COLLEGE STATION, TX.- Running through April 13, 2016, protest poster art from the years 1985 to 2000 from the anonymous feminist group Guerrilla Girls is being displayed in the
Wright Gallery in the College of Architecture at Texas A&M University. Alongside the poster art, Robin Tewes, a New York artist and professor at Pace University, is displaying her newest series of paintings, Men in Trouble.
Started in New York in 1985, Guerrilla Girls is an internationally recognized, anonymous group of feminist female artists whose goal is to fight sexism and racism in the art world. Members take pseudonyms of dead female artists; wear gorilla masks for anonymity and communality; and use facts, humor, and outrageous visuals to expose discrimination and corruption in politics, art, film and pop culture.
I think it is important to highlight artists who challenge our view of art as well as our view of the world, says Felice House. We hope this exhibit will serve as an opportunity to start discussions within the university about what role activism does or can play in art.
This year marks the Guerrilla Girlss 30th anniversary. Though membership has changed and the group has taken on other projects, the impact made and the discussions raised by their poster art remains enduring.
Tewes addresses race and class in art both in and outside of her classroom, and she challenges the social norms in her own way as well. The adjunct associate professor of fine arts at Pace University is also a representational oil painter who focuses on class and gender. Tewes's figurative works challenge conventions of heroic masculinity by situating men in circumstances and conditions of compromise, vulnerability, crisis and ambiguity.
Men in Trouble examines the fragility and vulnerability of the human experience. Her paintings create implied narratives with imagery drawn from the domestic world juxtapositions of social interactions with surreal elements. Camouflage and absence work together throughout her work.
Tewes has exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries and museums such as The Whitney Biennial, Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, The Snug Harbor Cultural Center Museum, The Norton Museum of Art, Pelham Art Center, The Weatherspoon Art Museum, The Aldridge Museum of Contemporary Art, The Baltimore Museum, LACE, The Hopper Museum, The Drawing Center, P.S. 1, The P.P.O.W. Gallery, White Columns, The Alternative Museum, The New Museum, and Art in General. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, Artnews, Tema Celeste, Arts Magazine, The New York Times, The Drawing Society, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Soho Weekly News, and Village Voice.
The Guerrilla Girls / Robin Tewes display is the third in a lineup of five visual art shows exhibiting this spring at the Wright Gallery.