Eccentric Bodies, a group exhibition that explores new visions of the female nude, opens at the Mason Gross School of the Arts Galleries on June 14, 2007, with a public opening reception in honor of the artists from 5 to 7 p.m. The show will remain on view through August 3, 2007.

Eccentric Bodies includes the work of seven women artists who are creating a new "gaze" directed towards the female nude. These artists explore the intersection of life's imprint on the site of women's bodies. Their work contradicts the conventional "male gaze" of Western art since the Renaissance in which the nude is represented as sexually passive and available; the contemporary gaze of artists like John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage, who subvert this traditional "male gaze" through exaggeration and distortion; and the gaze of the feminist artists of the 1970s who were concerned primarily with gender. The Eccentric Bodies artists are concerned with such issues as the aging body and the body as the bearer of cultural and ethnic identity. A distinguishing characteristic of the group show is that all works are on a heroic scale.

The show's seven featured artists themselves represent a range of geography, age, and medium. They are Harriet Casdin-Silver, photographer, Boston, Massachusetts; Bailey Doogan, painter, Tucson, Arizona; Brenda Goodman, painter, New York; Orlan, performance and video artist, Paris, France; Ernestine Ruben, photographer, Princeton, New Jersey; Berni Searle, performance and video artist, Johannesburg, South Africa; and Linda Stein, sculptor, New York.

The Mason Gross School of the Arts Galleries are located at 33 Livingston Avenue, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The exhibition is curated by Judith K. Brodsky and Ferris Olin, and sponsored by the Institute for Women and Art, the Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series, and the Brodsky Center, all at Rutgers University.

Harriet Casdin-Silver, now in her 80s, in her desire to eliminate the distance between the photograph of the body and its viewer uses holography to animate her images. She focuses on how women's identity literally shifts as the body experiences changes such as weight gain, muscle loss, and aging throughout a lifetime.

Bailey Doogan is a figurative painter with an elegantly detailed style. The beauty of her painted surfaces creates a powerful tension when paired with the distorted bodies that are her subjects. Like 21st-century versions of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel figures of the Last Judgement, one feels that they inhabit the hell of life itself, making their way through sheer dint of will.

Brenda Goodman moved from Detroit to New York in 1976 and quickly became well-known in the New York art world. She was included in the Whitney Biennial and has shown through important New York galleries like Cavin-Morris and Edward Thorp. Goodman worked in an abstract expressionist mode for many years, but since 2003 she has moved to self-portraiture, using images of her own nude body for statements about the impact of aging and imminent death. The marks of her brush and palette knife and the build up of the paint become scratches, scars, wrinkles, and even open wounds on the body.

The French artist, Orlan, has explored the social construct of "woman" through her own body. She uses the procedures of plastic surgery to make "carnal art." She first transformed her face to question the stereotypes of beauty in European and American culture. In recent years, she has been using surgery to blur racial and ethnic distinctions, giving herself a "Mayan nose," for instance, or a longer neck like the stretched necks considered beautiful by some African cultures. The surgeries are documented on videos that have been widely distributed.

It takes some time before viewers know what they are looking at when they first see Ernestine Ruben's photographs of the body. Their mysterious fragmentation, the way in which they become all- encompassing landscape yet retain the intimacy of the body parts they depict, can be disorientating. Ruben's work has been widely shown, particularly in Europe; it is in the permanent collections of museums worldwide.

Berni Searle, a performance and video artist from Johannesburg, South Africa, is included in the Global Feminisms exhibition at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center of Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum. Using her own body as subject and point of departure, Searle comments on the intersection of race and gender in South Africa, particularly for mixed race "coloureds."

Linda Stein's sculptures are bronze and paper female heroic figures. She draws comparisons to the comics of Wonder Woman and the anime of Princess Mononoke. The British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen interviewed Stein in his 2006 film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan under the deception that her participation would help Third World women. At first Stein responded seriously until she recognized the joke and stormed off the set. Stein has been sought after as "the only person who stood up to Borat." Stein was recently awarded a commission for three bronze sculptures for the outdoor "Walk of the Heroines" at Portland State University, Oregon. In recent work, Stein has been pairing the sculptures with shadow figures on the wall itself. One of these shadow figures is Wonder Woman. Another is her payback to Sacha Baron Cohen-a nude image of Cohen with a very small phallus. An exhibition of Stein's work is currently traveling on the East Coast.

For more information contact Nicole Plett, 732/932-9407 ext. 27 or write nplett@rci.rutgers.edu.

Lecture by Brenda Goodman
Monday, April 23, 2007 - 4:00 p.m
Mabel Smith Douglass Library Galleries
Mabel Smith Douglass Library
Douglass Campus

The work of New York painter Brenda Goodman is featured in "Brenda Goodman: Self-Portraits 2003 - 2007," opening Monday, April 23, 2007, at the Mabel Smith Douglass Library Galleries and continuing through August 3, 2007. Goodman will give a talk in the exhibition galleries on Monday, April 23 at 4 p.m., followed by a public reception in her honor. This event is free of charge and the public is invited. Exhibition hours for the show are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays and weekends by appointment. Douglass Library is located on Rutgers Douglass Campus, 8 Chapel Drive, New Brunswick, NJ 08901.

Brenda Goodman grew up in Detroit, Michigan, where she studied art at the College for Creative Studies, a traditional art school where, as Goodman says, "you drew a still life for six months before you could actually start painting." From art magazines, Goodman began to learn about the burgeoning contemporary art world, and in the early 1970s, she joined Cass Corridor, a group of progressive artists who had studios in a large building in inner-city Detroit. In 1974, Gertrude Kasle, the leading gallery in Detroit, took on Goodman as one of its artists. Through Kasle, Goodman met Marcia Tucker, founding director of New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art.

After moving to Manhattan in 1976, Goodman quickly became well known and was included in the Whitney Biennial of 1979. She has shown her painting in many cities over the years including Edward Thorp and Cavin-Morris in New York, Revolution in Detroit and the Nielsen Gallery in Boston. Goodman's paintings and drawings are in the permanent collections of Agnes Gund; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Detroit Institute of Arts; and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, among others.

In 1993, Goodman became dissatisfied with the abstract expressionist mode in which she had painted until then. She says that she "had a desire to paint myself much more naturalistically; I felt it was important not to have a veil between me and my feelings, between me and the viewer. I wanted the work to be open. So much contemporary painting is not open. . . you can't penetrate it. You have no clue who the artist is, or why they're even doing what they're doing. Which is fine - I mean you can paint for different reasons and come from different places. But for me, it's always been crucial that I reveal myself, share my journey."

In the resulting paintings and drawing, the surfaces - whether paint, graphite, or colored pencil - become skin, revealing the wear and tear of a lifetime. The body is simultaneously vulnerable and commanding. As such, Goodman's self-portraits visually embody the contemporary discussion on the naked female figure as the intersection of the physicality of the body and social/political interpretation.

On June 14, 2007, a second exhibition featuring Goodman's work will open at the Mason Gross School of the Arts Galleries at 33 Livingston Avenue, New Brunswick. "Eccentric Bodies" was inspired by seeing Goodman's work. The exhibition includes six additional artists whose subject matter is the female form: Harriet Casdin-Silver, Bailey Doogan, Orlan, Ernestine Ruben, Berni Searle, and Linda Stein. "Eccentric Bodies" will remain on view through Friday, August 3.

Both exhibitions are under the auspices of the Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series, a joint program of the Rutgers University Libraries and the Rutgers Institute for Women and Art. Co-sponsor is the Brodsky Center at the Mason Gross School of the Arts. The Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series, now in its 36th year, is the oldest continuing venue for showing both established and emerging women artists. The shows' curators are Judith K. Brodsky, professor emerita, Department of Visual Arts and Founding Director, the Brodsky Center (formerly the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper), and Dr. Ferris Olin, head, the Margery Somers Foster Center, Rutgers University Libraries. Brodsky and Olin are co-directors of the Rutgers Institute for Women and Art. The exhibitions are also part of The Feminist Art Project, a national program, headquartered at Rutgers' Institute for Women and Art, celebrating the aesthetic, intellectual and political impact of women on the visual arts, art history, and art practice, past, present, and future.