Hello WCA Presidents!

We are trying to quickly pull together a proposal for a show next summer at the Ceres Gallery in
NYC. Would you please forward the following to your chapter members ASAP?

Please email or call me with any questions, 408-823-9524. Thank you so very much in advance!
Karen Gutfreund
Vice President - Peninsula WCA
Exhibitions Chair - SBAWCA

CALL FOR ART!

Proposal: “Man as Object: Reversing the Gaze”

Ceres Gallery, 547 West 27th Street, New York, NY
May 24th through June 18th, 2011

The Women’s Caucus for Art (www.nationalwca.org), a leading supporter of women

artists since 1972, is requesting art on the theme of “Men as Object: Reversing the
Gaze”. This proposal for an exhibition for Ceres Gallery is a collaboration between the
Northern California, South Bay Area and Michigan WCA chapters and is open to all US
women artists.

Send the following to karengutfreund@yahoo.com

• Images that pertain to the theme

• Image list with number, title, media, size and date for each image
• Artist resume

Deadline to send images: Wednesday April 14th

The art we receive will be given to Ceres as a proposal for an exhibition. If we are
chosen, we will have another call for art that will allow artists time to create new work.
Please also email karengutfreund@yahoo.com if you would like to be kept on the
mailing list for this and other feminist projects.

Prospectus for “Reversing the Gaze”

Since the early years of Feminist Art, women artists have responded to their subjugation
in art by male artists by using their own bodies as the subject matter in their work. We
credit feminist art of the 1970’s with giving artists today the “permission to be personal”.

There is a difference in women’s art from the work of male counterparts. We see the
nude woman from different angles. The feminist artist chooses a personal vantage
point, apart from that seen in men’s portrayals of women. The thesis of woman as both
surveyor and the surveyed continues.
“Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being
looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also
the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of women in herself is male: the
surveyed female…thus she turns herself into an object- and most particularly an object
of vision: a sight”. Ways of Seeing, by John Berger

The goal of this exhibition “Man as Object: Reversing the Gaze” is to turn the tables and
to exhibit works that put the male in the position of subject and spectacle. Not only will
the male be taking on the female role, but the surveyor is now female, no longer a
“masculine” part of the female, thus creating a truly Feminist stance. The male is the
spectacle for a woman’s enjoyment or mere viewing.

This is effective in two ways: as the male viewer encounters the male nude, he is forced
like many women before him to turn the mirror on himself and secondly to feel the
powerlessness of being owned or submissive. The individualism of the artist, the
thinker, the patron, the owner, and the woman is transformed. The person who is the
object of their activities, the man, is treated as a thing or an abstraction. By reversing
the unequal relationship between men and women that is so deeply embedded in our
culture, men will do to themselves what they have done to women for centuries. They
observe themselves and their own masculinity as women observe their own femininity.

This exhibition will explore women’s responses to a male dominated world in a different
way than an exhibition of women’s images of themselves. It will mark an important
development in Feminist Art which has long concentrated on images of women meant
to challenge stereotypical notions of womanhood.

A gallery filled with works depicting men, created by women, comments on the
prevalence of the male gaze in art and of the continued domination of male artists
exhibiting in galleries and museums.