A Feminist Avant-Garde

The Rencontres d’Arles presents “A Feminist Avant-Garde,” an exhibition of photographs and performances of the 1970s from the Verbund Collection, Vienna, on view through September 25 for the first time in France. The show is ​​divided into five themes: women’s reduction to “wife, mother, and housewife”; their resulting feeling of “being locked-up”; the questioning of “dictates of beauty and representations of female bodies”; explorations of “female sexuality”; and debates around “female roles and identities.” The feminists which comprised the late-twentieth-century avant-garde, like Ana Mendieta, Francesca Woodman, Birgit Jürgenssen, and Lorraine O’Grady, are featured in all the diversity of their ages and cultures, as well as in their intersectionality of race, class, and gender.