Arts Women

A woman at a dinner party playfully snapped her napkin at her husband as he and another male guest shared a private, disparaging remark about women. "Are you doing that male bonding thing again?" she asked. To a surprising degree, the art world continues to do its "male bonding thing."

A tough, contemporary centerpiece stands amid delicate, traditional tissue-paper cutouts of the Virgin at the entrance to Centro Cultural de la Raza's current show. The large painted canvas in the center bears the same general shape as the holy images on either side, but the woman portrayed is different, profane, not sacred. She is a young Mexican or Chicana in jeans, T-shirt and tennis shoes, a machine gun strapped across her shoulder.

Floor sweepings, pillows and monkey fur--variously undesirable, humble or sensual materials--are among the ingredients of "Sugar 'n' Spice." Although all the art in this exhibit--at the Long Beach Museum of Art through May 23--is by women, it isn't specifically feminist--at least, not in the traditional sense. Rather, it's subversive in a sneakily anarchic way, offering open-ended reflections on such topics as power, sex and the relationship between imagination and experience.

Michael Moran was once a dashing hero of the Irish War of Independence. Now he is a prickly and embittered old man living "amongst women"--his young second wife and three daughters. He has cut his ties with the past but disdains the present; he has isolated himself and his family, "that larger version of himself," but dreads the loneliness sure to come when his sons run away and his daughters marry.

Around 1930, Else Thalemann made an extensive series of photographs chronicling the transformation of the Ruhrgebiet , a rapidly industrializing section of Germany's Ruhr River Valley that came to play a pivotal role in arming the nation for a devastating, expansionist war. Among the pictures is a fearsome image of a grim-faced young boy standing in a field, seemingly trapped between two worlds of awesome power.

"Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women," proclaims a poster issued by an art collective called the Guerrilla Girls in 1989, "but 85% of the nudes are female." A healthy corrective to the plight of women in the art world, however, can be found in "Art/Women/California," an impressive and illuminating survey of art by women in California during the last half of the 20th century.

'Division of Labor: 'Women's Work' in Contemporary Art" is a pretty terrible exhibition that you certainly should see. It's terrible because, as a 35-year history of art that concerns itself with gender roles and stereotypes within the domestic sphere, the show can best be described as a parochial mess. And you should see it anyhow, because the subject is of such importance that, for once, anything really might be better than nothing.

'I found my voice as an artist when I stepped on a dead sparrow on a street in Paris in 1971," recalls French artist Annette Messager, whose work is the subject of a retrospective exhibition opening Thursday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. "I didn't know why, but I was sure this sparrow was important because it was something very fragile that was near me and my life. "Like the people I love, these small birds were always around me, yet they remained strange and mysterious.