An Optimistic Aesthetic

Let the art speak for itself. That's Alice Gray Stites' advice regarding "The Future Is Female," the new exhibition at 21c Museum Hotel in Bentonville. In a climate where words like feminist, activist, identity and representation can be polarizing -- and can even lead to preconceived ideas about what an experience or message will be -- the layers to the nearly 80 works on display are at once timely and timeless, and they offer an optimistic outlook everyone can connect to in varying ways.

"Art that's being made today reflects not only what's happening right now, but maybe looks at what is to come," muses Stites, museum director and chief curator for 21c. "I do think that artists are sometimes detecting before the rest of us the ways in which the world may change. That's not always positive, but it certainly can be, and they certainly allow us to ask questions about how can we get to a point where we are shaping a more inclusive world.

"But the first step, of course, toward making change is to have an honest reckoning about the present moment. And I do find that when people have experienced this exhibition, it is a very positive response. I think that's because there is a visual richness and beauty and wide variety of materials being used that it's quite seductive. So dive in with your eyes first, maybe."

Curated in 2016 for the boutique hotel chain's first location in Louisville, Ky., the decision to travel and expand the exhibition came after a passionate response to its premier.

"I'd been aware of that phrase, 'The Future Is Female,' as many people had [as] it had a resurgence in the last few years," Stites shares. "It was a phrase that was first actually printed on a T-shirt in the 1970s that was sold at a women-only bookstore in New York City. And I thought it was really interesting that it had a different meaning [today]. I mean, still asserting the need for gender equality and a recognition that women's rights are human rights, but at the same time, we're living in a period where notions around the gender binaries and the definition of what is female or who is female, what is the female experience -- have changed greatly. There's a lot more fluidity now. And we talk about feminism as being much more intersectional.

"So [in the exhibition] we wanted to address," she goes on, "a lot of different issues that have to do with socio-economic inequality and inequity, access to resources, and issues that involved race and other forms of identity. Feminism can encompass all of those things in a much more intersectional way."

The theme of "the personal is political" builds on those female-centric issues and pervades the exhibition, both in its cohesion and as a particular influence in some of the individual artists' works. Saya Woolfalk -- who will speak at the opening reception Jan. 17 -- points to the politicization of simply being a woman, or a woman of color, in one's everyday life and one's actions in that sphere as a compelling stimulus for her work.

"I was thinking a lot about how empathy is a tool that can be used to cross cultures and to attempt to understand others, even if you actually don't agree with the positions of those others," she says of the multi-dimensional world she has built in her work around a fictional race called the Empathics.

A race of female creatures who have self-selected to experience cross-species hybridization between humans and plants, the Empathics and their complex world are Woolfalk's interpretation of what groups can do when they collectively mobilize to try and transform themselves and the world around them -- manifested through the lens of science fiction and fantasy.

"I think that generosity of world building and that attempt to envision a world, or comment on a world, or see what could be better in the world, is pretty common between me and most of the other artists in this exhibition -- striving toward more equality, more representation," Woolfalk considers. "So absolutely, [the work is] fantastical and optimistic, but it tries to use realistic structures that are already in existence."

"I think any message that stresses the importance of empathy is the most optimistic we could think of moving into the future," Stites adds. "If we are going to move past the heaviness and the polarization and concerns that we have about gender relations, about race relations, about the state of the environment -- understanding other people's experiences [and] any call to empathy is a step in the right direction."

NAN What's Up on 01/13/2019