ALBANY, NY — The University Art Museum, University at Albany, State University of New York is pleased to announce its newest exhibition: Mary Beth Edelson:  Re-Scripting the Story (1970–2000), which opens on January 23 and continues through February 22, 2002. The exhibition surveys 30 years of Edelson's work including her seminal posters, collages, photographs, drawings, videos, story-gathering boxes, and transfer images on chiffon fabric. Throughout her prolific career, Edelson has engaged in an ongoing exploration into issues surrounding female identity. Her work, both as an artist and a leader in the 70s feminist art movement, is widely discussed within the discourse of feminist art practice as well as fields as diverse as psychoanalysis, art history, theology, and women's studies.

Mary Beth Edelson:  Re-Scripting the Story presents a context and sense of circumstance for feminist art production during the 1970s when studio practice, community activism, art history, theory, and criticism momentarily converged. On view for the first time will be Edelson's original layout for five handmade posters from the 70s including her most extensively reproduced and critically debated poster, Some Living American Artists/Last Supper (1972) which recasts Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper with women artists from the 70s feminist art movement. The exhibition also features O'Kevelson (1973), a series of altered photographs in which the artist transforms herself into Georgia O'Keefe and Louise Nevelson; Story Gathering Boxes, an ongoing project begun in 1972 in which gallery goers participate in the creative process by writing their own stories and leaving them in a story box for others to read; Edelson's photographic performance work including her renowned Goddess rituals of the 70s; and over three decades of drawings, collages, and fabric transfers. In Edelson's most recent work (a series of floor to ceiling chiffon transfer panels) she introduces the Hollywood film star/femme fatale as a source for continued critical inquiry into the conflicting portrayals of women in popular culture.

In an essay written for the exhibition catalog, art critic Laura Cottingham observes:

All of Mary Beth Edelson's cultural production from the past thirty years can be understood within the terms of narrative reconstruction:  to rewrite the codes of fine art's terms and distribution; to re-script the story to include women's experience within the context of both historical and cultural experience; and finally, as a sustained personal engagement with her own unique and evershifting experiences as both a woman and an artist.

Mary Beth Edelson:  Re-Scripting the Story is accompanied by an illustrated catalog and a specially produced video. The catalog includes essays by Laura Cottingham and feminist film theoriest, E. Ann Kaplan; the video features individual dialogues between Mary Beth Edelson and other significant feminist artists including Nancy Spero, Miriam Shapiro, and Carolee Schneemann.

The exhibition is funded in part by grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation, The Pollack-Krasner Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

For further information, including photographs and artist and curator interviews, please call or e-mail Corinna Ripps Schaming at (518) 442-4038 or [email protected].