Tamar Garb – författare

The Union of Women Painters and Sculptors was founded in Paris in 1881 to represent the interests of women artists and to facilitate the exhibition of their work. This lively and informative book traces the history of the first fifteen years of the organization and places it in the contexts of the Paris art world and the development of feminism in the late nineteenth century.Tamar Garb explores how the Union campaigned to have women artists written about in the press and admitted to the Salon jury and into the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts and describes how the organization's leaders took their campaigns into the French parliament itself. Although the women of the Union were often quite conservative politically, socially, and stylistically, says Garb, they believed that women had a special gift that would enhance France's cultural reputation and maintain the uplifting moral-cultural position that seemed in jeopardy at the turn of the century. Focusing on the developments that made the prominence of the organization possible, Garb discusses the growth of the women's movement, educational reforms, institutional changes in the art world, and critical debates and contemporary scientific thought. She examines contemporary perceptions of both art and femininity, showing how the understanding of one affected the image of the other.This book reverses conventional accounts of late nineteenth-century French art, offering a new picture of the Paris art world from the point of view of a group of women who were marginalized by its dominant institutions.

Portia Zvavahera is one of the outstanding artists of her generation. Born in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1985, she has developed a unique combination of print/painting techniques to register a private world of dreams, fantasies and figural constructions. She received her art education in Zimbabwe in the early 2000s, and has become recognised in the past decade as one of the foremost representatives of African figuration, showcased at the Venice Biennale in 2022, and in a number of commercial gallery exhibitions in South Africa, the US and the UK. She has not yet had a solo show in a public museum in Europe. This new publication accompanies a major exhibition, curated by Tamar Garb, which will include reproductions of brand new works created on the occasion of this exhibition alongside a selection of recent and older paintings which reveal the depth and richness of Zvavahera’s practice. The focus will be on the theme of dreams, fantasy and figuration, and large details will highlight Zvavahera’s innovative amalgamation of printmaking and painting techniques that build rich surfaces to create her private cosmology of creatures and contexts.The book will feature a significant new essay from curator Tamar Garb and will centre around an extensive conversation between Garb, Sinazo Chiya, Tandazani Dhlakama and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela discussing Zvavahera’s engagement with eros, intimacy and female-centred experience. The book will open up how Zvavahera’s works emerge from dreams; being figurative without being illustrative, registering a world of feminine experience and fantasy.

Distance and Desire – accompanying the same-titled exhibition in Neu-Ulm – is the first major publication to stage a dialogue between the ethnographic visions of late nineteenth and early-twentieth century African photography and engagements with this imagery by contemporary artists. Presenting an extraordinary range of portraits, albums, postcards, cartes de visite, and books from Southern Africa, as well as recent photography and video art from The Walther Collection, the catalogue includes original thematic essays by leading art historians, anthropologists, and cultural critics. Distance and Desire offers new perspectives on the African archive, reimagining its diverse histories and changing meanings. Distance and Desire investigates typical representations of African subjects, from scenes in nature and romanticized images of semi-nude models, to modern sitters posing in stylized studios, critically addressing the politics of colonialism and the complex issues of gender and identity. Among many diverse topics, the catalogue examines in-depth a series of cartes de visite from the Diamond Fields in Kimberley, the figure of the Zulu, the history of South Africa’s prominent studio photographers, A.M. Duggan-Cronin’s extensive ethnographic study The Bantu Tribes of South Africa, and the archive of elegant family portraits reproduced by the contemporary artist Santu Mofokeng in The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890-1950. The catalogue also reveals how the heritage of African imagery figures in the practices of contemporary African and African American artists, whose compelling photography and video art reworks the archive through satire or appropriation.