Overlap: Life Tapestries Curated By Vida Sabbaghi

A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce Overlap: Life Tapestries, an exhibition curated by Vida Sabbaghi, which includes photos, fabric collage, clothing, video, paintings, and drawings. The artists - Alice Hope, Sascha Mallon, Michela Martello, Shari Weschler Rubeck, Bastienne Schmidt, Linda Stein, Martha Wilson, and Kumi Yamashita - imaginatively recreate the tapestry of their lives to diversify the narrative surrounding women and the art they produce, while mapping relationships between personal and public life. Women must continually tell their stories about the ways gender, race, and class discrimination overlap and intersect, and how this defines their lives.
Intersectionality, the theory underpinning this exhibition, acknowledges and considers the various facets of the artists’ identity. The originality in their work takes precedence and challenges the assumptions and stereotypes of female artists and the work they produce. The term ‘intersectionality’ was coined by Kimberly Crenshaw, a civil rights activist and a professor of law at UCLA and Columbia University Law School, to challenge the notion that a woman’s experience throughout her life is determined solely by her gender. Crenshaw eschews the single issue approach to an individual’s identity (e.g., race only, gender only, or class only), arguing that forms of oppression are experienced and enacted in multiple and often simultaneous ways. Gendered oppression, for example, cannot be separated from racism; they are inextricably linked.