Past Exhibitons: ART of CONFRONTation

ART of CONFRONTation featured three concurrent exhibitions:

• Fernando Botero: Abu Ghraib
• Claiming Space: Some American Feminist Originators
• Dark Metropolis: Irving Norman's Social Realism

This will be the first complete showing in the U.S. of Paris-based Fernando Botero's 79 paintings and drawings depicting the torture of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The exhibition came to the AU Museum from Milan, Italy, and heads next to Monterey, Mexico. The first U.S. showing was at the Marlborough Gallery in New York City last fall and appeared at UC Berkeley this past spring.

"American University's long-standing commitment to international human rights makes us a natural host to display Botero's work," claims AU Museum Director and Curator Jack Rasmussen. "Through his distinctive painting style, our students, faculty and, especially, the Washington, D.C. community will be able to discuss human rights and war not through a political lens, but through art. Art cannot change the war but it can bear testimony."

Also on tap is an exhibition of American feminist art curated by pioneering feminist scholars and AU professors Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard which reverses stereotypes about women's work with a showcase of pieces that are large and politically confrontational, not delicate and self-effacing.

"This show's focus reiterates the original feminist initiative, which was to claim space for women in an art world that had given them little space and in a society that had traditionally allotted them a smaller place, outside of the public arena," suggests co-curators Broude and Garrard.