“Musée Imaginaire,” featuring the art of Elisabetta Zangrandi and curated by Alison M. Gingeras, will open at Keyes Art in Sag Harbor on Saturday, May 11, with a reception from 6 to 8 PM. The show runs through June 26.
Working in a small mountain village outside Verona, the Italian artist Elisabetta Zangrandi has toiled over the past year to create a portrait gallery that reflects the labors of nine hundred years of artist-women.
Zangrandi has reinterpreted an array of female artists’ self-portraits, transforming these art historical icons into her own personal canon of predecessors — and Keyes Art into an alternative feminist museum.
The earliest work referenced is by the 12th-century German monastic Guda of the Weissfauen Convent, who included her own likeness in an illuminated manuscript; her image is believed to be the earliest signed self-portrait by a woman in Western Europe.
Among other highlights of the exhibition are Zangrandi’s homages to the 17th-century Baroque prodigy Artemisia Gentileschi (whose allegorical depiction of herself as the personification of painting has become a posthumous landmark of Old Mistress painting) and such 20th-century trailblazers as Alice Neel and Frida Kahlo.
With this pantheon of artists, Zangrandi reflects upon the vitality and continuity of women painters throughout recorded visual culture — and claims her own place within this genealogy of feminist art history.