Claudia DeMonte - A World View

August 30 – October 28, 2018

Gallery Talk:

Thursday, September 13, 4:30PM

followed by

Reception: 5:30PM – 7:00PM

This is an exhibition of the global perspective of internationally known artist Claudia DeMonte’s

provocative installations that look at how women represent themselves.

Since the 1970s, artist, activist, and educator DeMonte, who has been in more than 100 solo shows and 500 group shows, has been challenging ideas of the role of women in society and emphasizing the shared experience of being female.

DeMonte’s love of travel has led her to bring a global perspective to the way women are tied together around the world. This perspective is significant today because as she says, “We don’t live in isolation in the world anymore. We are attached instantaneously to the global village.”

In this exhibition curated by CCMoA Exhibition Curator Michael Giaquinto, we see that DeMonte often works in series using stereotypical images of everyday life. In her Female Fetish series, DeMonte presents familiar objects in a woman’s life - high heeled shoes, a dustpan and broom – carved in wood and covered with 'milagros' small pewter charms that are influenced by her Italian/Catholic heritage.

In Women's World, DeMonte collaborated with women working in a Tibetan tent factory who made beautiful fabric works to create 25 appliqued squares representing female objects.

In the installation Are You Full?, DeMonte, whose father was homeless as a child, worked with the homeless in Mississippi. She asked them what they needed, had their answers embroidered on tote bags and asked them to make paintings of those objects.

DeMonte’s work is influenced by her Italian upbringing in the ethnically diverse county of Astoria, Queens, her travels to over 100 countries and her interest in Outsider Art.

More about Claudia DeMonte

Claudia DeMonte has had exhibitions at the Corcoran Museum, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Mississippi Museum, Tucson Museum, Flint Institute of Art, and Museum of the Southwest among others. She has lectured and exhibited in 35 countries. Her work is in numerous museum permanent collections including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Stamford Museum, Boca Raton Museum, and in major corporate collections such as those of Hyatt Regency Hotels, Exxon, Citibank and Siemens.

DeMonte is the curator of Women of the World: A Global Collection of Art. This traveling exhibition, with accompanying book, includes work of women from 177 countries dealing with the image of women. Her project, REAL BEAUTY, uses handmade fabric dolls to express beauty standards around the world that are being lost due to plastic reproductions and globalization.

For 33 years DeMonte has served on the faculty of the University of Maryland where she has been named Distinguished Scholar Teacher and Professor Emerita. In fall 2009 a retrospective of DeMonte’s work began a ten venue national tour. Pomegranate published an accompanying monograph, with essays by Eleanor Heartney and Museum of Modern Art President Emerita Agnes Gund. She is represented by the June Kelly Gallery in N.Y.C. Her website is www.claudiademonte.com