Free Reception & Gallery Talk: Claudia DeMonte: A World View

The show opens on August 30. DeMonte will give a Gallery Talk on September 13 at 4:30 followed by a reception at 5:30.

Since the 1970s, artist, activist, and educator Claudia 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 the 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, Museum of the Southwest. 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  MOMA President Emerita Agnes Gund.   She is represented by the June Kelly Gallery in N.Y.C.  Her website is www.claudiademonte.com

About Cape Cod Museum of Art

Founded by artists in 1981, CCMoA is the home of Cape Cod art.  It preserves the work of the Cape’s finest artists and celebrates the distinctive artistic identity of the Cape & Islands region.  The Museum is a major hub of cultural creativity.  It educates, inspires and excites the imagination through its outstanding art collection and diverse programming while caring for its many communities.  The Museum is situated in a beautiful setting surrounded by a Sculpture Garden at the Cape Cod Center for the Arts. CCMoA has seven galleries, a Museum Shop and a film screening room. It is supported in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod.

            CCMoA is located at 60 Hope Lane, just off Route 6A, on the campus with Cape Cinema and the Cape Cod Playhouse in Dennis, MA. Hours are 10 am to 5 pm Tues through Sat and noon to 5 pm on Sunday.  The Galleries are open on ARTfull Thursdays from 5 – 8 with no admission fee.  General Admission is $9, $7 for seniors and students 19+ with school ID, $5 for students 13 to 18, and free for children 12 & under. For more information, see www.ccmoa.org or call (508) 385-4477. Follow on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram