by Lisa Butterworth

We all know that words have power. The new exhibit at Claremont Lewis Museum of Art harnesses that power to inspire a new art-going experience, one that pairs the written language with the visual to showcase and explore gender, community, and agency.

Featuring art and writing from 15 local and L.A.-area women, “She Opens the Door: Women Artists and Writers Shape Language and Space” opens this Saturday, December 6, with a reception during the 6-9 p.m. Claremont Art Walk.

Words were also the catalyst for this exhibition, which was curated by CLMA poet-in-residence Chloe Martinez, a religious studies lecturer and associate director of programming for the Center for Writing and Public Discourse at Claremont McKenna College.

Claremont Lewis Museum of Art poet in residence Chloe Martinez is curator of “She Opens the Door: Women Artists and Writers Shape Language and Space,” which opens with a 6-9 p.m. reception this Saturday, December 6 during the Claremont Art Walk. Photo/by Adrianne Mathiowetz

Martinez felt the loss of museum access acutely during the COVID-19 lockdown. “Both my parents are visual artists, so I grew up going to museums,” she said. “I grew up sitting in a corner of their studios while they were working. During the pandemic lockdown, it felt like a really palpable absence for me, so I started writing into that space.”

The result was “a lot of poetry about museums and the ways that museums serve as an unusual communal space where we have this individual experience with art, but also we’re in public together,” Martinez said. When she shared the ideas behind these poems with CLMA Director Seth Pringle, he invited her to be the museum’s poet-in-residence, to enhance the conversation between art and the written word.

Though these poems inspired her CLMA residency, when it came time to curate the exhibition, Martinez drew from a different well: “I was thinking more about community and gender, and I really wanted to make a show that celebrated women artists and women writers,” she said.

The curation process was a collaborative effort between Martinez and Pringle. Those with a strong connection to Claremont were top of mind, and Martinez looked for artists who had piqued her interest, ultimately finding a range of pieces that fit together and felt organically connected. “We have sculptures, we have ephemeral art. There are artworks that are engaged with sound, and there are more traditional paintings on the wall,” she said. “I really wanted the show to be diverse in the kinds of media it’s using, and in the ideas and approaches that each of these artists is bringing.”

The exhibition title — “She Opens the Door” — comes from a line in Martinez’s poem “Volcano,” about watching her daughter make a door in a paper craft, and was elemental in the show’s conception. “In the poem and in my work, I think it’s a way of thinking about gender as a category that has traditionally been limiting or constricting, but a category that I now think of as open to possibility and open to community,” she said. “It has felt resonant with the artworks in the show … not necessarily explicitly through gender or by saying, ‘This is a woman’s artwork,’ but that we brought together a bunch of women artists and looked at the ways in which they were making new spaces or opening new doors with their work.”

Those artists include Lisa Anne Auerbach, who’ll be showing text paintings from her project “The Mount Washington Post.” The Pomona College art professor began posting daily handmade signs outside her gate as a quiet protest of social media, and the ones on display at CLMA will rotate daily. There are also sculptural straw pieces by Maria Maea, and photographs of natural spaces by Mercedes Dorame. “They look like portals and openings, so they really resonated with me thinking about our theme,” Martinez said. “They’re photographs of natural spaces, but they also look expansive and full of possibility.”

The art in the show also explores the idea of “women’s work,” a fraught phrase that is reframed by these artists, and hopefully, by the viewers. “I think anytime you say women’s work, there’s something that sounds limited or derogatory about the phrase — that women’s work is work that is lesser. Whereas non-gendered work is work that’s more central, more important, more powerful, more revolutionary,” Martinez said. “One of the things I was interested in doing in the show was bringing together work that was engaging in techniques that we might think of as crafty or materials that are a little bit more everyday. There are some pieces that are using felt and straw and newsprint. And I think it helps us to reflect on the ways that certain materials, certain kinds of labor, certain people have traditionally been devalued. Though I hope that we’ve moved beyond these kinds of limited ways of thinking about gender and stereotypes about gendered labor, I do think they’re still often with us.”

Once the exhibition was solidified, Martinez reached out to local writers — including Prageeta Sharma, Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, and Vickie Vértiz — who used the art and the artists as inspiration. Their written works will be included in the show’s catalog and accessible by QR code in the exhibition. “There’s not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence,” Martinez said. “Everyone approached it a little bit differently.”

All of the writing, however, adds another realm of experience for exhibition goers. “I think it offers just one more way to engage,” Martinez said. “When you go into a museum and look at an artwork, the way you engage with it is very personal and very individual. It might mean looking at each piece for a few seconds. It might mean standing in front of one piece for 15 minutes. Another way to look at an artwork might be to read the label and to research the artist, to learn a little more context. One more might be to look at a poem that someone’s written and then look back at that artwork and think about what someone else’s experience was like,” she said. “Also, I hope [the exhibition] opens up more possibilities. That people might go to the show and think, Oh, I could write something about a piece of art, or I could make something about a piece of writing. I hope that it invites people to engage with making in many more ways.”

“She Opens the Door: Women Artists and Writers Shape Language and Space” opens this Saturday, December 6 at Claremont Lewis Museum of Art, 200 W. First St., with a 6-9 p.m. reception during the Claremont Art Walk. More information is at clmoa.org/exhibitions.