Curator Pati Hertling is best known for her cyclical curatatorial project Evas Arche und der Feminist, started in Berlin and continuted here in New York at Gavin Brown Enterprise, and her 2009 show Modern Modern at the Chelsea Art Museum. We invited Pati to contribute as a guest blogger and she, along with photographer Emily Hope, arranged a studio visit with artist Mary Beth Edelson. The following images and text are from Pati’s experience with Marybeth.

If one were to draw up a list of the 20 most seminal women artists of the 20^th Century, Mary Beth Edelson would surely rank high up on that list.

Active as an artist and activist in New York since the early 70′s, Edelson was a founding member of important feminist collectives such as Heresies and WAC (Women’s Action Coalition), and an early and active A.I.R Gallery member. Her SoHo loft has served as a meeting place for many great women artists such as Nancy Spero, Hannah Wilke, Ana Mendieta, Lorraine O’Grady, Louise Bourgeois, and writers such as Lucy Lippard and E. Ann Kaplan.

Together with her close friend Spero, Edelson was a key player in many feminist activist events. In 1976, they organized a picketing of MoMA to demand that more women artists be shown. Edelson spearheaded the first national Conference of Women in the Visual Arts (CWVA) in 1972 held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in D.C., and she galvanized numerous other historical feminist actions. Prior to becoming active in the feminist movement, she was active in the Civil Rights Movement.

Edelson’s early performance art was also a major influence to Ana Mendieta, who had studied under Edelson and was mentored by her when she moved to New York. It was in Edelson’s loft where Mendieta was first introduced to the group of other women artists who would become important to help establish her in New York City throughout her tragically short life.

Edelson’s work sides with an aesthetic pluralism that makes room to embrace a world view of feminist politics and community as well as dives onto platforms of esoteric levels of consciousness. But whether working in performance, collage, or painting, Edelson’s presence is hard to miss: a fascination with myths and symbols (be they from the Neolithic era, Fifties Hollywood cinema, or tabloid headlines); a body-oriented praxis, and politics; an almost iconic precision of image and gesture, and, crucially, a sense of humor that is at the same time generous and absolutely subversive.

Perhaps her best-known work is the 1972 collage Some Living American Women Artists/Last Supper. Using Da Vinci’s famous painting The Last Supper, Edelson cut out all the men’s heads and replaced them with the heads of living American women artists. This work has become an iconographic image of the feminist art revolution, and was included in the major museum exhibition WACK!: The Art of the Feminist Revolution. Today it is – together with all other works from this collage series – part of MoMA’s permanent collection.

This fall, Edelson will be opening a two-part exhibition with Balice Hertling in Paris and Balice Hertling & Lewis in New York. The exhibition is titled Burn in Hell. In Paris, Edelson will be showing a work completed between 1989 and 1991 based on the sensational trial against Lorena Bobbitt, the woman who severed her husband’s penis from his body while he slept and after he allegedly raped her. The core of the Paris exhibit will be a book of images from Bobbitt’s trial with press clippings titled The Last Temptation of Lorena Bobbitt. The 81-page book, comprised of watercolors, gouache, ink, collage, printing, and statistics on domestic violence, illuminates Edelson’s interest in Bobbitt‘s case and is closely related to Edelson’s activism against domestic violence. In Edelson’s hands, Bobbitt is claimed as a complex symbolic figure, celebrated as a heroine fighting on behalf of the victims of domestic violence and at the same time venerated as Kali-Bobbitt, the many-armed Hindu goddess with a belt of knives around her waist and a will of steel.

In New York, Edelson will present a new series of wall collages with emphasis on Botticelli’s iconic Venus that incorporates both a dark and light side of the famous beauty along with a new series of collages that continues Edelson’s nearly four decades of collage production. The original wall collages from the Seventies were based on the heads of her friends and allies in the feminist art movement along with her mythic stand-by’s Baubo, Sheela-na-gig, the Egyptian Bird Goddess, and the Asyrian Snake Goddess.

We had the honor and the pleasure to visit Edelson in her Soho loft, where she holds her home and studio. During the course of one afternoon we chatted, sipped coffee and looked at the work she is selecting for her upcoming exhibitions. These are the pictures the New York based photographer Emily Hope took during our visit.

The piano zaps me faster than a microwave. It makes my heart melt instantly. Sunday night was one of those blissful New York spring evenings on the rooftop at Gavin Brown Enterprise. Hosted by the lovely Evas Arche und der Feminist, it was a light crowd, cheap drinks and elegant minimalist sculptures by Peter Kortmann. There were candles above a piano and Jay Israelson performed two melodic, hypnotic numbers. Everyone hushed, listening attentively. Even the lone baby in the crowd seemed to hold its breath. Just two songs, then the crowd began to stir; the chatter resumed, the baby cooed, and I got another glass of wine.