SUPPORT WOMEN IN THE ARTS! 

Fundraiser Supporting Beili Lu, Virginia L. Montgomery and Tammie Rubin

Elisabet Ney Museum Exhibit and Arts Education Project, Breaking the Mold

FUNDRAISING PARTY

September 26, 2024. 7pm-9pm

Hosted at Ivester Contemporary 

916 Springdale Road

Austin, Texas

Celebrating the commonalities between women artists in 19th-century art and contemporary times, the contemporary art programs at the Elisabet Ney Museum activates conversations between women artists across the centuries and in collaboration with the historic native Texas landscape.

Redefining Ney's iconoclastic life and brilliant art through the lens of three female contemporary visual artists, the museum’s newest exhibition, Breaking the Mold, explores notions of the artist process, life in 19th century Austin as an immigrant, and an admiration for the natural world.  

The exhibition features new and existing artwork inspired by Elisabet Ney by Austin-based artists Beili Liu, Virginia L Montgomery (VLM), as well as Tammie Rubin. In addition to exhibition, the artists will collaborate with the museum to create a new annual educational initiative, Breaking the Mold: Mobile Hands-On Art Crates. Each unique portable classroom kit will be designed and fabricated by the artists and be deployed into Austin elementary classrooms to engage students in the areas of art, history, science, and math to encourage critical thinking and the creative process. This program will also reinforce Elisabet Ney’s vision for women in the arts while advocating for youth educational initiatives.

This project has been funded in part by a grant from the Dorothy C. Radgowski Learning Through Women’s Achievement in the Arts Grant Program, provided through the “Where Women Made History” and the Historic Artists' Homes and Studios programs of the National Trust for Historic Preservation along with support from the Summerlee Foundation. This fundraising effort will complete the campaign to support the work of three extraordinary women artists.

BEILI LU

Beili Liu is a visual artist who creates material-and-process-driven, site-responsive installations and performances. Liu's current research focuses on the complex ecological, political, and environmental concerns facing the Circumpolar North and the urgency of the climate crisis on a planetary scale. As Kay Whitney wrote about Liu's work in Sculpture Magazine: "Liu's installations leap from obsession and repetition to something profound and expansive, merging the personal with the political...these remarkedly ordinary materials emphasize the disjunctive pairing of subtle beauty and cultural narrative."  Liu has exhibited extensively across the globe, in locations including Norway, Finland, UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Lithuania, France, Belgium, Poland, Austria, China, Taiwan and across the United States. Liu has received numerous fellowships and awards, including the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship (2022-2024); the Pollock Prize for Creativity (2022); the Fulbright Distinguished Arctic Chair Award (Norway, 2021-2022); the Fulbright Finland Inter-Country Grant (2022); the Brian Wall Grant for Sculptors (2022); NYFA Fiscal Sponsorship (2021-2024); the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2016); the National Endowment for the Arts Challenge America Grant through the Museum of Southeast Texas (2014). In 2018, Liu was honored by the Texas Legislature as the Texas State Artist in 3D medium.

VIRGINIA L. MONTGOMERY

Also known as VLM, Montgomery is an American multimedia artist working in video art, sound art, sculpture, performance, and illustration. She has exhibited extensively throughout the U.S. and Europe at museums, galleries, and film festivals. Her artwork is known for its surrealist qualities, material experimentation, and thematic blending of science, mysticism, metaphysics, and 21st century feminist autobiography. Montgomery is an ecofeminist artist whose work utilizes symbolic imagery like circles, holes, and spheres to facilitate unexpected and multi-layered insights about the natural world, gender, technology, the human subconscious, and visual language . Her work has been exhibited widely in the U.S. Canada and Europe including including the Tate Modern] New Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park,] Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Times Square Arts, SculptureCenter, Museum Folkwang,  Kunsthal Charlottenborg,] La Panacée art centre (a.k.a. MO.CO. PANACÉE), Sweet Pass Sculpture Park, Blanton Museum of Art, Houston Botanic Garden, and Lawndale Art Center.

Montgomery states in an interview with She/Folk magazine, "[Through my art] I can survey relationships between bodies, hierarchies between objects, genders, sound or forms, and thus allow forth a message to emerge from these intersecting realms of cognitive awareness and sensorial participation.  

TAMMI RUBIN

Tammie Rubin (b. Chicago, Il) is an artist whose sculptural practice considers the intrinsic power of objects as signifiers, wishful contraptions, and mythic relics while investigating the tension between the readymade and the handcrafted. Using intricate motifs, Rubin delves into themes involving ritual, domestic and liturgical objects, mapping, migration, magical thinking, longing, and identity. Her installations open up dream-like spaces of unexpected associations and dislocations. Rubin received a BFA in both Ceramics and Art History from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and an MFA in Ceramics at the University of Washington in Seattle. Rubin has exhibited widely, selections include Project Row Houses, Houston, TX., the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY., George Washington Carver Museum, Austin, TX., Mulvane Art Museum, KS., Indianapolis Art Center, Indianapolis, IN., The Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, TX., Women & Their Work Gallery, Austin, TX., and C24 Gallery, New York, NY. She's represented by C24 Gallery, New York, NY., Galleri Urbane, Dallas, TX., & Rivalry Projects, Buffalo, NY. She founded Black Mountain Project along with fellow Austin-based artists Adrian Aguilera and Betelhem Makonnen, and she is a member of ICOSA Collective, a non-profit cooperative gallery. She is an Associate Professor of Ceramics & Sculpture at St. Edward’s University.