Summer Series: Issy Woods and Johanna Fateman

Jul 28, 2025 4:30PM-5:30PM

Schermer Meeting Hall

Presented in partnership with the Aspen Art Museum

Issy Woods: (b. 1993, Durham, NC) considers herself a “medieval millennial”. Her sardonic tone is equally visible in her distinct painting style—one that blends classical techniques and colorways with decidedly contemporary subject matter. Imagining a world where women are battered by consumerism, she mines the internet for source material. The resulting oeuvre is an absurdist menagerie of fashion clickbait, family heirlooms, and figurative close-ups. Wood repositions source imagery as objects of modern devotion: as commodities that are loved, hated, exhausted, and memorialized at the same time. Scenes convey both intimacy and detachment, mimicking the many facets of the digital viewing experience. A graduate of both Goldsmiths and the Royal College of Art, Wood lives and works in London.

Johanna Fateman: Writer and musician Johanna Fateman is a founding member of the rock band Le Tigre and co-owner of Seagull Salon in New York City. In the 90s, she wrote and published the influential fanzines Snarla (co-written with Miranda July) and Artaud-mania, among others. Her papers from this era are housed at the Fales Library Riot Grrrl collection at New York University. Fateman contributes weekly reviews to The New Yorker‘s “Goings On About Town” section, and regularly writes for Artforum. Her writing has appeared in Art in America, Aperture, Bookforum, Apology, Lenny Letter, 4Columns, and The New Inquiry. In November 2017, she was profiled in T Magazine for her work as a feminist art writer and business owner. She was a recipient of the Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for short-form writing, and her art criticism was lauded in Holland Cotter’s New York Times year-end round-up. Recent projects include the book-length text accompanying the first comprehensive monograph for video artist Charles Atlas, a songwriting collaboration with Russian Band Pussy Riot, a catalogue essay for Judy Chicago’s retrospective at ICA Miami, and the collection Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin, published by Semiotext(e).

Panel

Issy Wood

Summer Series Speaker

Issy Wood (b. 1993 in Durham, North Carolina) is an artist, living and working in London. Her paintings explore the paradoxes of the modern world, through examining a range of subjects from vintage artifacts and luxury goods to sensual innuendos and personal experiences. Wood’s work highlights the rich symbolism of objects and events, suggesting a psyche trying to consolidate a realm of dualities: desire and shame, sensuality and pity, documentation and meme. Evoking the intimacy of social media messages, Wood reflects contemporary anxieties about excess and dogmatism while drawing on diverse cultural and art historical motifs.

Learn More

Johanna Fateman

Summer Series Speaker

Johanna Fateman is a New York-based writer, musician, and co-chief art critic for CULTURED magazine, where she is also commissioning editor of The Critics’ Table, the magazine’s new platform for art criticism. Previously, she was a regular contributor to the New Yorker, 4Columns, and Artforum (where she was a contributing editor). As a shortform reviewer, she wrote weekly for the New Yorker‘s Goings on About Town section; she also writes in-depth critical works. Recent magazine pieces include a cover profile of Anne Imhof and a longform essay on Cameron Rowland (CULTURED); features on Barbara Kruger and Nicole Eisenman (Artforum); and columns on Greer Lankton and Tommy Kha (New Yorker). She was awarded the Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers grant in 2014 and a Creative Capital grant in 2019. She has also contributed essays to museum catalogues and monographs for artists such as Charles Atlas, Judith Bernstein, Judy Chicago, Donald Judd, and Hilary Pecis. She co-edited and wrote the introductory essay for the critically acclaimed anthology Last Days at Hot Slit: the Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin, published by semiotext(e) in 2019. Her band Le Tigre (with Kathleen Hanna and JD Samson) was active recording and performing from 1999–2005, reuniting briefly to tour internationally in the summer of 2023. Her early artwork and writings were included in the 2024 exhibition “Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines” at the Brooklyn Museum, and her papers related to the punk feminism of the 1990s and ’00s are preserved in the Riot Grrrl Collection of the Fales Library at New York University.

Learn More