ABOUT

GODDESSES 3.0 is conceived as a contemporary, feminist inquiry into the idea of the goddess – not as a fixed mythological figure, but as an elastic framework through which artists address power, embodiment, ritual, resistance, and cultural memory. The exhibition places historical feminist practices in dialogue with contemporary work, foregrounding both lineage and reinvention across generations and media. In addition to video, drawing, performance, sculpture, prints, and multimedia, various items from popular culture are represented. A number of historically significant artists are featured, and works on view include the pioneering Dara Birnbaum video Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman from 1978. Other represented artists include:  Vanessa Beecroft, gwen charles, Myrlande Constant, Mary Beth Edelson, Chitra Ganesh, Geri Hahn, Donna Kessinger (video documentary), Pat Lay, Mariko Mori, Julie Ann Nagle, Carolee Schneemann, and Nancy Spero.

The exhibition was curated by Sydney O. Jenkins, Director of the Art Galleries, and feminist artist and curator Donna Kessinger.

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EVENTS

GODDESSES 3.0 opens to the public on Wednesday, February 25th in the Berrie Center Kresge and Pascal Galleries at Ramapo College and continues on view through April 10. There will be a public reception with artist and curator talks on Wednesday, March 25th, from 5-7 p.m. Please note: the Galleries will be closed the week of March 16th for Spring Break!

This project is supported by a robust schedule of public programs, including a historically grounded lecture, an interdisciplinary panel discussion, a film screening, artist talks, and a live performance component, including a punk feminist concert.

See below for further details on the dates and times for these events! More will be announced soon.

Feb. 27

GODDESSES 3.0

February 27, 01:00 pm -- April 10, 05:00 pm

Berrie Center

A group exhibition of contemporary artists curated by Director of the Art Galleries Sydney Jenkins and feminist artist and curator Donna Kessinger.

Planned public programs include a lecture relating to goddesses history, a film screening and academic panel, exhibiting artists’ talks, performance art, and a punk feminist band concert.

From the classical to fashion history to myth to popular culture and political art, this exhibition will flex numerous ways to think about the meaning of Goddesses.

Artists represented range from Dara Birnbaum, Nancy Spero, Mary Beth Edelson, and Carolee Schneemann to Myrlande Constant, Vanessa Beecroft, and Mariko Mori, among others.

Due to various unavoidable factors the quiet opening for GODDESSES 3.0 has been delayed until February 25^th at 1 p.m. This showing will be on view in through April 10th, with a reception on Wednesday, March 25th at 5 PM.

Dates of other GODDESSES 3.0 events to be announced soon!

View the information page for this exhibition here!

Image: Pat Lay, Altar Heads Series #4: Diviner, 2003, fired clay, steel, gold leaf.

March 2026

Mar. 06

Art History Talk - The Ballad of Miss Fortune

11:30 am - 01:30 pm

Berrie Center

Please join us in the Berrie Center Café at 11:30 for a special talk by Art Historian Maria Loh in which she bridges renaissance imagery and notions of misogyny.

This event is held in conjunction with GODDESSES 3.0, on view in the Kresge and Pascal Galleries February 25 – April 10. More information on GODDESSES 3.0 can be found here!

ABSTRACT

Kairos, Occasio, and Fortuna are complex facets of the same goddess of luck, but at a certain moment in time a troubling, schizophrenic iconography came into being, which cast Lady Luck as a distinctively female force, both a capricious agent controlling the Wheel of Fortune and also as a body that could be either violently seized or wildly adored. This lecture will explore the uneasy gendering of Fortuna in some early modern images such as an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi in the Metropolitan Museum that bears the descriptive title A Naked Man Holding Fortune by the Hair and Whipping Her. Rather than simply cancelling an image as such, I would like to take the opportunity to reflect upon the ideological work that such artworks accomplished in their own time and to push us to think about how we can and must make sense of them as twenty-first-century viewers.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Maria H. Loh is Professor of Art History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Previously, she taught at CUNY Hunter College for six years and at University College London for over a decade. She is a contributor to Art in America and the author of three books—Titian Remade. Repetition and the Transformation of Early Modern Italian Art (2007); Still Lives. Death, Desire, and the Portrait of the Old Master (2015); and Titian’s Touch. Art, Magic, & Philosophy (2019). She has also written on: horror and “special affect” in early modern painting and sculpture; rainbow imagery in Stuart England; melancholia and the Renaissance in Ottocento Italy; remakes in Chinese cinema; repetition in Hitchcock’s Vertigo; seriality and Sherrie Levine; and the “open work” of Jeff Wall. Her forthcoming book—Liquid Sky—will be written for a general audience. 

Image: Maria Loh, courtesy of the Institute for Advanced Study.

Mar. 25

Film Screening - Ask the Goddess

02:30 pm - 04:30 pm

G126

As part of the GODDESSES 3.0 exhibition, on view February 25 – April 10, the Ramapo College Art Galleries are pleased to present a screening of Carolee Schneemann’s Ask the Goddess (1991).

Ask the Goddess is a provocative performance in which Schneemann interacts with the audience by responding to sexual and psychic dilemmas read from cards they have submitted. A continuous relay of projected slides comprises an iconography of Goddess symbols, taboo and sacred, including images of animal attributes. Schneemann reacts spontaneously to the questions; she channels cogent answers triggered by the unpredictable images and finds herself physically activated, turning into a howling wolf or crawling across the projection area, squealing like a pig. (Description via Electronic Arts Intermix).

PLEASE NOTE: This film contains adult content.

Following the screening, there will be a panel discussion featuring Rachel Churner, director of the Carolee Schneemann Foundation, Julie Nagle, professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Donna Kessinger, co-curator of GODDESSES 3.0 and feminist video artist.

Location: Room G126

Image: Carolee Schneemann, Ask the Goddess, 1991. Photo courtesy of the Carolee Schneemann Foundation.

 

Mar. 25

Exhibition Reception

05:00 pm - 07:00 pm

Berrie Center

Join us in the Kresge and Pascal Galleries on Wednesday, March 25th from 5 – 7 PM to explore and celebrate the GODDESSES 3.0 and Relative to the Collection: Luce Turnier exhibitions!

The evening will begin with time to view the galleries, followed by artist and curator talks at 6 PM.

View the GODDESSES 3.0 information page here!

Refreshments will be provided.

Image: Nancy Spero, A New Consciousness (detail), print, Ramapo College Collection, gift of the artist.

April 2026

Apr. 10

Punk Concert: The Dick Pinchers

04:30 pm - 05:30 pm

Berrie Center

Feminist punk band the Dick Pinchers will be performing a set on the grounds by the Berrie Center as part of the robust programming around GODDESSES 3.0. More info on this exhibition here.

The performance will take place in the late afternoon of April 10th, exact time to be announced soon!

ABOUT THE BAND:

The band Dick Pinchers is multi-media, multi-disciplinary artist Sierra Furtwangler (of Blood and Stomach Pills)‘s brainchild. It all started through a Facebook post. Sierra posted that she wanted to have a girl band named Dick Pinchers, she tagged Laura V Ward of Octavia Cup Dance Theatre and the Glam Rock Cabaret, and Alison Babalon of Beautiful Bastards and Oblivion Grin, suggesting that they might be a good fit. Miraculously, the trio formed. The raucous Dinner Party-esque band has become a sanity oasis for all three. Themes careen and intersect with swamp witchery, hot flashes, maniacal misbehavior, and Goddess invocation. Alison’s virtuosic bass work anchors Sierra’s heavy-hitting drums and Laura’s minimalist guitar (or violin). Vocals range from primal screams to somewhat more melodic singing, often within the same song. This IS your grandmother’s punk rock band.

Via O+ Festival.

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For more information, contact Sydney Jenkins at 201-684-7147.