Visual Arts
Feigenbaum Center for Visual Arts
Crowell and West Galleries
January 5 - March 13, 2026
8:00am - 8:00 pm (for campus community only at this time)
Opening Reception
Thursday, February 12, 2026 4:30-6:30 pm
Tanyth Berkeley | Sarah Friedland | Samantha Nye | Yoshie Sakai
Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens | Sandra Stark
Curated by Rachel Stern, Assistant Professor of Photography
The first thing I encounter when discussing the ideas around which I have curated A Certain Age - a group exhibition of women artists making work about older women - is a problem of language. Just there I used the term “older women” but it isn’t quite right. I don’t feel settled with the term “elderly” either, perhaps “elders” works depending on context, but the ineffable, relative, judgmental and social nature of age itself sets me to a challenging task. As I have spent time with these artworks I have found myself using the word “older,” yet no sooner do I use it than I wonder about its relativity, “older than whom, older than what?” I suppose that the ineffability of age is part of the reason I am drawn to it as a subject and “older” feels properly ambiguous, giving the most space to mean a lot of things. This makes sense for our subject matter as we look to older women as symbols and tropes, as individuals, as something that cannot be pigeon-holed and as real people who are, in fact, many things. Embracing this ambiguity, I chose the title A Certain Age. It is as specific as it is slippery. The phrase “a woman of a certain age” carries in it the heterosexist chauvinism that largely accompanies our derisive social image of an older woman. It also conjures sexual pleasure and pits it against sexual utility. It brings up notions of vanity, infantilization, humiliation, and despair—the idea of a woman too old to be attractive, experience pleasure, or to be a serious contributor to almost anything. It assumes a male and heterosexual gaze that has helped shape the violent capitalist dystopia from within which these artists have determinedly made their work. A Certain Age subverts all of these implications and instead offers us the chance to wonder, to look closely, and to imagine more accurately what older women look like, who they are, and how they are integral to our social structures.
In the gallery we are serenaded by Justin Vivian Bond in Nye’s work Daddy and titillated by the sparkly BDSM play within her video, we are confronted by Linda Leven’s piercing gaze in Berkeley’s portraits, seduced by Sprinkle and Stephens’ tender and strange embrace, entranced by Stark’s conflation of image and body, invigorated by Sakai’s lively dance scenes, and deeply moved by the narrative arc in Friedland’s film. Using beauty, humor, seduction, and earnestness these women artists are looking at their peers, their families, their communities, and themselves to create more accurate, liberating, and joyful images of “older” women.
These works come together to form A Certain Age, a chance for us to consider our relationships to femininity and aging. They assert the imperative that we reexamine our preconceptions and social location of older women. Through their work we see not just the instruction and wisdom earned through life lived, but a chance to create a more liberated society by dismantling the “hag” stereotype and restructuring an embrace of the older woman as invaluable to our general social wellbeing. If there is a certain age it has a lot to offer us.
