Dara Birnbaum, American, 1946–2025, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (stills), 1978–1979, NTSC Digi-Beta Master, color, stereo sound, 5 minutes 30 seconds, © Dara Birnbaum
Thursday, August 6, 6 p.m.
Figge Art Museum, 225 West Second Street, Davenport IA
On August 6, Figge Art Museum Co-Senior Curator Vanessa Sage will lead a special tour celebrating the creativity, strength, and influence of women in art during the Davenport venue's Music & Makers Night event Celebrating All Wonder Women, allowing guests to explore rhe works and stories that highlight remarkable women artists and inspiring subjects throughout the galleries.
Among the tour stops is sure to be visual artist Dara Birnbaum's Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, a video assemblage of scenes from the 1970s Wonder Woman television series starring Lynda Carter. Throughout the video, Wonder Woman spins – transforming again and again from her alter ego, Diana Prince, into the Amazonian superheroine. The video is all set to the song “Wonder Woman Disco.” Birnbaum uses the iconic character to critique mass media portrayals of women, including how they are often over-sexualized and over-simplified. She states of the work, “I’m a secretary, I’m a Wonder Woman, and there’s nothing in between. And the in-between is the reality we need to live in.”
The New York City-based Birnbaum, who passed away in May of 2025, entered the nascent field of video art in the mid-to-late 1970s, challenging the gendered biases of the period and television’s ever-growing presence within the American household. Her oeuvre primarily addresses ideological and aesthetic features of mass media through the intersection of video art, YouTube and television. She used video to reconstruct television imagery using as materials such archetypal formats as quizzes, soap operas, and sports programs. The foundation of her work uses techniques which involve the repetition of images and interruption of flow with text and music. She was also well known for having formed part of the feminist art movement that emerged within video art in the mid-1970s.
The Music & Makers Night event Celebrating All Wonder Women begins at 6 p.m., and the evening also features live music in the Figge Café and hands-on art making activities available throughout the night. Participation in the event is free, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman will be on view in the Davenport museum's third- and fourth-floor galleries through August 16, and more information is available by calling (563)326-7804 and visiting FiggeArtMuseum.org.
