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
Saturday, February 21, through Sunday,August 16
Figge Art Museum, 225 West Second Street, Davenport IA
Taking as its inspiration a beloved television series starring Lynda Carter, visual artist Dara Birnbaum's Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman will be on view in Davenport's Figge Art Museum from February 21 through August 16, the video one of the best-known creations from the talent who borrowed imagery and sound to compose powerful, politically charged video works.
In Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, Birnbaum assembles scenes from the 1970s Wonder Woman television series. 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.
Currently, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman is held in numerous museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Birnbaum also has works in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, and the S.M.A.K. Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Gent, Belgium.
Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman will be viewable in the Davenport museum's third- and fourth-floor galleries from February 21 through August 16, with regular museum hours 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Tuesdays through Saturdays (10 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Thursdays) and noon to 5 p.m. on Sundays. Museum admission is $8-14, and more information is available by calling (563)326-7804 and visiting FiggeArtMuseum.org.
