Fashion depicting the human figure has taken the art world by storm in recent years, with an emphasis on race, gender and other pressing social issues. Another pressing topic in America was mysteriously absent from the arts. Abortion became all the more timely when the Supreme Court overturned his Roe v. Wade judgment in June.
Depictions of abortion are still rare in art history canons. Check out museum walls, flip through the pages of HW Jansson and other art textbooks, and you’re likely to come across countless images of beautiful mothers, babies with dimples, and a world with never-ending pregnancies.
But the subject of abortion, historically shrouded in stigma and relegated to the realm of unspeakable secrecy, has recently been gaining prominence in the art world. It’s a combination of galleries, art fair curators, and young artists who grew up at a time when art, exploring personal identity, moved from the cultural fringes to the mainstream.
For 90 years, there has not been a single painting in the Whitney Museum that explicitly deals with abortion. But that has changed. The museum recently purchased Juanita McNeely’s “Is it Real?” Yes, it is! (1969), a mural-sized painting, a fragmentary narrative spread across nine separate panels, recounts her harrowing experience of having an abortion in the early ’60s when the procedure was illegal. , will debut at the museum on Sept. 20, when the Whitney Museum of American Art re-exhibits its permanent collection.
The best places to ponder abortion-themed art in NYC this weekend are: Armory Show, an annual fair where aisles bustling with art shoppers can make Bloomingdale’s look like an oasis of calm. It opened Friday at the Javits Center, thanks to the loan of ten of her etchings, which were reprized in uncharacteristically pro-feminist notes. Paula Lego’s now historic “Abortion Series” (1998-99) From the Christia Roberts Gallery, London.
The series consists of large-scale pastels showing a woman in the middle of a self-induced abortion at home. They lie on rumpled beds or squat in corners, in towels and bowls and metal buckets, dumped by medical facilities unwilling to help. Renowned Portuguese artist Lego, who died in June at the age of 87, has swept potentially harsh body details from her images, as raw as this may sound. They are still clothed and tend to be viewed from the side. They look intimidating with their wayward facial expressions and thick, muscular runner legs. “I tried to do Full Frontal,” she once said. And what you want to do is make people look beautiful. “
Despite such instances of social protest, the issue of women’s reproductive rights continues to receive the sustained attention the art world has lavished on climate change and mass incarceration, among other timely issues. I haven’t received it yet. But abortion is a deeply offensive topic, not only among art institutions, but even among artists, a prominent liberal group that overwhelmingly supports legalized abortion.Women painters and sculptors In a recent interview with . Some women say the art of abortion risks being funny, overly intimate, politically naive, turning sensibilities into slogans, and advocacy into turn-offs.
At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, director Max Hollein told a spokesperson he did not know of a single piece of art related to abortion in the museum’s 1.5 million collection. Additionally, spokesperson Ken Wayne said the museum “has nothing direct or tangible.”
At the Brooklyn Museum, Anne Pasternak The curator also referred to collections dating back to antiquity, stating:
Read more about abortion in America
But in the spirit of advocacy, she emailed museum members on June 24, the day Roe v. Wade was overturned, saying, “We face a relentless attack on human dignity.” I warned you. Curators also spoke with artists Jenny Holzer and Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter early about doing an “activation” at the museum in January to mark her 50th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade case. We are having a discussion.
The art of abortion is infinitely diverse, oscillating between Lego-style political activism on one side and raw self-revelation on the other. At the helm of Confession Mode is Frida Kahlo, the flamboyant Mexican modernist who created her visual oversharing tradition. In the process, she legitimized female trauma as a legitimate subject in art.
The de Young Museum in San Francisco owns a rare piece on the theme of abortion. 1936 Kahlo. A small, poignant lithograph, alternately titled “El Aborto” (Spanish) or “Frida and the Miscarriage”. (Scholars are divided on whether it indicated an abortion or a miscarriage; Kahlo is known to have had at least three pregnancies that could not be continued to term.)
In the lithograph, she is depicted facing forward in a pose reminiscent of the women in medical textbooks. Inside her womb you can see a rolled up fetus. Two large tears run down her cheeks and she cries like the moon. A second image of her in a fetus (this one expelled from her body) floats in the lower left, and a heart-shaped palette on the right suggests that art is both a solace and a substitute for a lost child. doing.
McNeely, whose paintings are in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, can be said to belong to Kahlo’s lineage of art as autobiography. She said, “Really? Yes, it is!” It employs an angled, expressionist style to document medical emergencies before finding a doctor to do.
The 86-year-old McNeely, who has lived in the Westbeth studios in the West Village for nearly half a century, was in high spirits when I visited him the other day. Whitney’s purchase was a big surprise. Her repeated efforts to display this painting in her gallery were rejected until last year when James held her solo exhibition at her Fuentes gallery. She attributes her decades of professional obscurity to a societal aversion to contemplating female trauma. “I painted a lot with blood,” she recalls. “I loved blood. The more blood, the better.”
Was she worried about the potentially offensive aspects of portraying abortion? “You wouldn’t live without your blood,” she cheerfully retorted.
Do men create memorable artwork on this subject? At least one has. Sculptures by Ed Kienholz, “Illegal Operation” (1962), at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, was inspired by his anguish over his wife’s abortion. A lamp with a crooked shade, rusty tools, a shopping cart requisitioned as an operating table, and the cobbled together of found objects imbues the abortion scene at home with an almost unbearable loneliness. I’m in.
But not every artist who supports abortion rights is interested in using art to advance the cause. Many of our most revered female artists, especially those who lived in the Raw era before illegal abortions, acknowledge an element of self-censorship on the subject.
Consider the long-awaited group exhibition Painting in New York, 1971-1983. karmaThe works of 30 famous female painters who started their careers during the heyday of second-wave feminism are brought together. It also raises funds for Planned Her Parenthood by selling t-shirts. This her t-shirt is a textless object depicting an abstract painting by artist Mary Heilman, featuring a grid of snuggling rectangles in fuchsia, bubblegum and other shades associated with pink.
According to the participants, apparently none of the show’s work is related to abortion. “It’s only recently that women have publicly admitted to having abortions,” said Joan Semmel, a representational artist and staunch feminist who turns 90 next month. To explain why she never thought of painting abortion-themed work. .”
Artist Lois Lane, who also appears on the Karma show, emphasizes that she came of age at a time when sexism in the art world was overwhelming. It was enough of a professional challenge for her to make a career in her art without emphasizing her status as a woman. “When I started my career, I felt like I was pushing rocks uphill every day,” she said.
Even Kiki Smith, a noted sculptor of the female body, said that abortion was more interesting to her as a social topic than as an art topic. said she had an abortion in “Personally, it’s the saddest thing in my life,” she recalled, adding that the prospect of raising children wasn’t possible for her. It just wasn’t good enough for me to be able to take care of someone else.”
A ’90s Smith body-themed sculpture show will take place on October 19 at artist Alex Katz’s private gallery at 211 West 19th Street. Not included in the exhibition is 1989’s Untitled, a four-foot tall, or lower half, female figure made of translucent paper and torn at the waist. This sculpture gives off a light, floating feeling in contrast to the complex theme of a fetus hanging from a string between a woman’s legs. While this sculpture may appear to refer directly to abortion, Smith said he likes to think of it as an expression of “my ambivalence towards motherhood.”
Every generation of artists is shaped by the moment they enter the art scene. There is much to suggest that today’s young artists possess an agility for dealing with political content that escapes most of their predecessors.in the current program Matthew Marks Gallery, Julia Phillips, An accomplished German-American artist, 37 treats the subject of abortion with chilling, almost clinical candor. In the back room of the gallery are two of his sculptures, ‘Aborter’ and ‘Impregnator’. In this work, various small objects resembling gynecological tools are placed on steel trays to evoke a dystopia in which women entrust control of their bodies to unknown agents.
Phillips said on the phone: There is a more clarifying urgency, and there is still discomfort in that. “
Yet some of the best-known art on abortion eschews images of body internal organs in favor of streamlined text. ‘Untitled (Your Body Is a Battleground)’ by Barbara Kruger, Since 1989, social media has recently appropriated it as the default icon for Post Roe’s complaints. Like much of Kruger’s work, this image is a combination of old found photographs and overlaid text. It opens with a slogan (“Your body is…”) and imbues it with the mysteries of art.
Who is the woman that charming brunette stares in from that photograph, which is halved vertically in the contrast of Manichaean darkness and light? Kruger has not publicly identified the source. She originally created the image as a poster for the Women’s March in 1989. Although the poster is long gone, a nine-foot-square version of her in “Your Body Is a Battleground” remains at the Broad Museum in Los Angeles. ing.
I called Kruger the other day to see what else she had planned. In keeping with her reputation for sharp maxims, she exclaimed: I have no complaints, except for the world.