Yinka Shonibare, CBE
English-Nigerian, born 1962
Girl Balancing Knowledge III, 2017
Fiberglass mannequin, Dutch wax printed cotton textile, books, globe, leather, steel baseplate
Purchase: Priscilla Payne Hurd Endowment Fund, 2017. (2018.1a-c)
Balancing on one foot with a teetering pile of books on her back, this young girl appears to be doing the impossible, if temporarily. Who is she? Where is she from?
Dressed in nineteenth-century Western fashion made from African textiles, her identity is elusive, as is the period in which she lives. These fabrics were historically made in Europe using Indonesian wax-resist techniques for sale to a colonial African market, but today have become a symbol of pan-African pride. Shonibare’s use of this material evokes the complexities of the colonial past and cross-cultural interactions and identities today.
The knowledge the girl balances is in the form of mid-nineteenth to early twentieth-century literature and scientific volumes in English, suggesting the dominance of Western education. This reference has particular resonance for Shonibare, who attended Western schools growing up in Lagos, Nigeria, before completing his education in England. However, the writers whose names mark the constellations on the girl’s head reflect ideas from over the centuries and across the world. Look carefully at the details of her Victorian clothing, the authors marked on the celestial globe of her head, and the titles of the books she balances to explore her story for yourself.
Mola ‑ Jorge Negrete, Gallo (Rooster),
Elvis Presley, after 1962
Cotton with reverse appliqué, appliqué, and embroidery
Gift of Angel Suarez‑Rosado, 2018. (2018.18)
For decades, the Guna have translated imported goods into mola designs, including imagery from packaged foods, advertisements, and comic books. The maker of this mola drew inspiration from an album by Mexican singer and actor Jorge Negrete (pictured below). A beloved star of golden-age Mexican cinema, Negrete was known as one of the Tres Gallos Mexicanos (Three Mexican Roosters) along with Pedro Infante and Javier Solis. This mola also depicts hip-swiveling dance moves by American rock-and-roll icon Elvis Presley.
American, 1918–1986
life is a complicated business, 1967
Screen print
Printer and Publisher: Corita Kent, Immaculate Heart College, Los Angeles, CA
Purchase: Gift of Paul K. Kania, 2020. (2020.4.1)
Corita Kent used LIFE magazine as a source of visual and spiritual inspiration: here, adopting and transforming the typeface and iconic red of the publication’s logo. She combined this new, crumpled title with quotes from pop culture that suggest how life is both challenging and inspiring.
At the time, Kent was a Sister of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and was interested in how Catholicism could be modernized through media. She called LIFE magazine a “manual of contemplation” and used it to meditate on the world’s stories, humor, and wisdom just as she would gospel readings and sermons.
Keith Haring
American 1958–1990
Andy Mouse, 8/11/1985
Acrylic on canvas
Private Collection
Keith Haring believed that his mentor, Pop artist Andy Warhol, had made as much of an impact on American culture as Mickey Mouse. He created a series of works that explored this idea through Andy Mouse, a Mickey-Mouse-like character who had Warhol’s signature messy hair and glasses.
Both Haring and Warhol questioned the divisions between “high” and “low” art. In the 1960s, Warhol shocked the art world by using Campbell’s soup as a subject for his work. Haring’s Andy Mouse is similar in its declaration that pop culture is a worthy topic for art.
Angel Suarez-Rosado
American, born 1957
White Fence, 2003
Found objects, wood, paint
Purchase: The Ardath Rodale Art Fund, 2021.
(2021.7a, b)
Puerto Rican-born, Easton-based Angel Suarez-Rosado plays with expectations in his installation White Fence. On approach, we see a white picket fence that suggests an uncomplicated American domestic ideal. Passing through, we encounter hybrid symbols of violence, pain, and great spiritual power.
Suarez-Rosado is a practitioner of Santería, an Afro-Cuban religion that merges elements of West African Yoruba faith with Catholicism, and was a means for enslaved Africans to maintain their identity in the Americas. In its use of sharp metal objects, nails, and tools, White Fence recognizes Ogun, the god of iron and war in the pantheon of Yoruban deities. Nails hammered into the surface of the fence recall nkisi, central African power figures whose forms were the result of both creation and use, contributed to by a sculptor and a priest, who used the figure to heal illness, settle disputes, and punish wrongdoers.
Roy Lichtenstein
American, 1923–1997
Sweet Dreams, Baby! from the portfolio
11 Pop Artists, Volume III, 1965
Screen print, edition: 200
Printer: Knickerbocker Machine and Foundry Inc., New York, NY
Publisher: Original Editions, New York, NY
Gift of Ralph S. Hughes, 1982. (1982.28.13)
In this print, Lichtenstein replicates the bright colors, speech bubbles, and graphic “POW” of an action comic. He even stenciled in rows of dots that imitate the Ben-Day dots used in commercial printing—a choice that blurs the distinction between his fine-art print and a mass-produced cartoon. This work is an example of Pop Art, which challenged art-world convention in the early 1960s by borrowing from popular culture.
A. Bachman
American, born 1957
Caught, from the Attraction/Repulsion
series, 1989
Gelatin silver print
Purchase: Priscilla Payne Hurd Endowment Fund, 1991. (1991.2.2)
In this work, Bachman reproduces an image of a young girl tossed from one man to another, placing it between two ideals of feminine beauty: Barbie, and a nude model. Bachman appropriates images like these from advertisements and the media, combining them to create new meanings. Here, the title Caught refers not only to the action in the central image, but also points out how women are trapped by unrealistic beauty standards and other gendered expectations.
Petah Coyne and Kathy Grove
American, born 1953 and American, born 1948
Left:
The Real Guerrillas: The Early Years
AKA Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, 2015–2016
Right:
The Real Guerrillas: The Early YearsAKA Remedios Varo, 2015–2016
Archival pigment prints
Gift of Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz, 2021 and 2022. (2021.14.7, 2022.9.2)
Coyne and Grove collaborated on The Real Guerrillas: The Early Years series to document and honor the members of the feminist art activism group known as the Guerrilla Girls. Founded in 1985, this anonymous collective calls attention to gender and racial discrimination in the art world. Donning gorilla facemasks and art historical personas, the Guerilla Girls use humor, statistical data, and advertising to address prejudices inherent in galleries and museums.
Coyne and Grove produced two photographs for each member of the original collective: one of the Guerilla Girl as her alias – a female artist who was underrecognized in the art-historical canon; and one of her unmasked in her own studio. The prints here are the first part of two pairs, but the second unmasked photographs will only be released after their deaths.
AKA Elizabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun
I am Élizabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun. I was born in Paris in 1755, and though my only formal training was in the girlish art of fan painting from my father (who died when I was 12) I became a sought-after portrait painter with my own studio by age 15. My paintings commanded high fees – which both my step-father and then my husband relieved me of. Men dominated the Parisian art world (plus ça change, n’est pas?) and their jealousy of my success was a constant plague. Nonetheless I lived an exceptional, and exceptionally long life, becoming court portraitist to Marie Antoinette by age 23. As the French court was losing favor, I fled France with my young daughter and continued painting portraits of royalty in Italy, St. Petersburg and Prussia. I was one of few women included in academic art societies of several countries, and my talent was in demand by elite society throughout Europe.
By the time I died in 1842, I had produced an oeuvre of over 660 portraits and 200 landscapes. Today, with works in museums like the Hermitage, London’s National Gallery, and the Louvre, I sometimes wonder why it took nearly 150 years to b given a retrospective in the United States. (And why, s’il vous plait, your Metropolitan Museum deems it necessary to bill it as “a woman artist in revolutionary France?”)
No Matter. In 1985 I was reborn as one of the Guerrilla Girls, a most sympathetic collective (if perhaps lacking the elegance of my former court circles.) I worked diligently with them until 1995. My main job was correspondence, which I could do alone at night after my own painting sessions were complete. And my former skill at supporting myself and my daughter made me a natural to become the Girls’ first banker – though opening an account for a secret society taxed my ingenuity. Naturally the bank official asked, what was this Guerrilla Girls organization? Panicked, I blurted, “a women’s bowling league”. Genuinely interested, he inquired, “Where do you bowl?” Alas! I knew nothing about New York City bowling alleys! Awkwardly I dissembled: “We are a dysfunctional group, wanting to bowl but fearful, so we meet and socialize. We hope soon to find our way.” There were strange looks but we got the account. And then, how to sign the checks? Reluctant to employ my own signature, I at first used art world names with currency, such as Marian Goodman, Leo Castelli, Roberta Smith and Paula Cooper. This too caused problems.
Late one night, postering on West Broadway with two other Girls, we were arrested. Frightened, but summoning my old world charms, I explained to the officer our cause of avenging neglected women artists given so few exhibitions in galleries or museums. He stopped, let us out of the police car, and gave us this advice: “Look ladies, if you would take off those really ugly gorilla masks, you might just have a fighting chance!”
AKA Remedios Varo
I am Remedios Varo. I was born in Spain in 1908, and studied at the same Fine Arts Academy in Madrid as Salvador Dali. To escape family constraints, I married a fellow student friend. We fled Spain to Paris during the civil war, where I became a member of André Breton’s Surrealist circle, took part in international Surrealist exhibitions in Paris and Amsterdam and contributed to important collaborative Surrealist publications.
War intervened again in 1941, when the Nazi occupation of Paris forced me to take refuge in Mexico City, with my second husband, a Surrealist poet. We joined other European intellectuals there, and the mystical Mexican Catholic culture and pre-Columbian art and myth further enriched my work. I had long recognized that Surrealism, embracing the traditional role of woman as muse or object, never overtly empowered women artists. I countered that by depicting women in my works as the active heroine, the power figure and creator. Yet I was forced to do commercial art to make a living. Surrealism was not yet appreciated in Mexico, and it took years of subsistence living before success. My final partner, Walter Gruen, another exile, was my most ardent supporter, enabling me at last to focus on my painting.
I had my first solo gallery exhibition in Mexico City in 1956, and it was so well received that collectors were put on waiting lists. Even Diego Rivera became a fan. Over the next few years, my subsequent shows were equally successful, but sadly I died suddenly in 1963 just as my career had finally begun.
The animism and mystery that inform my paintings, as well as the spirit of Surrealist collaboration made me a natural to help found Guerrilla Girls. After all, name a ‘corps’ more exquisite than our surreal ladies league! Late in 1984, following a lecture at the New School, Frida Kahlo, Lyubov Popova, and I talked of forming a women’s union to protest the way museums and galleries ignored women artists. We gathered some friends in 1985 and came up with the idea of the Girls.
With my language skills I was perfect for doing phone research. I called galleries and museums, and, sounding like a sophisticated European collector, inquired what artists had been shown in recent years. In this way, we tallied the dismal figures of actual women’s exhibitions. Postering was messy work, and at the end of those cold winter nights, we had wheat paste slopped on us everywhere, but I felt our work was worthy of the most serious performance art. In tribute to our wonderful masks, I wore a chic green overall. Afterward, we all went to Popova’s place for hot chocolate. In 1986, after the Guerrilla Girls had gotten such a good start, I retired from them and returned to Mexico, where my paintings are still highly regarded, though little known elsewhere. Imagine my delight, however, when Madonna riffed on my painting The Lovers in her 1995 music video Bedtime Story!
Angela Fraleigh
American, born 1976
And then we’ll walk right up to the sun, 2016
Oil, acrylic, and marker on canvas
Purchase: Priscilla Payne Hurd Endowment Fund, 2019. (2019.11)
The art-historical canon typically portrays women as one-dimensional figures to be lusted after, as victims of violence, or as passive background decoration. Allentown artist Angela Fraleigh retrieves such women from the sidelines of respected historic works, giving them new life in her monumental paintings.
In And then we’ll walk right up to the sun, Fraleigh excerpts figures from two paintings by nineteenth-century French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme, who was known for imagery that affirmed Western fantasies of the Middle East as a place of sensuality, violence, and submissiveness. While Gérôme used these women as foils for white subjects, Fraleigh makes them the focus of her composition. Her work encourages us to explore their agency and possible subversion—with the white protagonists removed from their scene, what might they choose to do?
A Tale of Three Textiles
These three textiles share a common inspiration: a drawing or painting by the British artist John Russell, which depicts his daughters feeding chickens. Russell’s original work was reproduced as a print (see photo), allowing this imagery to circulate widely.
One impression of this print made its way into the hands of Philadelphia artist Samuel Folwell, whose wife ran a renowned school for young ladies. He incorporated a faithful rendition of Russell’s scene into his design for the large framed embroidery on the wall to your left, which was then stitched by student Ann Hutchinson.
On the other hand, the designer of the blue printed fabric offers a looser interpretation of Russell’s scene, which appears here under a palm tree. You’ll also notice that this textile reverses Russell’s composition: the designer did not correct for the printing process, which flips designs from left to right.
The small embroidery behind you closely replicates the scene from the printed fabric, and at the same scale, meaning its design may actually have been traced from the fabric. Fashionable textiles imported from Britain, like this one, could offer appealing imagery for girls’ needlework, especially at schools that lacked access to an artist like Folwell.
Peltro William Tomkins
British, 1759–1840
after John Russell (British, 1745–1806)
Children Feeding Chickens, 1788
stipple with etching.
Collection of the British Museum (1917.1208.2421)
Ann Hutchinson, with Samuel Folwell
American, 1789–1848 and American, 1764–1813
The Little Cottagers, 1806
Silk satin with silk satin, running,
and straight stitch embroidery and hand-painting
Gift of Elizabeth M. Wistar, 1986. (1986.36.2)
British
Panel, ca. Early 1800s
Printed cotton plain weave
Gift of Linda and Rick Rehrig, 1991. (1991.37)
The Little Cottagers, ca. 1805-10
Silk, with silk satin, French knot, and stem stitch embroidery and hand-painting
Purchase: The Reverend and Mrs. Van S. Merle‑Smith, Jr. Endowment Fund, 2006. (2006.21)
Iman Raad
Iranian, born 1979
Until We Hardly See, 2019
Patinas and screen print on copper, edition: 35
Printers: Pedro Barbeito and Jase Clark, Experimental Printmaking Institute, Easton, PA
Publisher: Experimental Printmaking Institute, Easton, PA
Purchase: Priscilla Payne Hurd Endowment Fund, 2019. (2019.12)
A mirrored bird proliferates like a digital glitch in Until We Hardly See, evoking both seventeenth-century South Asian nature paintings and twenty-first-century technologically mediated visual culture. Iman Raad has explained that these works “mainly evolved after my migration to the United States. Living a hybrid life … I have experienced a stammering communication with, and a shattered understanding of my surroundings, and of myself in the eyes of others.”
Raad’s reality-disrupting subversion of form is supported by his unorthodox application of technique. The copper plate, typically a surface from which to print, is here printed on. The dreamlike setting of the image is the result of chemical modification of the metal surface with experimental homemade patinas of salt, vinegar, and Miracle-Gro®.