Illinois Women Artists: The New Millennium
Still, it’s been difficult for artists and viewers to reach any kind of consensus on this exhibit. I’ve heard some people comment that a show segregating women will ghettoize their art and result in a diminution of quality. Others worry that people won’t attend an exhibit restricted to works by women. Some have argued that a greater effort should have been made to include black, Asian, Native American, and Latina artists. Others believe that an exhibit of women’s art needs to address such issues as women’s working conditions–an opinion voiced by Elizabeth Cady Stanton not long before Renoir made his observation, when she faulted an exhibition of women’s art at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition.
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People who are trying to find their place in history often set out to rewrite it, as Chicagoan Mary Ellen Croteau does in her mock-Renaissance The Annunciation. Her Virgin Mary wears the traditional blue robes but stands with one hand on her hip like an annoyed mother; she seems to be gesturing at the archangel Gabriel to get out. Though he has wings, he also wears glasses and looks like a salesman or a doctor (the figure is actually a portrait of Randall Terry, the antiabortion activist). Slightly crouched over, he seems to be making a pitch: one hand is raised skyward, pointing toward God in the standard iconography of the Renaissance, while the other is open and displays a fetus.
A friend of mine called Wolfram’s use of color “alchemical,” as if all the impurities had been burned off and only the essentials remained. In her quest for meaning, Wolfram paints only in black, cream, and red, using an inflected line that reminds me of Käthe Kollwitz’s or van Gogh’s drawings: like their figures, hers are drawn in poses that capture the suffering inflicted on them. The figures move in a dreamlike space broken up into rectilinear but not perspectival zones, almost like a map; these ambiguous, disturbing “built” spaces look like basements or industrial areas. In the upper righthand corner is a muzzled dog, and just behind the couples is a crouched figure imprisoned in an odd cream-colored rectangle. Part of the painting is bordered by what looks like a picket fence–usually a sign of domestic tranquility but here an ironic comment on lamentations over the loss of past values. Wolfram’s Branks makes one wonder whether less visible but institutionalized punishments for speaking out still exist, but Wolfram preserves the sense of mystery in her piece by not pushing the point.
Nevertheless, difficult subjects are not absent, though they might be in the area of private life. Two images deal directly with sickness: one is a deftly drawn, disconcertingly jagged etching by Sigrid Wonsil of Streamwood, Last Illness, the other an oil pastel on paper by Chicagoan Hollis Sigler, one of a group of works about the battle she and her relatives have waged with breast cancer. This small painting about an often fatal illness is refreshingly nonpedantic and full of light and color, reminiscent of the hymnals and prayer books of the mystic Hildegard von Bingen: the luminosity of the colors seems metaphysical. Although the images are representational, they have no weight; the illumination seems to come from inside the objects. A small blue bed sits on a red stagelike platform in front of a window looking out on orange, yellow, and brown hills; black tree stumps look like the remnants of burned trees. A gracious squadron of winged hands bearing bags of blood is flying in front of the window, and a banner floating over the bed reads: “The blood was a gift that others had given to reinforce me.” Piles of gifts flank the bed, and the scene is surrounded by an alternately red and blue double frame with a design that looks like blood cells.
