Edmonia Lewis
Edmonia Lewis opened my mind to racial issues that are certainly not articulated in traditional historic texts about the period of slavery in America. So much of the text is focused on the physical harm to the African American or Native American cultures, but the loss of identity as people was more perhaps even more harmful.
Lewis’s sculpture Forever Free was an important depiction to allow me to begin engaging the other consequences of slavery and freedom to the African American female. She is to be obedient to her husband in the same way white women were to be obedient and passive. Freedom for a male slave and a female slave now take on an entirely different meaning. The text describes freedom as a “masculinized process” (Buick, 1998) which still speaks to women today.
I feel there is still an entirely too firm description of gender roles today. Females are to be domestic and nurturing and yet take on new responsibilities in the modern economy and culture. Female slaves were asked to be courageous and remove their maternal roles; when freed she regained her maternal role and was asked to conform or remove that courageous person that had grown inside her. There is a parallel between her story and the story of women of ever era in my opinion.
Women in America during World War II were asked to become courageous and support the war efforts by limiting their traditional roles as homemakers and instead becoming employed in factories and taking over their husbands businesses. Then asked to remove their strength to return to a gender role of being submissive and confined to a role of domestic chores. The difference between these two examples is that as a black woman in 1940 if you went to work in the factory, your children didn’t become property.
A cord was struck with me when I realized that to be a black female slave your children were never people but just property or commodity. A freed female slave could see her skin color as the reason her children became assets; by Lewis removing those features that identified her subject matter as an African American female, Lewis was presenting a woman freed of her past and giving her the possibility to be a mother again.
Additionally removing the ethnic markers of African or Native American women in her sculptures, Lewis was able to present pieces not to be seen as autobiographical works. I find it frustrating that often critics interpret works as representative of the artist. Much of the contemporary art immediately after the height of Abstract Expressionism aimed to remove the artist from the object. White washing the female figures of Lewis’s sculptures was not a want to ignore or forget her ethnicity but her effort to ask viewer to look objectively.
Furthermore we have already talked in great lengths about the neoclassical depiction of Native American women by colonial and American artists. There is in my opinion she may also just be depicting women in the acceptable fashion of the artists before her. It was safe to Europeanize the female subject or to depict them in an idealized neoclassical style. Lewis was the first African-Indian woman to sculpt in America and straying from the conventional ways might have dismissed her talent or made her work unappealing to the current tastes.
I see a connection between what Lewis was doing and what Robert Rauschenberg did with White Painting. Rauschenberg was poking fun at the Formalist Clement Greenberg. Greenberg saw flatness and all over color to be two of the defining element of great modern art. Flat was what the Abstract Expressionists, Color field, and Hard Edge painters were doing; so Rauschenberg gave the public a white, large, flat piece of art. Perhaps Lewis was just seeking to swim in the mainstream but not because she saw it as the right way but as simply a way to sell her work.
This reading has helped me to look deeper into the racial and gender issues in American art. Many artists and women in particular have concealed their identity and removed something of themselves from their work. Removing the ethnicity or gender from an object is not ignoring the issues, but side stepping it to allow for a more objective interpretation. There is a struggle in modern culture about political correctness and as viewers we must try to turn off that function when examining work before the modern era.
Isabel Bishop
From the first sentence of this essay, I was fully engaged and interested in what Isabel Bishop had to say; or rather what was to be expressed about her in this essay. “I didn’t want to be a woman artist, I just wanted to be an artist” calls to mind the struggles of being a female in a career field that has been dominated by males since art first began being created. Then it calls to question what gender roles are and whether gender is an inherent quality or applied to each sex by their surrounding culture.During the semester, Art History 495 asked the students to read Linda Nochlin’s Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists. There is an interesting connection between these two pieces of work. Nochlin discusses the obstacles that women have faced and continue to face in both the art establishment and main stream culture. The former primary obstacle was the inability of females to attend the academies because it was improper for females to view, study, and sketch the nude form, especially that of a male nude. Without access to schools it became nearly impossible to display work and study.After gaining access to school or moving to Italy to study, females faced the scrutiny of American culture. It wasn’t acceptable for women to work outside the home until the mid-late twentieth century. The Edmonia Lewis essay expressed the difficulties that a female artist in the mid-late nineteenth century. It seems as though nearly a hundred years later, there was not much change.Women were allowed to work in office jobs, but were to maintain and observe the constructed gender roles of the period. Ultimately the essay stresses that culture of the time were seeking to provide a transition between young women and married women; a period of time where young women could “prepare herself for the successful marriage that both she and society considered her ultimate achievement”. So despite the necessity for females to work during the post-depression and ensuing World War II economy, there was no assumption that these changes would be neither permanent to the American economy and gender norms.Additionally I find it both logical but counterproductive to the advancement of women in the work force, when single women were pressuring their married colleges to leave the work force. It is logical because during the Depression a job of any kind put you in a better place than a vast majority of the American population; if a woman was married there was a better chance her husband had a job and single women saw them as a opposing force. This reaffirms the notion that the woman in the work force was never a permanent position, not even in the eyes of most females participating in the work force.These ladies are none-the-less beautifully portrayed by Bishop. The shifting and changing atmosphere convey the condition of modern city life. In focus are young women, politely dressed and poised. They embody the qualities of the new working woman perfectly. Demure, and dressed tastefully the women were captured by Bishop while the women were away from the office. The female qualities are indeed more aptly conveyed through the rage of emotional expression. Just as females were subject to a constructed gender identity of the time, males were as well. Male depictions were serious and reserved and it is this difference which may be the exact reason women are chosen as subjects. There is an artistic freedom when depicting females and I think Bishop fully utilized that to achieve her success.
