All posts by maureenfarrell

 
News

Where give meets take

Sharing a house, a shower, and a meal at the Catholic Worker.


St. Joseph House on East First Street, one of the two Catholic Worker houses located in Manhattan.

Like many of her classmates at the University of Notre Dame, Sarah Brook came to New York soon after graduation, looking for work. But the job she ended up applying for last summer had few of the “perks” that a typical graduate might look for, such as health insurance, retirement benefits, or even a salary. It also had a somewhat unconventional way of interviewing candidates — one involving a mandatory overnight stay at the organization’s downtown office.

Since August, Brook has been living, working, and volunteering at Maryhouse on East Third Street in Manhattan, one of two Catholic Worker houses in Manhattan. The other house, St. Joseph House, is just two blocks away on East First Street. Brook and the other dozen or so volunteers at each house have agreed to live and work at this house, wage- and rent-free. They assist the poor directly by serving meals, giving out clothing, and providing homeless men and women access to showers. The volunteers eat the same food they cook and serve to the destitute. They also wear clothes that have been donated to the group.

But Brook and the other Catholic Workers do not just serve the poor. They live with them. Every day, St. Joseph House and Maryhouse welcome hundreds of New York’s estimated 39,000 homeless into its living quarters. And every day, these individuals — many of whom suffer from mental illness — eat with, talk to, and sleep alongside volunteers from more or less privileged backgrounds.

“The ideal is to be with the poorest people and to do as much as we can to obliterate the distinctions,” says Tom Cornell, a volunteer who lives at a Catholic Worker farming community in upstate New York. Cornell and his wife, Monica, have been volunteers with the movement since the 1950s.

The Catholic Worker movement itself goes back seventy years, when activists Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin started handing out copies of their newspaper, the Catholic Worker, at a May Day communist rally in New York’s Union Square. (To this day, the 80,000-circulation Catholic Worker still sells for a penny a copy.) A year later, Day and Maurin decided they should do more than simply publish articles about social justice. They began establishing houses to serve the poor, the first of which opened in New York in 1934. There are now 185 Catholic Worker houses, serving thousands of poor people in the United States as well as abroad.

Day once said that young people will always want to come to Manhattan — and there will always be poor people in Manhattan. Decades later, residents of the New York houses — both the Catholic Workers and the people they serve — continue to represent a wide range of ages and backgrounds. Brook, who is twenty-two, says that living at Maryhouse is “an ideal way to still be in school. You’re getting your hands dirty, but getting to use your mind.” The Catholic Workers live off donations, she says; they do not take any pay, except for $20 a week in “fun money.”

This lifestyle of self-imposed poverty is precisely what continues to draw people — especially young people — to the movement, nearly two decades after Day’s death. “There is … great freedom in giving up your possessions, in devoting yourself to love of the poor and of fellow members of your community and devotion to social and political justice,” says Jim O’Grady, the author of Dorothy Day: With Love for the Poor. Bill Griffin, a former volunteer who often eats dinner at the Maryhouse, calls the Catholic Worker movement a “school of life.” Most volunteers stay for two or three years, he says; some end up staying indefinitely.

The organization’s name is somewhat misleading: The Catholic Worker has no official relationship with the Roman Catholic Church, and its statement of “aims and means” explicitly states that it has no “religious test.” Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day were both practicing Catholics when they founded the movement, but they wanted the organization to be open to people of all faiths. To this day, most of the organization’s volunteers are practicing Catholics, and religious faith remains a central motivation for their work. (“Our priorities don’t make any sense unless you believe in God,” says Felton Davis, a volunteer at Maryhouse.) That said, in some Catholic Worker houses other faiths have been known to dominate: The volunteers in the Catholic Worker house in Boston, for instance, are mostly Buddhist.

Of the 185 operating Catholic Worker houses, none of them can be rightfully called the movement’s “headquarters.” Informally, however, the New York houses function as the de facto center of the movement, as it was there where the movement began and where Day did her charity work. Today, Maryhouse and St. Joseph House sit inconspicuously alongside chic restaurants and boutiques in Lower Manhattan. When Day and Maurin founded the organization seven decades ago, this area — known as the Bowery or the East Village — was a blighted urban neighborhood. Over the years, however, real estate prices soared and the area’s poor left for other parts. Today, some volunteers question whether the Catholic Worker should move to Brooklyn, Central Harlem, or the South Bronx, since these areas now have the highest concentrations of the city’s poverty and homelessness.

One positive thing about their current location is that it allows the Catholic Workers to directly confront New York’s materialistic culture, says O’Grady. The Catholic Workers rebuke the “disgusting wealth reveling that goes on in Manhattan,” he says. “They sit right in the middle of it, but by going about their daily business, they say to us: ‘What obsesses you doesn’t matter.’”

In fact, the Catholic Worker movement seems to take pride in rejecting many mainstream cultural values, especially competition and materialism. “You’re not supposed to reject competition. That’s a rejection of the American way of life,” Davis tells me on one of my visits to Maryhouse. In Davis’ view, some people are in need and some people have too much; the Catholic Worker simply helps facilitate this redistribution of wealth. “If we weren’t here, how would people who have more than they need hand over to those who don’t?” he asks.

As we’re talking, a young woman stops by the house to drop off a bag of clothing. “People come to give and come to receive,” Davis says. “We’re living at that point where give meets take.”

Sarah Brook, a Catholic Worker volunteer, takes a break from her duties at the Maryhouse shelter in Manhattan.

One family

At Maryhouse, there is no formal training for new volunteers. And that, Brook says, was perhaps the most difficult part of getting started as a Catholic Worker. Brook had never before lived among the mentally ill. She often felt confused when her mostly female charges would act happy and talkative and then, moments later, begin screaming at her. Other volunteers were supportive, she says, and Brook felt comfortable asking them questions. Still, no one took her aside to point out which house residents had which types of problems.

It is precisely this lack of structure that defines the Catholic Worker movement and makes it so different from other social service organizations. As one volunteer puts it, the Catholic Worker is “a family.” It strives to create a relaxed, accepting environment in its houses. Many people who come to the house for food feel comfortable wandering through its pantries. “We try to offer someone not just a plate of food but a home or something that can be their home,” says Brook.

Meals at St. Joseph House or Maryhouse are a cross between a Thanksgiving family dinner and summer camp. One Friday night I walk into a macaroni and cheese dinner prepared by volunteer Jim Regan. The Catholic Workers sit right beside the people who come seeking meals. Smoke fills the air of the dining hall. Alcohol and drugs are not permitted in any of the houses — many of the residents are recovering from drug or alcohol addiction — but cigarettes seem to be the accepted indulgence. Some of the men and women yell or talk in disjointed sentences, while the volunteers doggedly try to engage them in conversation.

Griffin describes the Catholic Worker as the place where the “voluntary” poor and the “involuntary” poor come together. For a casual observer like myself, the two categories blended together so discreetly that it was often difficult to distinguish between those who served as volunteers and those who came seeking food. I initially thought a woman named Stacey was one of the volunteers. When I spoke to other people who ate or lived at the Catholic Worker, it was immediately clear that they suffered from a mental illness. Not Stacey. As she explained to me her problems with the city shelter system, she came across as strikingly intelligent and aware. Stacey said she was thirty-five, though she appeared much younger, and had been homeless for two years. She knew few details about the Catholic Worker organization, but she had been coming regularly to St. Joseph House and Maryhouse for clothes, food, a shower, and sometimes even a nap.

Stacey is one of hundreds of people who pass through the two Catholic Worker houses in Manhattan on a daily basis. Many of these people complain of problems they’ve had with the New York City shelter system. What makes the Catholic Worker houses stand apart from the other shelters, they say, is the unique attitude among the staff — the direct personal engagement that Catholic Workers bring to their work. For the past seventy years, this particular approach toward public service has been an explicit part of the movement’s mission, encapsulated in a philosophy known as “personalism,” which Catholic Worker co-founder Peter Maurin studied in the writings of the French philosopher Emmanuel Mounier.

At the time of the Catholic Worker’s founding, the world was beginning to be split between two warring political ideologies. The conflict between the classical liberals who favored capitalism and the Marxists who favored socialism would dominate the history of most of the twentieth century. Mounier’s philosophy of personalism advocated a middle ground between the liberals’ glorification of the individual and the Marxists’ glorification of the collective, both of which (according to Mounier) failed to put sufficient emphasis on personal responsibility.

In a 1955 issue of the Catholic Worker, Dorothy Day explained how Peter Maurin adapted the principles of personalism to the work of social justice: “His whole message was that everything began with one’s self … If every man became poor there would not be any destitute, he said. If everyone became better, everyone would be better off. He wanted us all ‘to quit passing the buck.’” In their daily work, the Catholic Workers live out the personalist philosophy by both choosing poverty and working to help those who have to live in poverty. As Griffin points out, “The way you help is as important as the money you give to help.”

The Maryhouse on East Third Street.

Act locally, act globally

It’s noon on Saturday in Manhattan’s Union Square, and nearly a dozen people are gathered around the statue at the northern edge of the square. The Catholic Workers and other activists have been holding a weekly vigil here for years. Now it’s about Iraq, but they’ve always had reasons to protest: Before the September 11 terrorist attacks, the group protested the presence of U.S. troops in Colombia.

How do U.S. policies in far-off lands connect to the movement’s mission of helping the poor? Art Laffin, a volunteer at the Catholic Worker house in Washington, says that the poor person on the street and the people in Baghdad are both “victims of our society.”

“We’re trying to live an alternative, a nonviolent alternative,” Laffins says. “We choose to not cooperate with a consumer society and a system that sanctions killing.” For Catholic Workers like Laffin, protests and vigils are as much a part of their day-to-day work as feeding the poor. Every Monday for the past sixteen years, Laffin and about fifteen other volunteers have held a vigil in front of the Pentagon. Every Friday for the past six years, they have demonstrated in front of the White House. Laffin was arrested last August for participating in a vigil at the Pentagon commemorating the Hiroshima nuclear bombing; the police said he had entered an off-limits area. “Dorothy Day said we have to fill the jails,” Laffin points out.

Besides taking part in protests, Catholic Worker volunteers also go to war zones to bring food and other supplies to victims. Laffin visited Iraq in 1998, Central America twice during the 1980s, and the occupied territories of Palestine three times between 1996 and 1998. “You see firsthand the immeasurable suffering of people,” he says.

Over the years, many notable pacifists have joined forces with the Catholic Worker. Daniel Berrigan regularly attends the Union Square vigil. Berrigan and his brother Phillip, who passed away last year, were known for their creative acts of civil disobedience in the 1960s, when they were both Catholic priests protesting the Vietnam War. The duo made the cover of Newsweek, and Paul Simon mentioned them in a song, “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.”

Of course, not everyone can fill the jails at the same time. When certain volunteers are in jail, others must be around to help feed the poor, says volunteer Matt Daloisio: “No one of those things is more important than any other, but they’re all connected.” Daloisio says that no one in the organization pressures the volunteers to get arrested. “It’s more pressure that we put on ourselves,” he says.

On one hand, being part of the Catholic Worker clearly makes it easier for these volunteers to practice the pacifism that they preach: Davis, the Maryhouse volunteer, points out that people who work in full-time jobs can’t risk going to jail because that might jeopardize their jobs. On the other hand, when Catholic Workers do go to court, they often have to defend themselves. The organization does not use lawyers, Laffin says, because “courts are complicit” in the injustices that the volunteers are protesting.

The Catholic Workers’ radical denunciation of war also puts them somewhat at odds with the Catholic leadership in Rome. At many points in its history, the Roman Catholic Church has accepted the idea of a “just war” — that is, a war that can be justified on moral grounds. Earlier this year, for example, the Church did not come out against the U.S.-led war on Iraq.

While the Catholic Worker has no affiliation with the Catholic Church, most volunteers say they would like the Church to actively advance a pacifist agenda. The group has held meetings with Catholic bishops all over the country to ask them to take stronger public stances against war. Many Catholic Worker volunteers also work with other Catholic groups, like Pax Christi, that are part of the international Catholic peace movement. “We would like to see the Catholic Church become a peace church,” Laffin says.

“If the Catholic Workers, by speaking to their pacifism, unsettle us in our war-making for a just cause, well then that’s a good thing,” says O’Grady, the biographer. “Because it’s terrible if we’re blithe or smug about going to war.”

As with all radical politics, however, it’s difficult to be optimistic about the Catholic Worker’s ability to achieve the social and political transformation it seeks — at least in the near future. For all its devoted volunteers and relentless crusading, the Catholic Worker has all the “political impact of a grain of sand falling from the sky,” O’Grady notes. Nevertheless, he adds, even if there are few immediate results to speak of, in the long term the influence of a popular movement like the Catholic Worker can manifest itself in “mysterious and subterranean” ways.

It’s unclear what changes we’ll see in another seven decades, but there’s a good chance that the Catholic Workers will still be toiling then, still building the society that Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin envisioned so many years ago — a society “where it is easier for people to be good.”

STORY INDEX

ORGANIZATIONS >

The Catholic Worker Movement
URL: http://www.catholicworker.org

Pax Christi USA
The national Catholic peace movement that “strives to create a world that reflects the Peace of Christ by exploring, articulating, and witnessing to the call of Christian nonviolence.”
URL: http://www.paxchristiusa.org

Plowshares Movement
An organization working toward nuclear disarmament in the United States and abroad.
URL: http://www.plowsharesactions.org

Voices in the Wilderness
A Chicago-based organization working to end economic and military warfare against the Iraqi people.
URL: http://www.nonviolence.org/vitw/

PEOPLE > DAY, DOROTHY >

Biography
Co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement.
URL: http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/ddbiography.cfm

PEOPLE > MAURIN, PETER >

Biography
Co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement.
URL: http://www.catholicworker.org/roundtable/pmbiography.cfm

“

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Reviews

The painted ladies of Queens

When modern art masters Matisse and Picasso visit Long Island City, it's their mistresses who take center stage.



From left to right: Henri Matisse, Self-Portrait, 1906. © 2003 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Pablo Picasso, Self-Portrait with Palette, 1906. © 2003 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art)

On February 13, 2003, the celebrated Matisse/Picasso exhibition opened to sold-out audiences at the Museum of Modern Art’s temporary residence in Long Island City. I was one of the lucky ones to make it through the doors of this converted storage space on opening day, after purchasing my timed ticket on Ticketmaster weeks before. Crowds lined the streets waiting to take their place beside the art of two modern masters, Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). While the new MoMA is just a few subway stops from midtown Manhattan, the industrial area of Long Island City and the warehouse made me anticipate a freshness about the exhibition. The 133 works on display–many of which have never before been shown to the public–show the well-documented rivalry and surprising collaboration between Matisse and Picasso. The arrangement of the art works reveals more about each of their maker’s preoccupations–Matisse’s experiments with color, for instance, and Picasso’s experiments with shapes and forms.

On a wall of the exhibition, the curators have printed a quote attributed to Picasso in old age:
You have got to be able to picture side by side everything Matisse and I were doing at that time. No one has ever looked at Matisse’s painting more carefully than I; and no one has looked at mine more carefully than he.

The curators place the viewer in the center of this dialogue, and we are given the unique opportunity to do exactly what Picasso wishes we could do. But the exhibition curators didn’t leave room for some questions I wanted to discuss with the artists. While analyzing how Matisse and Picasso used color, forms, and perspective, the curators never address how Matisse and Picasso challenged or failed to challenge traditional representations of women.

While each challenged artistic conventions in different ways, Matisse, despite his novel use of color and space, emerges as the traditionalist by consistently depicting women as passive creatures. Picasso experiments with his women, whereas Matisse’s women simply lie waiting to be looked at.

The MOMA’s mission statement says: “The Museum of Modern Art seeks to create a dialogue between the established and the experimental, the past and the present, in an environment that is responsive to the issues of modern and contemporary art.” While the paintings can speak for themselves, neither the audio guide (which features two of the exhibition’s curators, John Elderfield and Kirk Varnedoe, discussing the works) nor the exhibition catalog allow feminism to enter into this dialogue.


Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907. © 2002 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art)

Brothel broads vs. bathers

The pairing of Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon,” (1907) and Matisse’s “Bathers With A Turtle” (1908) most vividly illustrates the differences in how the artists depict women. In the exhibition catalog, the painter and art historian, John Golding, calls “Demoiselles” “one of those rare individual works of art that changed its very course.” Art historians have called “Bathers with a Turtle” Matisse’s response to “Demoiselles.” The “Demoiselles” shocks, and, juxtaposed with such boldness, Matisse’s “Bathers” is overshadowed.
  
“Demoiselles” breaks with traditional composition, perspective, and Western images of beauty. The painting depicts five standing nude women surrounded by drapery and geometric figures and pieces of fruit at the bottom center of the canvas. Rejecting three-point perspective that creates the illusion of painting as a window on the world, Picasso uses a combination of geometric forms and angular features to show women projecting from the canvas toward the viewer. Three of the five women, who are said to be prostitutes in a brothel in Avignon, Spain, stare directly at the viewer, while the other two look sideways. Two of the women’s faces resemble African masks.

In 1935, Picasso is quoted as saying: “Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon.” In “Demoiselles,” Picasso rejects the Western canon of beauty–cherubic porcelain-skinned women with generous curves–and paints women with androgynous features. Picasso horrified his contemporaries, particularly Matisse, with this painting that mocks the traditional passive female nude. The demoiselles may be playing one of the most humiliating female roles– the prostitute–but they gaze directly at the viewer. They dare the viewer to objectify them.

“Bathers With A Turtle,” rivals “Demoiselles” in size, but despite the boldness of color, the painting seems lifeless next to it. While the demoiselles seem to jump off the canvas toward the viewer, Matisse flattens out the three-point perspective without trying to invert it like Picasso. Instead, the viewer enters the bathers’ world, watching the women stand timidly, peering at the turtle. Perhaps taking a cue from “Demoiselles,” Matisse does not objectify the women in a typical manner. The three women are engaged in examining the turtle and their nudity is a response to the act of bathing rather than for the enjoyment of the viewer. Like the women in “Demoiselles,” the women do not interact with one another and seem to occupy their own worlds within the painting.

Come hither

Each artist’s treatment of women follows from his generalized artistic methods. As Matisse seeks to find beauty through spatial and color relations, he uses women as one of his primary props. In painting after painting, women sit in his studio beside fruit, goldfish, and some of his other trademark motifs. In Matisse’s “Goldfish and Sculpture” of 1912, a reclining nude female lies at the right side of the picture and a large bowl of red goldfish are placed to the left of this woman. The entire painting is hazily depicted and in typical Matisse style, the colors stand out. In this picture, presumably a studio, one cannot make out the face of the model or sculpture but her breasts are visible as she lies with one arm resting against her head, possibly a provocative pose. Her body blends into a vase with flowers, which rests next to a fish. With my feminist eye, I am sometimes awed, sometimes horrified. There’s beauty in the way he arranges his objects and the colors he chooses even if they are nude women. But I am horrified when the female nude occupies a lower position than a compositional object, in this case, a goldfish.
  
Another Matisse painting, “The Studio, quai Saint-Michel” of 1916-17, features a reclining nude model lying on a red floral couch atop a red floral sheet in Matisse’s studio. Unlike many of his other images of nude models, Matisse depicts her facial features. It is difficult to discern whether the model is simply posing for the painter or is resting between poses. The artist’s chair is empty and the canvas shows a half-drawn painting. The studio, which is a depiction of Matisse’s actual studio at the time in Paris, overlooks water and buildings. Viewing this painting like “Goldfish and Sculpture,” and almost every still life displayed in this exhibit, I come up against the same conflicting responses: My eye jumps toward the bold and unique pairing of colors, and I grapple with Matisse’s unusual use of space. But the image of a woman, devoid of life, is intensely disconcerting. In the other paintings in the exhibition, Matisse depicts nude women in different scenes, colors and the perspective, but still places them in the same role–that of a powerless but sexual object.

Near the end of the exhibition, the curators juxtapose Matisse and Picasso’s depictions of odalisques, which are female slaves or concubines in a harem. Matisse was intrigued by the “Orient” and often incorporated Asian styles of ornamentation in his paintings. Nineteenth-century French artists who had visited the Arab world, such as Eugene Delacroix and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, helped to popularize these “exotic” women.

Despite the sharp contrasts between Picasso’s and Matisse’s representations of women, Picasso ultimately chooses the odalisque, one of the most overtly degrading historical images of women and calls it his primary inheritance from Matisse. Picasso told the English surrealist painter and modern art collector, Roland Penrose: “When Matisse died, he left me his odalisques as a legacy, and this is my idea of the Orient, though I have never been there.” Two months after Matisse’s death in 1954, Picasso began a 15 painting cycle on variations of Eugene Delacroix’s “Women of Algiers.” The three paintings displayed in this cycle: “Women of Algiers, After Delacroix, Canvas M,” “Women of Algiers, After Delacroix, Canvas N” and “Women of Algiers, After Delacroix, Canvas O.” In each of these canvases, Picasso breaks the odalisques into unusual forms, but remains true to traditional odalisque image by making the women’s bare breasts a prominent feature in the paintings.

The curators draw specific attention to the image of the odalisque as another major proof that Matisse and Picasso borrowed and learned from each other. The curators compare the use of the odalisque but never probe why Picasso specifically chose the odalisque, the female slave, as his “primary inheritance” from Matisse. Perhaps, this would reveal much more about what the artists sought to learn from one another. Was Picasso’s use of the odalisque simply an homage to Matisse? Or, was Picasso making a larger statement by choosing more traditional female imagery? “Demoiselles” challenged the idea of the female nude and in turn challenged art historical conventions. Could this use of traditional female imagery in the traditional sense signify that Picasso has chosen to backpedal away from the modern? Both Picasso and Matisse’s use of the female imagery speak beyond their ideas of women. They could help the viewer understand more about their broader ideas on painting, what conventions they challenged, and where they were content to reiterate certain long-held Western art practices. By failing to probe how each artist depicts women, the curators leave out a large part of the story.


Pablo Picasso, Girl Before a Mirror, 1932. © 2001 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art)

Going beyond the stereotype

I keep gazing at a print of Picasso’s “Girl Before A Mirror” (1932) that hangs on my wall, trying to divine what it is saying. This woman seems to be grappling with her femininity as she reaches her hand into the mirror almost through the image of herself. In the region of her abdomen, Picasso paints circular figures that resemble a womb. The woman’s face resembles a mask split in half, half yellow, half purple. Her image in the mirror shows only half of a mask with red around the eyes. From the mirror image’s eyes hangs a small semi-circle of red, possibly a tear.

While the intensity of color here rivals Matisse’s showiest work, I am drawn to “Girl” by Picasso’s depth of perception. Rather than telling you about the girl’s experiences before a mirror, Picasso lets the viewer watch the girl connect to herself in the mirror. He writes an open-ended sentence. This painting rejects the idea of art as escapism and instead offers this picture as an invitation into the mind of the woman or perhaps even the idea of womanhood.

I also hang Matisse prints on my walls. While Picasso’s works make me seek to understand the objects, I become absorbed by Matisse’s use of color–his reds and yellows warm the entire room. I display his still lifes, though, not his nudes. Looking at Matisse’s works, I continually feel a range of positive emotions. His colors evoke a sense of calm and happiness.

But works by both Matisse and Picasso can simultaneously offend and inspire me. As Matisse and Picasso opened the doors to modern art, they brought with them an inheritance of disempowering female imagery. On my two trips to this exhibit, I found myself standing in an awkward place. To begin to understand what has happened in twentieth century art, I must study and understand these masters, but their depictions upset my vision of the world and a woman’s role in it.

While Matisse and Picasso put me in an uncomfortable position, the curators working in 2003 surprise me with their implicit acceptance of the idea of women as art subjects. Why didn’t they address this issue in their catalog or audio guide? The place of Matisse and Picasso in art history is secure, so why not start questioning some of the other forces at work in their paintings?

While exposing new ideas about Matisse and Picasso and their important contributions to each other’s art and the idea of the modern in art, the exhibit also showed that modern art does not by necessity incorporate modern feminist ideals. As the suffragette movement gained momentum in the early 1900s in the United States and similar feminist movements arose in Europe, these artists continue to use primitive images of sexualized women. Changes in iconography seem to happen much slower than political change. To this day, contemporary art struggles with the inherent conflict between women as art object and women as artist.

The Guerilla Girls, an anonymous group of female artists who protest the marginalization of women in the art world, organized themselves after the MoMA’s 1984 exhibition, “An International Survey of Painting and Sculpture” had only 13 female artists out of 169 contemporary artists exhibited. Since then, the women have crashed major art exhibitions wearing gorilla masks to highlight how female artists are ignored in the mainstream art world. Their provocative posters put art in the wider perspective: “Do women have to be naked to get into the Metropolitan Museum of Art?” one of their posters asks. “Less than five percent of artists in the Modern Arts section are women, but 85 percent of the nudes are female.” These posters and protests serve an important purpose. The highest forms of art that stand in the Metropolitan Museum of Art should be celebrated, and also questioned. By questioning the patriarchal ideals around which Western art developed, women can begin to find a space from which they stand as art viewers and creators.

The Guerilla Girls’ protests kept flashing through my head as I left the exhibit. Maybe we need to shake up the modern art world and remind it that women are not just objects. We can appreciate the beauty of forms and color, but there is also beauty in remembering that women paint, stand, and argue.

Story Index

CONTRIBUTORS >

Written by: Maureen Farrell, Inthefray.com Special Features Editor

MARKETPLACE >

A portion of each sale goes to Inthefray.com

Matisse/Picasso
Reunion des Musees Nationaux and the Museum of Modern Art | Tate Publishing | 2002
Amazon.com

Art in Theory: 1900-1990
Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, editors | Blackwell Publishers | Oxford | 1999
Amazon.com

“

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also: