Tag: nasty women artists

Edmonia Lewis(1844-1907): An American Sculptor Trapped in Structures Harder Than Marble

Edmonia Lewis(1844-1907): An American Sculptor Trapped in Structures Harder Than Marble

Posted by | Dec 15, 2020 |

Edmonia Lewis had two problems. One: that she was not white and two: that she was not male. She defies classification while at the same time has been classified over and over again. If she can’t be classified, then she is demonized and if she can’t be demonized then she is erased and if she can’t be erased then she is blamed when all this woman wanted was to pursue her art, be taken seriously, be free to compete on a level playing field with other people: meaning white people — and people who were taken seriously by the...

Read More
Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine (2020): Fact-Checking and Footnoting Her Own Pain

Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine (2020): Fact-Checking and Footnoting Her Own Pain

Posted by | Oct 20, 2020 |

This book was hard to read. It is full of raw pain. I so appreciate Rankine’s willingness to expose her vulnerability. I am struck by how hurtful it is for a black woman to live in the culture of the United States. She is brave to expose herself this way. Rankine, a professor at Yale teaching classes on the history of whiteness in the U.S. wonders one day,  “What it would mean to ask random white men how they understood their privilege. . . . I found myself falling into easy banter with all kinds of strangers except white...

Read More
Ich bin Ich (I am Me) Paula Modersohn-Becker: The Self-Portraits

Ich bin Ich (I am Me) Paula Modersohn-Becker: The Self-Portraits

Posted by | Dec 10, 2019 |

“I am Me, and hope to become this more and more.” Paula Modersohn-Becker(1876-1907) to Rainer Maria Rilke 1906 I was lucky to be in Bremen, Germany yet again in November of 2019 just in time to see the newest exhibit of Paula Modersohn-Becker’s Self-Portraits at the museum dedicated to her there in the Museen Böttcherstrasse. Read the original NWW piece on Modersohn-Becker, Women and Ambition, and the follow up, Degenerate Art. What a fortuitous opportunity it was to be there while this exhibit was showing. So many paintings I had never seen, in a book or in a museum, were...

Read More
Degenerate Art: Update on Paula Modersohn-Becker

Degenerate Art: Update on Paula Modersohn-Becker

Posted by | Jun 11, 2019 |

  In December of 2018, I was able to return to Germany and explore more about Paula Modersohn-Becker. In the kunsthalle (art museum) in Bremen, I found this fabulous painting by Becker. At the time, I was unable to read the title on the placard below it, for I do not speak German.      Recently I asked a German speaker to translate it for me and was surprised to find this as the translation:  A Farmer’s Child from Worpswede Sitting on a Chair, 1905. Confiscated as “degenerate” art by the Nazi Regime. Banished to a forbidden art depot 1937-1945....

Read More

JOIN NOW FOR “NASTY” UPDATES, One post per week in your inbox about a #nastywoman who is inspiring us to write about them.