Ana Mendieta, Imagen de Yagul, 1973

This piece by Ana Mendieta is a part of a series of photographs she took in Mexico in which she used her own body to create the subject matter. This photograph in particular shows the femininity of the artist, as well as her unavailability to the viewer. The conservative placement of the flora wrapping around her nude body censor any erotic imagery such as breasts or genitalia. She’s not laying in any seductive manner, and you can’t see her face, so you can’t read her emotions. In fact, she is posed rather rigid and cold, almost as if she is dead and the flowers have begun to grow around her corpse. There is nothing sexual about this photograph even though she is naked. She’s nude, but she’s not seductive, or provocative, she’s one with nature and the flora that is surrounding her. She could also be a woman that’s trapped in a web of social expectations. Some of these expectations that this flora could represent are feminine qualities and delicacy. However, I think that this piece is about reclaiming her body as a woman and saying, “it’s just a body. Yes, it’s my naked body and I’m a woman, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything sexual here.”









https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/93.220/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Guerrilla Girls Billboard (aka the Guerrilla Girls Poster), 1989

Image
This billboard was commissioned by a coalition of anonymous, female artists known for donning gorilla suits at their meetings. This piece calls out the harsh reality of how museums have been organized in the past, and how they still are for the most part today. This billboard is one of many that the Guerrilla Girls commissioned in order to expose the racial and sexual discrimination that has long been dominant in the art world. The billboard uses a grayscale print of the Grande Odalisque by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, with a gorilla head plastered wear the female head should be. This is not only branding the billboard but also criticizing the artwork as well. It’s pointing out that no one really cares about the woman’s individuality, but rather just her body and sexuality. By censoring the face, they show how women’s voices have been silenced in the art world. It is very to the point, the statistics to the right probably haven’t changed much in the last 30 years which is most
Read more

Wangechi Mutu, Preying Mantra, 2006

Image
This piece by Wangechi Mutu is all about taking back the African female form from these racist, sexist ideals that have haunted black women for hundreds of years. In previous artworks, we have seen how black women are depicted as sexual, unintelligent, secondary characters. They are rarely the subject matter, and if they are it’s over-sexualized, over-exaggerated, and displayed as exotic erotica. What Wangechi Mutu does in this piece is she combines all these ideas, as well as a nod to classical paintings, to depict not a nude woman, but the injustices done in the oppressive colonization of Africa by European nations. First, we see and abstracted woman lying in a classical pose on top of Kuba cloth, which is native to Kenya, where Mutu was born. It’s full of symbology, there’s trees, which are a part of those people’s creation story as well as many others around the world. There’s also a serpent, which we see a lot in classical art usually in reference to sin associated with the
Read more