Uncanny
Unearthly, enigmatic, and psychologically tense, the wide range of works in Uncanny give form to women artists’ powerful expressions of existential unease.
A concept first described by German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch in 1906 and popularized by Sigmund Freud in 1919, the “uncanny” is the psychological experience of a phenomenon that is strangely familiar, yet alien, engendering a sense of anxiety. Artworks may provoke these eerie experiences through unexpected elements that spark surprise or disquietude. In historical representations, women were often associated with strangeness and horror—the “other” in contrast to a default male norm and male gaze—and conventional visual tropes positioned women as passive or uncanny objects. While artists and art historians have revisited the uncanny throughout the decades, this exhibition uncovers women’s authorship of uncanny narratives, revealing how women artists use this framework to regain agency and probe feelings of revulsion, fear, and discomfort.
The exhibition takes as its starting point recent scholarship by art historian Alexandra M. Kokoli, whose book The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice (2016) interrogates the complex relationship between Freudian psychoanalysis and feminism. In Kokoli’s view, the uncanny is an aggressive defamiliarization of long-held preconceptions, and it relates to the unsettling goal of resistance and liberation in feminist artistic practices.
Uncanny features works that destabilize gendered and societal preconceptions, bearing witness to women’s complex experiences and worldviews.
The large-print guide is ordered presuming you enter the second floor from the passenger elevators.
Magdalena Abakanowicz
b. 1930, Falenty, Poland; d. 2017, Warsaw
4 Seated Figures, 2002
Burlap, resin, and iron rods; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Patti Cadby Birch and partial museum purchase: Members’ Art Acquisition Fund
Coming of age in the political upheaval that followed World War II, Abakanowicz witnessed violence against her family and compatriots as a nurse’s aide. The burlap’s rough, tactile surface gives the appearance of wrinkled skin and evokes the physical and psychological scarring that people endure. The seated fragmented, headless figures, calling to mind Egyptian monoliths, express the fraught and fragile nature of the human condition.
Frida Orupabo
b. 1986, Sarpsborg, Norway
Labour II, 2020
Framed collage with paper pins; On loan from Darryl Atwell
In Orupabo’s images of women in childbirth, she reconciles her own difficult labor and postpartum experiences within the modern medical system with the histories of colonial violence towards Black women. The reclining mother and upright adult-faced baby stare back at the viewer with inaccessible, even critical, expressions. The artist uses paper pins, a common item in her work, to suture body parts and recast archival imagery. In connecting the historical to the personal, Orupabo engages with the present-day struggles of Black women.
Meret Oppenheim
b. 1913, Berlin; d. 1985, Basel, Switzerland
Pelztasse (nach foto Man Ray) (Fur Teacup [after photo by Man Ray]), 1971
Color offset print on paper; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Josephine Withers
In this print of Oppenheim’s famed Object (1936), the artist defamiliarizes mundane, everyday items—a teacup and saucer—by coating them in animal fur. While the smooth,
soft fur may prompt a pleasant tactile association, it simultaneously repels the viewer by eliciting a feeling of disgust at the thought of wet pelt in one’s mouth. Oppenheim’s Object, which merges strange, discordant materials, became the quintessential Surrealist statement and a symbol of the uncanny.
Meret Oppenheim
b. 1913, Berlin; d. 1985, Basel, Switzerland
Der Spiegel der Genoveva (Genevieve’s Mirror), 1967
Debossed print; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Thomas Hill, in memory of Rosemary Furtak
Polly Morgan
b. 1980, Banbury, Oxfordshire, England
Receiver, 2009
Color offset print on paper; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Josephine Withers
Morgan stages taxidermied creatures outside of their natural habitats, distorting the rational world like something out of a surreal dream. In Receiver, a group of yellow quail heads emerge from the black earpiece. Their beaks are open as if they are loudly squawking, prompting shock and visceral unease in the viewer. Morgan says of her bird sculptures, “I wanted to make an organic whole that looked uncannily real.”
Surreal Imaginings
The Surrealists of the twentieth century were among the earliest to explore the concept of the uncanny expressly in their work. Drawing on Freud’s writings, which asserted that the unconscious was a more powerful connection to true meaning and desire than the rational mind, Surrealists transformed familiar objects and images into dreamlike worlds. Mythological creatures, ghoulish figures, and vaporous terrains populate the Surrealist landscape.
While male Surrealists frequently represented the fragmentation and dissolution of female bodies, women artists reclaimed and co-opted this trope to grapple with their own frustrations and traumas. Through distortion and manipulation of scale, works in Uncanny ask the viewer to navigate the body’s emotional and physical relationship to the unknown.
Continuing the legacies of the early Surrealists, contemporary artists play with ideas of the absurd, horrific, grotesque, seductive, and spiritual. They create images that reveal uncharted territories of the human psyche.
Remedios Varo
b. 1908, Angles, Spain; d. 1963, Mexico City
Fenómeno de ingravidez (Phenomenon of Weightlessness), 1963
Oil on canvas; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift from a private collection
Remedios Varo
b. 1908, Angles, Spain; d. 1963, Mexico City
Tejido espacio-tiempo (Weaving of Space and Time), 1954
Oil on Masonite; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift from a private collection
In Varo’s enigmatic paintings, science comingles with spirituality, and human bodies merge with objects and animals to create new entities. Fascinated by the idea of human-machine hybrids, Varo depicts a couple with wheels and gears for body parts. She alludes to the idea of people as cogs in a machine with little control over their lives and fates, until they achieve an awakening that reveals hidden order and unseen truths.
Janaina Tschäpe
b. 1973, Munich
Acqua Alta 4, 2010
Chromogenic color print; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection
Leonora Carrington
b. 1917, Clayton Green, England; d. 2011, Mexico City
Ship of Cranes, 2010
Bronze; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Paul Weisz-Carrington, M.D.
Carrington’s mystical boat, shaped like a crane, holds four anthropomorphic bird figures. Behind the three smaller birds, a tall creature stands with a paddle, appearing to guide the passengers through an otherworldly voyage. Her work is rooted in Surrealist philosophies, Indigenous mythologies, and personal experience; here, she specifically calls on myths from the Egyptian afterlife and Mexican spiritual guides.
Leonora Carrington
b. 1917, Clayton Green, England; d. 2011, Mexico City
The Palmist, 2010
Bronze; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Paul Weisz-Carrington, M.D.
Frida Orupabo
b. 1986, Sarpsborg, Norway
Two Heads, 2022
Framed collage with paper pins; On loan from Lisa Gregory
Unflinchingly confrontational, Orupabo collages disparate forms and limbs from figures depicted in archival images, reconstituting them into new beings. In Two Heads, a portrait of a woman is mirrored by an upside-down version. The source image recalls pseudo-scientific photographs disseminated in colonial-era Europe that perpetuated racist stereotypes of African people. Deliberately triggering feelings of discomposure, Orupabo states of her work, “For me, to create work that looks back at the viewer is a way to refuse to be made into an object, and to say, ‘I see you’.”
Louise Bourgeois
b. 1911, Paris; d. 2010, New York City
Untitled (with foot), 1989
Pink marble; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift from the Trustees of the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Museum purchase with funds provided by the Roger S. Firestone Foundation Fund, the FRIENDS of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, William A. Clark Fund, gift of William E. Share [by exchange], the Women’s Committee of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and Carolyn Alper)
Bourgeois’s surreal juxtaposition connects two disparate objects—a baby’s foot sticks out from beneath a perfect sphere. Sculpted to evoke smooth, tender flesh and suggest its dismemberment by a heavy globe-like object, the work is equally alluring and alarming. While the sculpture provides no resolution to questions that it raises, it conjures the unresolved tension of the universal trauma of birth, a recurring theme in Bourgeois’s art.
Julie Roberts
b. 1963, Flint, Wales
Sigmund Freud Study, 1998
Oil on acrylic ground on cotton duck; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection
Julie Roberts
b. 1963, Flint, Wales
Dormitory, 2011
Oil on linen; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection
Partly inspired by her own childhood, Roberts’s Dormitory touches on the experiences of displaced children in the mid-twentieth century. The emptiness and uniformity of
the room, filled with identical white beds, alludes to the authoritarian and unwelcoming reality of many children’s homes during this period. In other works, she focuses on isolated images—typically of a medical instrument or facility—to examine society’s methods of exercising power, particularly over the female body.
Julie Roberts
b. 1963, Flint, Wales
Crime Scene, 1998
Oil on acrylic ground on cotton duck; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection
Sheida Soleimani
b. 1990, Indianapolis
Panjereh, 2022
Archival pigment print; On loan from Sara M. and Michelle Vance Waddell
Soleimani explores her parents’ exile and displacement from their homeland in Iran. Here, the artist depicts a skewed view of the prison cell in which her mother, a pro-democracy activist, was held for a year in solitary confinement. Her face is partially hidden by a paper mask as protection against persecution. Drawing on visual references such as the ancient Persian game of Snakes and Ladders, images of her mother’s family home, or the mountains that became the escape route for her father, Soleimani interweaves sociopolitical themes with deeply personal references.
Janaina Tschäpe
b. 1973, Munich
Devilwoman (Sala de Espera), 2001
Chromogenic color print; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection
This photograph is part of a series of works in which Tschäpe uses artificial appendages to depict her own body mutating into a devil or beast. Sala de Espera, or “waiting room,” refers to the space where this startling transformation takes place. Wings sprout from beneath her shoulder blades, and her face becomes unrecognizable. Continuing her exploration of female metamorphosis, Tschäpe suspends herself between myth and human being, revealing the malleable and sometimes shocking nature of identity.
Unsafe Spaces
Some artists in Uncanny explore ghostly interiors and discomfiting environments that appear to be abandoned, neglected, or psychologically unwelcoming.
The term “uncanny,” or unheimlich in German, translates to “unhomely.” This alludes to the feeling of being in an unfamiliar space that might contain and reveal something hidden. Women artists have long explored the home and domestic sphere as a point of political tension and a site to use in pushing back against established gender roles.
Works depicting histories and legacies of political violence and racial trauma reveal that country and homeland can become places of hostility. Climate change and rising temperatures may lead to broader, collective fears of threatening and ominous places. These instances of the uncanny unveil the jarring disconnections between our expectations of a place—and our experiences of it.
Sheida Soleimani
b. 1990, Indianapolis
Delara II, 2016
Archival pigment print; On loan from Sara M. and Michelle Vance Waddell
The daughter of political refugees who escaped Iran in the early 1980s, Soleimani creates photo-based works that reveal systemic violence—particularly against women—as a result of the interlinked politics of Iran, the United States, and the greater Middle East. She excavates low-resolution archival photographs of women who were unlawfully imprisoned and executed, creating colorful yet distressing compositions in which the victims’ faces are multiplied and distorted. Soleimani depicts the nation-state as the unheimlich, an unwelcoming space.
Marlo Pascual
b. 1972, Nashville; d. 2020, Philadelphia
Untitled, 2011
Digital C-print; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection
Marlo Pascual
b. 1972, Nashville; d. 2020, Philadelphia
Untitled, 2011
Digital C-print, Plexiglas, and lamp; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection
Marlo Pascual
b. 1972, Nashville; d. 2020, Philadelphia
Untitled, 2014
Laser-cut digital C-print on Plexiglas; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Tony Podesta Collection
Pascual’s work incorporates vintage photographs of women that she found in thrift shops. The artist restaged them with stark lighting and furniture to create photo-based installations and sculptures that provoke psychological encounters between figure, object, and image. Simultaneously menacing and playful, Pascual’s subjects’ faces are shattered like shards of glass, folded and bent into incomprehensibility, and literally turned on their heads to support the furnishings.
Fabiola Jean-Louis
b. 1978, Port-au-Prince, Haiti
Rest in Peace, from the series “Rewriting History,” 2017
Archival pigment print; Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Myrtis
Fabiola Jean-Louis
b. 1978, Port-au-Prince, Haiti
Follow the Drinking Gourd, from the series “Rewriting History,” 2017
Archival pigment print; Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Myrtis
In this haunting paper dollhouse, two runaway enslaved people hide on the bottom level, a Confederate soldier hunts for them upstairs, and an abolitionist cautiously watches the scene unfold. The girl playing house shushes the hidden figures, warning them against looming danger. A cotton-filled “drinking gourd,” symbolizing the Big Dipper, alludes to the time when those fleeing enslavement used the night sky to guide them north. Jean-Louis creates a quiet moment of palpable tension, while paying tribute to the resilience and courage of those who sought liberation.
Fabiola Jean-Louis
b. 1978, Port-au-Prince, Haiti
They’ll Say We Enjoyed It, from the series “Rewriting History,” 2017
Archival pigment print; Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Myrtis
Jean-Louis carefully stages and photographs studio portraits of friends and family members wearing ballgowns and period costumes that seem, at first glance, typical of familiar historical paintings of European nobility. On closer examination, however, Jean-Louis’s portraits reveal images of racial and sexual violence in a composition’s background or a dress’s intricate details. Through this disquieting imagery, the artist addresses generational trauma faced by Black women across history.
Jane and Louise Wilson
b. 1967, Newcastle upon Tyne, England
Suspended Island, Diving Boards, 2005
Chromogenic color print on aluminum; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Tony Podesta Collection
In their films, photography, and sculptures, the Wilson sisters often touch on the complex dynamics of society. In this work, abandoned diving boards loom in the darkness while grass sprouts through concrete. As nature reclaims this forgotten place, it slowly descends into an eerie, uninhabitable state. In exploring deserted urban landscapes and terrains, the Wilsons reflect on society’s relationship with its built environment.
Jane and Louise Wilson
b. 1967, Newcastle upon Tyne, England
Skarfandry, 2000
Chromogenic color print on aluminum; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection
Sama Alshaibi
b. 1973, Basra, Iraq
Collapse, 2013
Video, 6 min., 36 sec.; Courtesy of the artist
Alshaibi poetically alludes to the colony collapse of honeybees, which points to the larger dilemma of humanity’s coexistence with the ecosystem and with one another. She uses bees as a metaphor for eco-refugees, people who are displaced due to environmental changes that threaten their livelihood or well-being. The foreboding music of a child’s violin conveys the haunting realities of war and conflict, forced migration, and human-caused disasters. Here, the planet itself is depicted as a hostile, unsafe space.
Berlinde De Bruyckere
b. 1964, Ghent, Belgium
019, 2007
Wax, epoxy, metal, glass, wood, and blankets; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Tony Podesta Collection
De Bruyckere presents fragments of wax-covered wood within a two-hundred-year-old museum glass vitrine. Twisted and gnarled, with colored wax that is eerily reminiscent of human skin, the branches appear startlingly animate, like bodies or ethnographic specimens hanging on display. While the antique glass obscures the forms, doors left slightly ajar invite viewers to peer inside. As the artist says of her work, “I don’t want people to see the sculptures as trees, but as strange, vulnerable beings.”
Vesna Pavlović
b. 1970, Serbia and Montenegro
Moskva Hotel, Belgrade IV, 2001
Chromogenic color print; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection
The liminal space of hotels—home, yet not home—aligns with Freud’s notion of the uncanny, or unheimlich. In her series of hotel interiors, Pavlović documents the remnants of once-grandiose hotels that were built during Yugoslavia’s “golden age” in the 1960s and ’70s. Here, the red carpet on the grand staircase reflects Eastern European socialist design. While hotels like the Moskva survived civil wars in the Balkans, Pavlović’s views of deserted room furnishings and architectural decor evoke the collective memory of a past era.
Angela Strassheim
b. 1969, Bloomfield, Iowa
Untitled (Babies), 2005
Chromogenic color print; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection
Shahzia Sikander
b. 1969, Lahore, Pakistan
Afloat, 2001
Silkscreen on paper; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Karen Canner Moss
Sikander recasts the language of Surrealism to disrupt Western notions of exoticism as well as articulate her experiences as a Muslim, immigrant woman in the United States. This work is inspired by Sikander’s installations of painted murals layered with translucent drawings. She includes recurring motifs, such as headless female figures and a smaller female figure in profile. In lieu of arms, they have trailing tendrils, often alluding to deity figures from Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist mythologies.
Marta María Pérez Bravo
b. 1959, Havana
Protección (Protection), 1990
Gelatin silver print; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Helaine Posner and David Dorsky in honor of Susan Fisher Sterling, PhD, The Alice West Director of NMWA
Characteristic of Pérez Bravo’s self-portraits, in which her face is usually inaccessible to the viewer, Protección depicts the artist’s head obscured with a white veil. Her breasts are covered in thorns, referring to the ceiba tree, which reflects syncretic belief systems in Cuba. A sacred tree for Yoruba deities and Cuban orishas, in Catholic folk tradition it is also believed to have provided shelter for Mary and Jesus. In associating her body with the protective sacred tree, the artist stages an act of self-protection.
Ann Hamilton
b. 1956, Lima, Ohio
Top, left to right:
Body Object Series #5, sagebrush, 1984 (printed 1994)
Body Object Series #2, stool, 1984 (printed 1991)
Body Object Series #10, basket, 1984 (printed 1996)
Bottom, left to right:
Body Object Series #14, megaphone, 1984 (printed 1992)
Body Object Series #4, cloth, 1984 (printed 1993)
Body Object Series #9, stoveplate, 1984 (printed 1995)
Gelatin silver print; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Tony Podesta Collection
Hamilton began her Body Object Series in the 1980s as a study of objects that she used in a previous installation. Her work explores the complex relationships between human bodies and everyday objects. For example, in Body Object Series #5, a figure stands alone in a long dress with a bushel of sagebrush in place of a head. Deliberately erasing the head of the figure, Hamilton creates an obscure mutation of the living and the inanimate.
Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg
Nathalie Djurberg, b. 1978, Lysekil, Sweden;
Hans Berg, b. 1978, Rattvik, Sweden
Crocodile, Egg, Man, from the video I am Saving this Egg for Later, 2012
Metal wire, clay, fabric, silicone, putty, acrylic paint, and glue; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Tony Podesta Collection
These clay figures were used for one of the artist duo’s stop-motion animation videos. In the video, a wizard-like man in a red velvet suit and a crocodile in silicone fight over an egg. Djurberg and Berg draw on mythology and the subject of ontogenesis, the transformation of an organism from an egg to a mature form. Djurberg sculpts figures with blotchy skin, bulging eyes, and flapping mouths, exploring grotesque aspects of the uncanny.
Valeska Soares
b. 1957, Belo Horizonte, Brazil
Limp, 1997
Latex; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection
Connie Imboden
b. 1953, El Paso, Texas
Fire, 1988
Gelatin silver print; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of an anonymous donor
Connie Imboden
b. 1953, El Paso, Texas
Sainthood, 1988
Gelatin silver print; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of an anonymous donor
Connie Imboden
b. 1953, El Paso, Texas
Untitled, 1994
Gelatin silver print; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of the artist and the Gomez Gallery
Inspired by the theories of Carl Jung, who believed that the conscious mind is guided by the unconscious, Imboden portrays fragmented, contorted, or fantastical bodies. Here, the open mouth that becomes the figure’s head appears to shriek in an unbridled cry. The artist says that the encounter with her tense and highly emotional work enables viewers to experience extreme feelings “without having to go through the trauma.” In this way, Imboden views the uncanny as a means of exploration and catharsis for the viewer.
Valeska Soares
b. 1957, Belo Horizonte, Brazil
Untitled, from the series “Entanglements,” 1998
Cast beeswax and oil perfume; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection
Two hyperreal mouths reveal tongues and teeth on either end of a flesh-toned wax slab in this multisensory work. Perfumed oil flows from one mouth to the other, as if to indicate an exchange or conversation. Inviting, yet repellant, this visual and olfactory experience “crosses that border between being pleasurable and being overintoxicating,” says the artist. Soares’s wax and latex limbs sensuously invoke the human body, touching on complex emotions of unrequited desire, loneliness, hope, and melancholy.
Mathilde ter Heijne
b. 1969, Strasbourg, France
F.F.A.L. #1, #2, #3, 2003
Mixed media; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection
Ter Heijne brings fictional characters to life through remarkably realistic life-size wax sculptures in her series “F.F.A.L.” (“Fake Female Artist Life”). The three figures here, based on women artists from twentieth-century novels, embody Elvire Goulot from Guillaume Apollinaire’s La Femme assise (1920), Elaine Risley from Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye (1988), and Ueno Otoko from Yasunari Kawabata’s Beauty and Sadness (1964). In the accompanying audio, excerpts from their stories express the characters’ shared challenges as women artists across cultural borders.
Angela Strassheim
b. 1969, Bloomfield, Iowa
Untitled (grandmother in casket), 2004
Chromogenic color print; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection
Strassheim’s photograph depicts her own grandmother lying in a casket at her funeral. Influenced by her early career as a forensic and biomedical photographer, she captures an unusual and unnerving image of the deceased. Almost appearing staged, the still and lifeless form of her grandmother is jarring against the saturated bubblegum pink setting and the warm lighting on her face.
Angela Strassheim
b. 1969, Bloomfield, Iowa
Untitled (Julia—girl on bed), 2004
Chromogenic color print; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection
Anna Gaskell
b. 1969, Des Moines, Iowa
Untitled #27 (Override), 1997
Chromogenic color print on Plexiglas; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection
A theory of the uncanny valley states that feelings of unease around corpses and images of death may point to humans’ fear of mortality and instinct for self-preservation. Images by Anna Gaskell, Justine Kurland, and Angela Strassheim depict inert bodies in precarious circumstances that leave their condition ambiguous. Viewers are left to wonder—are these subjects alive, unconscious, or has a fatal disaster occurred? In these works, the uncanny exists in the unresolved mystery.
Justine Kurland
b. 1969, Warsaw, New York
Grassland Drifters, 2001
Chromogenic color print; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection
Justine Kurland
b. 1969, Warsaw, New York
Raft Expedition, 2001
Chromogenic color print; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection
Uncanny Valley
In 1970, the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori coined the phrase “uncanny valley” to describe the strange and apprehensive sensation evoked by objects that very closely—but not completely—resemble people and places. These objects and images typically contain small peculiarities that signal to the viewer that they are not naturalistic. Artists explore the uncanny valley from a variety of perspectives, from hyperreal sculptural figures that might be mistaken for people to works that expose the increasingly blurred lines between technology and living beings. Some images, such as photographs of twins, point to Freudian ideas about the double or a fear of mortality. Women artists have frequently used wry, dark humor in exploring the uncanny valley, aiming to destabilize gendered and societal preconceptions.
Laurie Simmons
b. 1949, Queens, New York
The Music of Regret IV, 1994
Cibachrome color print; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Promised gift of Steven Scott, Baltimore, in honor of NMWA Director Susan Fisher Sterling
Laurie Simmons
b. 1949, Queens, New York
Woman Listening to Radio, 1978
Gelatin silver print; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Promised gift of Steven Scott, Baltimore, in honor of the artist
Simmons’s work challenges societal understandings of gender and identity through careful construction of imagery. By using dolls, often conjoined to household objects, to represent women in her works, she remarks on the persistent objectification of women in society. Here, a doll dressed in women’s clothing sits motionless, alone in a dark domestic world. Exploring themes of isolation and despair, Simmons creates an unsettling depiction of the lives of many American women in the mid-twentieth century.
Top:
Laurie Simmons
b. 1949, Queens, New York
Bending Globe, from “Lying Objects Print Portfolio,” 1992
Off-set print (photolithograph); National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Steven Scott, Baltimore, in honor of the artist and the twenty-fifth anniversary of NMWA
Bottom:
Laurie Simmons
b. 1949, Queens, New York
Lying Perfume Bottle (Lavender), from “Lying Objects Print Portfolio,” 1992
Off-set print (photolithograph); National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Steven Scott, Baltimore, in honor of the artist and the twenty-fifth anniversary of NMWA
Margi Geerlinks
b. 1970, Kampen, Netherlands
Pinocchio, 1999
Fujichrome print on dibond and faced in Plexiglas; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection
Margi Geerlinks
b. 1970, Kampen, Netherlands
Living Dolls, 2001
Silver dye bleach (Ilfochrome) print on dibond (and face-mounted to acrylic); National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift from the Trustees of the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection)
In Living Dolls, Geerlinks depicts two young girls who sit together in a field as they each hold dolls and gaze toward the viewer. Using digital manipulation, Geerlinks added human eyes to the image of the doll on the right, creating something unnatural. Known for constructing blunt and unsettling imagery, Geerlinks forces the viewer to confront the objectification of young girls in society. Here, she asks, who is the human and who is the object?
Mary Ellen Mark
b. 1940, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania; d. 2015, New York City
Tashara and Tanesha Reese, Twins Days Festival, Twinsburg, Ohio, 1998 (printed later)
Gelatin silver print; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Robert and Kathi Steinke
Mary Ellen Mark
b. 1940, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania; d. 2015, New York City
Crying Twins, Middlesboro, Kentucky, 1988 (printed later)
Gelatin silver print; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Robert and Kathi Steinke
Gillian Wearing
b. 1963, Birmingham, England
2 into 1, 1997
Video, 4 min., 30 sec.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection
Wearing’s video depicts a conversation between a woman and her eleven-year-old twin sons, in which mother and boys are asked to express their honest thoughts about one another. They then lip-sync to one another’s statements with eerie precision. The viewer grapples with the unexpected disjunction between the individuals’ identities and voices. What begins as uneasy humor, as adult and children swap voices, veers into deep discomfort as the mother registers her sons’ cruel declarations.
Mary Ellen Mark
b. 1940, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania; d. 2015, New York City
Sue Gallo Baugher and Faye Gallo, Twinsburg, Ohio, 1998 (printed later)
Gelatin silver print; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Frieder K. Hofmann
Mary Ellen Mark
b. 1940, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania; d. 2015, New York City
Idesha and Mikayla Preston, 8 Years Old, Idesha Older by 10 Minutes, Twinsburg, Ohio, 2002
Polaroid; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Jill and Jeffrey Stern
Freud described “the repetition of the same thing” as a critical element of the uncanny; the encounter of a familiar yet unsettling situation may trigger a sense of dread. He theorized that encountering doubles such as identical twins can shake our belief in the individuality or identity of each person. In gothic and horror genres, twins, doppelgangers, and body doubles often represent good and evil sides of the same person. Mark’s twins mirror each other, while also revealing subtle differences in their body language and characteristics.
Martine Gutierrez
b. 1989, Berkeley, California
Body En Thrall, p 112, from Indigenous Women, 2018
C-print mounted on Sintra; On loan from Nancy and Marc Duber
Gutierrez employs satire and humor to reveal the uncanny, using the language of advertising photography to upend traditionally Eurocentric, heteronormative ideals of femininity and beauty. Body En Thrall looks like a centerfold image, with the artist posed in front of a backdrop of blooming flowers, revealing her cleavage, which is created by melon halves tucked into her bikini top. Gutierrez foregrounds her Mayan heritage as well as her transgender identity, disassembling the limiting, unfeasible conceptions of womanhood in popular media.
Gillian Wearing
b. 1963, Birmingham, England
Self-Portrait as My Sister Jane Wearing, 2003
C-type color print; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Tony and Trisja Podesta Collection
Gillian Wearing
b. 1963, Birmingham, England
Me as Meret Oppenheim, 2019
Framed gelatin silver bromide print; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Tony and Trisja Podesta Collection
Gillian Wearing
b. 1963, Birmingham, England
Me as Dürer, 2018
Gelatin C-type print; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Tony and Trisja Podesta Collection
Gillian Wearing
b. 1963, Birmingham, England
Sleeping Mask (for Parkett, no. 70), 2004
Wax reinforced with polymer resin, paint; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection
Wearing creates silicone masks of her own face. She works with a team of assistants who cast, sculpt, paint, and even apply hair to the masks to make them look as naturalistic as possible, with every mask taking four months to complete. Each mask is based on a cast of the artist’s face in a similar expression to the one she wishes to copy, for instance an enigmatic smile or a vacant stare.
Gillian Wearing
b. 1963, Birmingham, England
Me as Mona Lisa, 2020
Chromogenic color print; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Tony and Trisja Podesta Collection
Stephanie Dinkins
b. 1964, Perth Amboy, New Jersey
Conversations with Bina48: Fragments 7, 6, 5, 2, 2018
Video and audio, 4 min.; Courtesy of the artist
Dinkins documents her interactions with an android modeled to look like Bina Aspen Rothblatt, a Black woman and the wife of the co-founder of Terasem Movement, a foundation promoting the maximum extension of human life. While Bina48 exists as a bust-like head mounted on a frame, and is clearly not human, her conversational speech is eerily intuitive. Responding to a series of questions about race and gender, the responses from the android—developed by white men at Hanson Robotics—highlight the unchecked human biases and social inequities perpetuated by people responsible for encoding these technologically advanced systems.
Gillian Wearing
b. 1963, Birmingham, England
Self-Portrait, 2000
Chromogenic color print; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Tony Podesta Collection
Masks are central to Wearing’s works, whether she is portraying relatives or artistic icons, whom she calls her “spiritual family.” For this self-portrait, Wearing donned a mask of herself, ironically creating a sense of both transparency and disguise. Her real identity is hidden by a constructed one, symbolizing the conceptual masks people wear in their everyday lives. The “uncanny valley” effect is heightened as viewers notice the artist’s eyes peering out from behind the mask.
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