Hilda Belcher (American, 1881–1963). The Checkered Dress (Portrait of O’Keeffe), 1907, watercolor and gouache. Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College. Bequest of Mary S. Bedell, class of 1873, 1932.1.5
April 7, 2021.
Patricia Phagan, Philip and Lynn Strauss Curator at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, will discuss her exhibition Women Picturing Women: From Personal Spaces to Public Ventures, on view through June 13, 2021.
"Women Picturing Women: From Personal Spaces to Public Ventures studies the key themes that emerged when selecting works by women depicting women. In different media, female artists from the seventeenth century to the 1960s—the eras studied—frequently communicated the idea of an intimate or sheltered enclosure such as a room, studio, or garden, even though these women participated in a more public arena to show or even make their work. In this exhibition from a collection of 22,000 objects, portraits and domestic scenes appeared often, with family, friends, colleagues, models, and oneself playing major roles. Home-centered settings and situations, including views of mothers and children, proliferated from the nineteenth century onwards. Idyllic, invented landscapes, mostly of the here and now, appeared, too, from the late 1700s where female artists placed their women (and sometimes men) in a harmonious or even fantastic natural world. On the other hand, some female artists relayed the idea of venturing into an outright public place such as a street or an office, or into the more public, intellectual world of a narrative found in religion, history, or social critique. These images appeared less often, while documentary photography spurred a veritable movement among women artists in the twentieth century."
