“The F Word: We Mean Female!” exhibition at the Hunter Museum of American Art—hosted on the one hundredth anniversary of the 19th amendment, which guaranteed women’s suffrage—is an exploration of the female experience through an international curation of sculptures, paintings, collages, and installations.
These pieces examine traditional roles of women, the female perspective, and domestic routines not frequently the subject of “fine art”. Much of the exhibition features textiles, a conventionally female artistic medium, but are presented here with an uncommon gravity.
Miriam Schapiro’s In Her Own Image, a kimono embroidered with floral patterns and gilded lace, reexamines women’s place in society. Rectangular and symmetrical, what might be a dressmaker’s print functions as a statement on subservience. Kimonos, typically worn by Japanese geishas, recall the delicate feminine form, but the framing of this pattern recontextualizes the traditional and elevates the merely decorative into the realm of fine art.
This theme of domesticity is woven throughout the exhibit. Fold, by Surabi Saraf, is an an immersive video installation that reimagines the mundane task of folding laundry. Taking inspiration from Indian textiles, the video presents Saraf sitting cross-legged in eighty-eight frames, folding brightly colored sheets and garments and neatly stacking them to her left. The frames are choreographed, though, into complex, shifting patterns as classical Indian music invites the viewer into a trance.
The effect of these domestic pieces conveys a question rather than a direct message. If the function of art is to reconfigure our perceptions of the world and ourselves, a room of explicitly feminine creation asks the viewer to reconsider the female experience and its implications on culture and history. Dressmaking, household chores, and women’s artifacts—when viewed through the lens of the artist—are bold statements on how evolution and culture shape our species’ identity.
“The F Word” also offers insights into the internal experiences and emotions of women from various cultures. Sisavanh Phouthavong’s Impact captures the fragmented and disjointed immigrant experience. A native of Laos, she and her family, displaced during the Vietnam War, immigrated first to Thailand and later to Kansas. This painting is a snapshot of the artist’s ineffable despair: abstract and rigid, its sharp lines and geometric disarray portray the confusion of a young girl torn from her home and propelled into chaos.
Adjacent to Impact is Pullman, an oil painting by Chinese artist Hung Liu, who immigrated to the US in 1984. As a young girl, she was sent to the countryside during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, where she witnessed untold suffering. This painting, inspired by Jackson Pollack’s drip technique, is an interpretation of a photograph. Two faceless men pull a boat upriver, their hands outstretched, grey streaks of paint running from their tired bodies.
History, often narrated with masculine zeal, when viewed through the feminine lens, favors the real suffering of those marginalized by prodigious leaders, body counts, and philosophical frameworks. In other words, the feminine artistic perspective is presented as not just underrepresented, but as a uniquely compelling alternative to works of art by men.
Other pieces in the exhibition offer windows into the female experience across time and space: red tapestries embroidered with ecstatic visions; a stone sculpture of Ixchel, the Mayan goddess of fertility; a pressed glass, diamond-shaped outcropping of white flowers and mushrooms; a sedate portrait of a tattooed woman sitting with a glass of tea; a stained lightbox reimagining Philippe de Champaigne’s 1664 The Annunciation; and an anti-beauty wall of squarish evening wear inspired by John Cage’s famously silent 4’33. Each piece highlights the suffering, joys, and idiosyncratic experiences of women, and the exhibition as a whole is a tribute to this theme.
This past May, singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey embroiled herself in controversy with a typed “Question For The Culture” posted to her Instagram account. In the letter, she makes a plea for “The kind of women who are slated mercilessly for being their authentic, delicate selves, the kind of women who get their own stories and voices taken away from them by stronger women or by men who hate women.”
In a culture that is more willing than any time in history to elevate women in artistic terms, Lana Del Rey wonders if imperfect, delicate women aren’t being marginalized by more boisterous, robust figures.
“The F Word” asks viewers to spend a few hours considering the question of women in art, and without explicitly stating it, leaves one with the impression that the conflicting messages in the culture—that women’s voices are distinctive, and simultaneously equal to those of men—behoove us to concede Lana’s conclusion: that women provide a unique spectrum of experience often hushed by the deafening orthodoxy of “male”.
The F Word, indeed, means female.
Like this story? Click here to Subscribe to more like this delivered weekly to your inbox!