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RantWhy can’t there be good art of women?
I was doing a little idle scrolling and read a blurb about a statue for the Ferry Building Plaza in San Francisco. Of a woman. And I was intrigued because the sculptor (a man) was quoted saying he chose a woman as the subject because there are very few women depicted in public art.
I clicked through and it’s going to be a 45 foot high NAKED WOMAN. La sigh. I mean, why do all the women have to be nude? The longer article explains that the artist has become prominent at Burning Man and got into the large scale there and also? So many of the women at BM were close to or fully naked and no one mentioned or noticed it.
Which, sir. That’s mentioned IN EVERY ARTICLE ABOUT BURNING MAN.
And then I flashed on the statue of Mary Wollstonecraft, which is a big hunk of metal with a tiny naked woman arising out of it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sculpture_for_Mary_Wollstonecraft
It’s not just me, right? All over there are large statues of famous and not so famous men and they have clothes on.
But the women? GOTTA BE NAKED, even a statue about the first feminist. Ugh.
I hear you. It's annoying.
I was happy when I found this statue of Emmeline Pankhurst when I visited London.
Does anyone else want to share some favorite statues of clothed women?
Memorial of Edith Cavell, the British nurse who helped hundreds of Allied soldiers escape during WWI and for which was executed by a German firing squad, in St Martin's Place, just outside the National Portrait Gallery
Donatello's Judith, initially on the Piazza della Signoria, now in the Palazzo Vecchio (a copy still stands on the piazza)
the statue of liberty is clothed, if that counts.
She falls into that class of “women as symbolic of ideas.” But, yeah, she doesn’t have a bared breast, like Liberty Leading the People (although not a sculpture).
It is weird and bitterly ironic that concepts like "liberty," "victory," "justice," etc. are always portrayed (by men) as women. What are they thinking? Wait, I know--opportunity to paint or sculpt a woman with her tit out.
No, I think they subconsciously know that they have no morals and must look to us.
Maybe it is a grammatical gender kind of thing? These words are all feminine in some languages like Latin...
Oh, interesting--that hadn't occurred to me!
https://www.associationforpublicart.org/apa-now/story/the-few-monuments-to-women-in-philadelphia/
There’s a nice range here. I need to take a trip to Philly and look at some larger-than-life representations of women!
I loved living in Philly. Don't listen to all the crap about that city. It is wonderful. Some of the happiest days of my life were spent there.
Now in SF, where this stupid statue is being set up. Maybe Women are Real will take this on. I do not want to see this statue. It sucks to live in TiM central.