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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.
Yea and the Wikipedia on it has no story either. It's just "Here it is and this is what it's called"
Wow!
Yea and if you look further and try to view the pages of other statues related to women's sufferage there's not even pictures of them
I wonder how many American women even know who these women are anymore. I think I only knew about Susan B. Anthony as a kid because of the dollar coin that came out with her face on it. I found out about Elizabeth Cady Stanton in college because I found her autobiography (republished by a feminist press in the early '80s) at a thrift store. And to this day I know very little about Lucretia Mott. There was that Ken Burns documentary on the suffragists that came out in the late '90s--the main takeaway people seem to have from that is that suffragists opposed black men getting the franchise before women (I think largely because the two movements had been working in tandem up to that point), and how evil that was.
I barely know because I didn’t get taught it in school much and am currently focused on learning about the second wave. The first wave is mostly a mist to me