Mary Beth Edelson

rdf:langString Mary Beth Edelson

rdf:langString Mary Beth Edelson

rdf:langString Mary Beth Edelson

rdf:langString East Chicago, Indiana, US

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rdf:langString The Negotiation

rdf:langString Some Living American Women Artists / Last Supper,

rdf:langString Story Gathering Boxes,

rdf:langString School of the Art Institute of Chicago,

rdf:langString Mary Beth Edelson

rdf:langString Mary Elizabeth Johnson

rdf:langString Painting, collage, performances

rdf:langString right

rdf:langString "Feminist Humor as Political Device", Princeton

rdf:langString Considering Mary Beth Edelson's Some Living American Women Artists, The Brooklyn Rail

rdf:langString Mary Beth Edelson, DePauw University

rdf:langString Mary Beth Edelson, Whitney Museum of American Art

rdf:langString The art of Mary Beth Edelson, Brooklyn Museum

rdf:langString Works of Mary Beth Edelson, MoMA

rdf:langString Some Living American Women Artists / Last Supper, Smithsonian Institution

rdf:langString Mary Beth Strauss

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rdf:langString Alfred H. Edelson, husband

rdf:langString Jerome Strauss, husband

rdf:langString Robert Stackhouse, partner

rdf:langString My interest in Bobbitt is obviously a feminist one—I had a point of view about it immediately and wanted to examine and express that. I started thinking of her as Saint Bobbitt because she really did something for all women: She retaliated. In addition to the book, I’ve also created a lot of other drawings and a sculpture of a Kali figure that I made out of a mannequin. She has a number of arms and a girdle of knives around her waist as well as a bracelet of severed penises around her arm. In short, she is decorated. I first exhibited the work at Combat Zone and put this very dramatic lighting on it. It sums up my feelings about the Bobbitt situation, a situation that I feel the same way about today as when I first heard about it—I thought it was really funny. As someone once said: A hundred ten million women worldwide are survivors of genital mutilation, and then there is just John Bobbitt––one man, one name.

rdf:langString Mary Beth Edelson (born Mary Elizabeth Johnson) (6 February 1933 - 20 April 2021) was an American artist and pioneer of the feminist art movement, deemed one of the notable "first-generation feminist artists." Edelson was a printmaker, book artist, collage artist, painter, photographer, performance artist, and author. Her works have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. She began her studies at the Art Institute of Chicago and continued as she pursued her Bachelor's and Master of Fine Arts degrees. She taught art at the college level, including School of Art and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. and at the Corcoran Gallery of Art's Dupont Center for Advanced Studies. Inspired by Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne and Édouard Manet, she made paintings of mothers and children in the 1960s. During that decade, she owned a gallery in Indianapolis. Her art changed markedly in the 1970s when she shifted to performance and other forms of art, as well as how women are depicted in art. Her studies of philosophy and psychology greatly influenced her art, both in terms of content and medium. Important works of the early 1970s are representations of goddesses, which Edelson used as a contrast against established, patriarchal viewpoints of women. In Some Living American Women Artists / Last Supper, the faces of the disciples are replaced with noted women artists, and Story Gathering Boxes explored stories of the feminine experience. Other notable works include The Negotiation and Kali Bobbitt. She worked to increase the rate at which works of art by women are among museum collections. She helped found and was an active member of the Heresies Collective, which published the Heresies journal, to show and promote art made by women. She also joined the feminist cooperative gallery, A.I.R. Gallery (Artists In Residence), which held exhibits of Edelson's work, including The Memorial to the 9,000,000 Women Burned as Witches in the Christian Era. In that exhibit, the intention was to empower women attendees. She was also active in the civil rights movement.

rdf:langString Mary Elizabeth Johnson