This Thursday I bring you part two of an ongoing project, a photo series I’ve been doing since I started Less Than Half.
Anytime I see something that accidentally reminds me of a woman artist’s work, I snap a picture of it and put it into a special album on my phone.
Once on a beach, I picked up a stone and thought of a Barbara Hepworth sculpture. Snap. Another time at a café in Penn Station, as my tea bag spun and dripped over my cup of tea, I was immediately reminded of a Wangechi Mutu sculpture I had seen at the Whitney Biennial. Snap. (See below.)
If I have one takeaway from this project (besides it being genuinely fun to collect these images) it’s that the vocabulary, forms, and themes that women artists engage in are part and parcel of the world. Women artists are so often a footnote, an afterthought in art history, as if they weren’t engaging with the same raw material as the big boys were. Ha!
It’s also a great reminder of how embedded art is within ourselves— we are predisposed to recognize patterns and familiar forms in the world. If you look at the work of women artists as much as I do, inevitably you start seeing them everywhere. And what a comfort it is to have them by my side as I go about my day!
So without further ado:
BARBARA HEPWORTH
ANNI ALBERS
YAYOI KUSAMA
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