Mary Beth Edelson
Inspired by Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne and Édouard Manet, she made paintings of mothers and children in the 1960s.
Important works of the early 1970s are representations of goddesses, which Edelson used as a contrast against established, patriarchal viewpoints of women.
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.
[3] From 1951 to 1955, Edelson studied at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, where she majored in art and minored in philosophy and speech.
[3][d] In April 2024, three years after Mary Beth's death, her son Nick Edelson was reported to have ordered the disposal of art and ephemera outside of her studio in SoHo without notifying her estate's gallery.
[3][33] Edelson's feminist and conceptual art consists of bronze sculptures, paintings, collages, prints, story gathering boxes, and sketches.
[25] Edelson is considered one of the "first-generation feminist artists", a group that also includes Rachel Rosenthal, Carolee Schneemann, and Judy Chicago.
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.
[9][39] Edelson was a member of the Title IX Task Force, a group formed to increase the presence of women's painting and sculpture in museums in accordance with the Title IX amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that bans federally funded organizations from sex discrimination.
[39] Edelson was interviewed for the Archives of American Art Oral History Program in the first half of February 2009 at her New York studio by former Independent Curators International (ICI) executive director Judith Olch Richards.
The artists collaged over the apostles include Lynda Benglis, Louise Bourgeois, Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Nancy Graves, Lila Katzen, Lee Krasner, Georgia O'Keeffe, Louise Nevelson, Yoko Ono, M. C. Richards, Alma Thomas, and June Wayne.
[49] Story Gathering Boxes, an ongoing participatory artwork, was initiated in 1972[50] and exhibited though at least 2014, when it was shown at Aldridge Contemporary Art Museum in Hartford, Connecticut.
Paper cards contains a prompt inviting viewers to share personal stories on various topics, such as gender, childhood, and immigration.
The sculpture reimagines Bobbitt as the warrior goddess Kali, mounted on a ziggurat plinth, adorned with knives, and grasping a severed penis.
[3] In 1980, she created Shaking the Grass, gelatin silver print mounted on board and Seven Cycles: Public Rituals, offset lithograph on paper, both of which are at the Walker Art Center.
[56] Primordial archetypes, like the goddess, warriors, and tricksters that she invokes, represent a contrast to women of formalized, patriarchal societies.
[39] As Edelson states in 'Male Grazing: An Open Letter to Thomas McEvilley', published in the April 1989 New Art Examiner, her enduring interest has been in "destabilizing preexisting representations of masculine desire and privilege in relationship to the female body.
"[57] She continues: "My rituals also provided resistance to the mind/body split, by acknowledging sexuality in spirituality, thus reconciling the experience of a united spirit, body, and mind.
[58] The National Museum of Women in the Arts' biography of Edelson states: "Her site-specific performances or 'rituals' […] strove to create a new feminine spirituality with its own values and iconography.
"[9] Recurring "esthetic talismans" in her iconography are stone and fire, substances "at the heart of the Great Goddess myths that she is adapting to contemporary needs.
"[58] For example, Edelson invited visitors to ritually enter through a flaming ladder installation titled Gate of Horn for her 1977 show at A.I.R.
[58] The artist's own naked body acts as a stand-in for the divine feminine in Women Rising (1973), Moon Mouth Series (1973–74), and later Goddess Head (1975) photomontages, for which the artist documented herself performing private rituals in nature and altered the images with a grease pencil to resemble mythological women such as Wonder Woman, Kali, the Wiccan Spiral Goddess, and Sheela-na-gig.
[59] She explains her conception of the goddess as "an internalized, sacred metaphor for an expanded and generous understanding of wisdom, power and the eternal universe.
I was fascinated with Jung's ideas about the collective unconscious and tried to make work that depicted that—very presumptuous of me, but to some extent it was good and became important to me as a feminist.
The critique that Jung made of the symbolic world, myths, and the figures therein was liberating, and around that time I began working with fire, photography, collage, and performance.
Over time, though, I began to understand that what Jung offered was still in the end a patriarchal construct, and I broadened my approach and analysis, informed by feminism.Edelson draws attention to the female nude to address the ways in which women have been "exploited and underrepresented in the history of art.
"By presenting herself so self-possessed and unapologetically unclothed, she hoped to help loosen the centuries-old grip that male artists held on the passive female body," wrote the !Women Art Revolution.
[38][60] Mary Beth Edelson's work has recently been the subject of various museum, gallery, and art fair exhibitions, including: The book The Art of Mary Beth Edelson (2002) includes information and images of her works, as well as conversations with artists and essays by her colleagues.
[9][38] She received a residency to Yaddo,[38] which offers live-in programs on a 400-acre estate in Saratoga Springs, New York for 200 writers, visual artists, and musicians each year.
