The Ladies' Art Museum is a pivotal and personal piece for me, one that allowed me a space to "make learning visible," in Reggio Emilia parlance. It came together slowly over four years, as I processed the impressions of a whirlwind trip to Italy and made a deliberate effort to learn more about women artists through history.
In the summer of 2018 we had a two-week family trip that included stops in London, Edinburgh, Genoa, Florence, and Venice. I had never been to Italy before, and it blew my mind. I had one glorious day in the Uffizi, and about a week of getting lost down crooked streets goggling at the architecture. Immediately on returning home I made Cardboard Italy, a little double-sided street scene focusing on the plastered textures of exterior walls.
The wooden wall curio that eventually became the Museum may have already been in the studio; I am always on the lookout for interesting boxes and my first plan for it was to make a little theater... but after Italy I knew I had to paint those shutters green.
Patterned papers supplied exterior and interior backgrounds. I worked next on the roof garden, using some miniatures marketed for fairy gardens, then toyed with placing some of the garden statues on pedestals in the rooms.
The tiny porcelain figurines who became the artists are eBay finds from a 1983 Franklin Mint series called Ladies of Fashion, which I originally intended to use as heroines from Gothic novels, starting with Adeline in the piece Adeline at the Window.
Eager to learn more about the amazing art I had seen in Florence, I started reading the book Invisible Women, about Jane Fortune's remarkable initiative to restore and display lost masterpieces by Suor Plautilla Nelli and other Renaissance women painters. Soon I was also reading Eighteenth-Century Women Artists by Caroline Chapman, and starting to print and find tiny frames for portraits that caught my eye.
My selections weren't systematic; for the artists, I was limited to the figurines I had, although I eventually repainted a couple. For the art, I was drawn to self-portraits, interesting facial expressions, and paintings that had made an impression on me in real life, such as Annibale Carracci's Portrait of a Black Woman Holding a Clock (1583-85), which I had seen in a visiting exhibit at the Princeton University Art Museum. Including works by male and female artists, I wanted to explore a wide range of portrayals of female faces within traditional portraiture of the 14th-19th centuries. Of course I wound up with far more pictures than would fit the frames and walls, and had to paste a guide on the back to keep track.
When opened and extended, the inside of the shutter doors suggest exterior walls leading to the museum building, with windows, frescoes, fountains, doors, medallions, and columns. Atop the column on the upper left rests a gold earring, a gift shop replica of the ancient earring in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston depicting Nike's chariot. Below it is Labille-Guiard's magnificent portrait with her students shown at the 1785 Paris Salon, two years after Labille-Guiard and Vigee Le Brun were admitted to the Academy. These two artists face each other in the top left room, with Labille-Guiard in slightly more old-fashioned court dress and Vigee Le Brun in a looser romantic style.
I enjoyed putting the artists in dialogue with each other, and drawing attention to networks among the women as they painted themselves, their students, and their sisters. In the room below, I placed Edma Morisot by her sister Berthe in conversation with Mary Cassatt, acknowledging that Edma was also a painter, even though she did not share the professional recognition they had.
On the far lower right is a detail of fruit pickers from Cassatt's mural Modern Woman for the Woman's Building at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. The catalogue for this long-lost exhibition inspired Judy Chicago's Dinner Party and Womanhouse, the 1972 whole-building installation led by Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, in which Schapiro's Dollhouse was first displayed (it had shutters too!).
The Ladies' Art Museum echoes those more ambitious feminist projects, although it was less programmatic and grew more haphazardly along with my reading. The Museum sat unfinished on a back shelf for two years while I was busy parenting, moving, and renovating, and most of my creative energies were going toward teaching. When Covid put my teaching on hiatus, I dove back in to art history and artmaking and memories of the Italy trip to produce the Shuttered Shrines series. Not until I had finished most of the series, including a response to Christine de Pizan and Double Selves, which juxtaposes self-portraits made 400 years apart by Elaine de Kooning and Catherina van Hemessen, did I finish up the Museum.
In the top right room, I gave Gentilleschi a green dress and palette to echo my favorite of her self-portraits, and Nelli got a candlestick where one of her tiny hands had broken. The figurine in the white Empire dress was perfect for Villers, whose work had long been misattributed to a male painter. When I replaced the original wood railings with red gallery ropes, the space really started to feel like a museum.
During those days of Covid when real museum trips were impossible, the idea of what a museum is, and who gets to be in it, was haunting. Our local museum at Princeton University took the opportunity to start renovations, as many institutions did. I was excited to hear that MoMA moved Faith Ringgold next to Picasso, and captivated by the newspaper picture of their scale model.
The Stettheimer dollhouse has a miniature art gallery, with original works of art created by the Stettheimer sisters' famous friends.
Queen Mary's Dolls' House also has original paintings by artists, although the miniature books written by authors are more celebrated. So does Colleen Moore's Fairy Castle in Chicago, which had a huge influence on my grandmother and me and our years of collaboration making dollhouse furniture out of junk... which deserves its own post! But my ideal museum would resemble the opulent Great Hall in the Fairy Castle, not a white cube.
With one important difference: as a kid I was disappointed that the Fairy Castle doesn't have any "people" (the fairies are supposed to visit at night, or they're invisible perhaps). The Ladies' Art Museum is above all an imagined dialogue among artists, a utopian space where artists from different generations and locations would meet and exchange ideas. And this fantasy, too, has its precedents-- the Dinner Party, but also de Pizan's City of Ladies and Boccaccio's Famous Women.
The title The Ladies' Art Museum refers also to several eighteenth-century literary magazines for women: The Lady's Museum, The Lady's Monthly Museum, The Ladies' Diary, and the Lady's Magazine, whose Gothic stories inspired the young Charlotte Bronte and her siblings to write their own collaborative, and tiny, magazines. The Ladies' Art Museum reaches back to my literary studies of 18th- and 19th-century women writers, their collaborations and intergenerational conversations.
The writers I studied were fascinated by the archetypes imposed on women, and I selected paintings that similarly presented women as muse, sibyl, allegory, queen, heroine, judge, or villainess. A touchstone for scholars of women's writing is a passage from the epic poem Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who found artistic and social freedom living in Florence. Orphaned at a young age, Aurora projects fantasies onto the portrait of her dead mother:
...And as I grew
In years, I mixed, confused, unconsciously,
Whatever I last heard or read or dreamed,
Abhorrent, admirable, or beautiful,
Pathetical, or ghastly, or grotesque,
With still that face… which did not therefore change,Â
But kept the mystic level of all forms,Â
Hates, fears, and admirations, was by turns
Ghost, fiend, and angel, fairy, witch, and sprite,
A dauntless Muse who eyes a dreadful Fate,
A loving Psyche who loses sight of Love,
A still Medusa with mild milky brows
All curdled and all clothed upon with snakes
Whose slime falls fast as sweat will; or anon
Our Lady of the Passion, stabbed with swords
Where the Babe sucked; or Lamia in her first
Moonlighted pallor, ere she shrunk and blinked
And shuddering wriggled down to the unclean;
Or my own mother, leaving her last smile
In her last kiss upon the baby-mouth
My father pushed down on the bed for that;
Or my dead mother, without smile or kiss,
Buried at Florence.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (1856). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, 146-168.
So many overdetermined, conflicting connotations have adhered to images of women. Edmonia Lewis's statue The Death of Cleopatra, majestic and a little problematic in its use of conventions, would have fit perfectly if I could have found a miniature version. Instead I resorted (a little problematically) to altering one of the figurines to approximate the iconic photograph of Lewis herself. I had darkened another figurine's dress to represent Anguissola, but at the last moment I wondered if she should be Properzia Rossi (we don't really know what Rossi looked like) so that Lewis would have another sculptor to talk to. I put them in the last room to contemplate the two garden statues (one of which appears inspired by Canova's dancer).
So many favorites were left out that I will have to make more miniature museums. I'd like to try one with 20th-century artists next...