womxnhouse detroit
Curated by Laura Earle and Asia Hamilton via Norwest Gallery
Womanhouse (January 30 – February 28, 1972) was a feminist art installation and performance space organized by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, co-founders of the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) Feminist Art Program and was the first public exhibition of Feminist Art. "Womanhouse began in an old deserted mansion on a residential street in Hollywood and became an environment in which: “The age-old female activity of homemaking was taken to fantasy proportions. Womanhouse became the repository of the daydreams women have as they wash, bake, cook, sew, clean and iron their lives away."
Almost 50 years later, a group of Detroit artists have revived this installation and crafted their works to the current social and political environment. What’s shocking isn’t the walk-in vagina. It’s how little has changed in that timeframe.
Entering into Asia Hamilton’s transformed childhood home, I was met with a cacophony of images, smells and sound. I was instructed to enter the kitchen through a doorway filled with hand-made marigolds strung like those stoner beaded curtains. In Hispanic culture, marigolds are believed to call the dead back to the present. Entering the kitchen, the secretly recorded voices of Rosa Maria Zamarrón’s Grandmother, Mother and Auntie while they’re cooking animate what is considered the heart of a home. The ceremony of passing down recipes through the generations is a rite of passage into womanhood.
Dangling from the stairwell ceiling are colorful stained-glass feathers reflected in an oval mirror extending the space indefinitely. Each feather represents a person of significance to Erin Gold, acknowledging the erosion of the relationship during the pandemic. Bands of gold on the wall installation refract light from the adjacent window begging investigation. Laura Earle’s notes of something lost, shed or let go of in the past year are written on gilded tags that moved with me as I passed.
Throughout the house is an audible heartbeat. The source is in the depths of Womb. I’m claustrophobic, so I had to psych up to enter this installation. The sensation of safe but shadowed envelopment is profound. This installation creates a hazy idea of what it’s like to be a developing human cradled in a soft secure space and comforted by a steady rhythmic heartbeat.
Sabrina Nelson’s Apothecary smells divine due to the drying herbs and other medicines used to care for loved ones. The modern bathroom is still the cupboard for curative lotions and potions. Although women have traditionally been healers, it’s on the precarious edge between savior and witch. Both can land an invitation to the scaffold if the practitioner has accumulated too much power. Is that when men became the authority on modern medicine? Women are only recently taking back their intrinsic role.
Thinking I’d met the strongest of images, there she was. The impetus for more female insecurity than any other shape I can think of. Barbie; playing with and influencing young girls around the world for decades. Her iconic shape, which originally only came with white skin and blonde hair, sells the impossible-to-achieve standard for feminine beauty. Laura Earle has made her into a mirror that drives home how ridiculous and soulless that shape really is. No thanks to Mattel for all the refused deliciousness of my Grandmother’s to-die-for chocolate cake. I’ll never miss another bite again.
I graduated high school in 1980, a year after the ERA was defeated. Since I grew up in a home that didn’t relegate me to gender specific activities—I mowed the lawn as much as my brother—I went off to college assuming I was there to get an education. I missed the memo I was supposed to be getting my ‘MRS’ degree. In my early career in radio sales, I fought through pervasive sexual harassment; behavior that wasn’t endorsed but no one did anything about it either. We dressed in suits with huge shoulder pads; miniature linebackers in heels. I wish I could say equality has been realized. In the arts, gender and race representation is still particularly and significantly lopsided. I am undeterred. The women who participated in this installation won’t quit either. “There are two ways of attaining an important end, force and perseverance; the silent power of the latter grows irresistible with time.” -Sophie Swetchine, Russian mystic.
Participating artists: Loralei R. Byatt, Jessica DeMuro Graves, Amelia Duran, Laura Earle, Setareh Ghoreishi, Erin Gold, Olivia Guterson, Asia Hamilton, Donna Jackson, Melanie Manos, Sabrina Nelson, Dalia Reyes, Leslie Sobel, Rosa Maria Zamarrón.
On view extended through October 31st WomxnHouse Detroit 15354 St. Mary’s Street
*images are mine
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