This Girl Bends: : Women Modern and Contemporary Artists' Representations of The Female Body

Juror Response Form

This exhibition positions a young girl at the center of a world she looks up at–a world in which women artists have long explored and reinterpreted the female body. By surrounding Kerry Stewart’s sculpture with works by Alina Szapocznikow, Kiki Smith, Francesca Woodman, Louise Bourgeois, Katy Schimert, and Pipilotti Rist, the exhibition creates a dynamic in which the girl encounters a range of possibilities for understanding herself and sees how women artists have taken back control over how their bodies are depicted.

Women artists have often approached the body as something changeable, imperfect, and emotionally expressive. Their works challenge traditional artistic conventions that idealized or objectified women. Instead, these artists create bodies that bend, or distort, or glow.

In conversation with Stewart’s sculpture, the surrounding artworks become the images the girl looks toward. Together, these works form a broad survey of female bodies and invite viewers to consider how women artists have reshaped the terms of their own representation throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.

The images are situated within a blueprint for one of the galleries in the new WCMA building.

Curated by Eliza Ault

ewa2@williams.edu