1. Kerry Stewart, This Girl Bends, 1996, fiberglass and enamel paint

Stewart’s life-sized sculpture anchors the exhibition. The girl’s pose–sort of paralyzed and staring upward–captures a state between innocence and self-awareness. In this exhibition, the girl becomes a central figure who “looks” up at the artworks around her, reflecting how young women learn to understand their own bodies through images and cultural expectations.

2. Kiki Smith, Nuit, 1993, anodized aluminum, bronze, mohair

In Nuit, Kiki Smith presents a series of cast legs suspended from the ceiling, each hanging from a string decorated with stars. This sculptural work creates a scene that feels both quiet and unsettling. Smith’s work often combines the human body with elements of the natural or cosmic world, exploring themes of vulnerability and the body’s limits. The title, Nuit, means “night” in French.

The deaths of many of Smith’s friends and, later, her sister Beatrice–who died from complications related to AIDS–deepened her interest in the fragility of the human body. Before becoming an artist, she had also trained briefly as an emergency medical technician, which informed her understanding of anatomy.

In this exhibition, Nuit shows the female body in a space that feels dreamlike. The hanging limbs echo the theme of fragmentation seen throughout the show, while the stars connect the body to a larger, almost mythic environment. As Smith has noted, women’s bodies are often eroticized in art, but her work instead offers what she calls “a more realistic depiction of women’s bodies in the world" (McKenna 1994).

3. Alina Szapocznikow, Iluminowana (Illuminated Woman), 1966, plaster, coloured polyester resin, electrical wiring and metal

As she developed her practice, Szapocznikow expanded her experiments with body fragments by incorporating industrial materials like car parts, resin, and poured foam to examine the connection between the body and mass production. As she explained, “plastic materials seem perfect to me… because of their repetitive possibilities, their lightness, their colors, their transparency, their inexpensiveness" (Alina Szapocznikow: Iluminowana, n.d.).

Iluminowana shows a headless and armless female torso with a cloudlike shape in place of a head. The piece lights up when switched on, continuing her interest in functional, semi-mechanical bodies.

Here, Szapocznikow’s choice to isolate the torso and give it a utilitarian purpose is both pointed and ironic. On one hand, it exaggerates the ways women’s bodies are objectified. On the other, it challenges traditional sculptural ideals. By transforming the figure into a working light source, she disrupts the heroic, monumental expectations of sculpture in a male-dominated field.

Francesca Woodman, On Being An Angel #1, Providence, Rhode Island, 1977, gelatin silver print

Francesca Woodman, On Being an Angel, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976, gelatin silver print

These two photographs from Francesca Woodman’s On Being an Angel series show the artist arching her body and looking upward intensely, her silhouette stretching toward the edge of the frame. Her pose creates a sense of strain and movement, as if she is pressing against the photograph itself. Her staring upward echoes the way that the girl stares upwards in Kerry Stewart’s This Girl Bends, the center of this exhibit. The works are connected in this way, both trying to reach beyond their immediate environments.

Woodman is the photographer and the model for these images, using her own body as a way to control her representation. Her work resists the way women’s bodies are often treated in visual culture—as commodities to be consumed or icons to be admired from a distance. Instead, Woodman uses her body to communicate her own message directly.

In this exhibition, the On Being an Angel works contribute to the overarching theme of women shaping their own representation.

5. Alina Szapocznikow, Lampe-bouche (Illuminated lips), 1966, colored polyester resin, metal, electrical wiring

Szapocznikow’s Illuminated Lips transforms a woman’s lips into a lamp, merging a body part with a household object. This design offers a commentary on how women’s bodies are consumed–literally rendered useful or decorative. Szapocznikow used casts of her own lips for this project as well as the lips of her close female friends, ultimately sculpting them in coloured resin and wiring them to lightbulbs. 

As an early example of her interest in turning body fragments into functional objects, Illuminated Lips introduces the ideas she would continue to develop throughout the 1960s. In this exhibition, the lamps show how the female body can be treated as separate pieces rather than a whole person.

 

6. Louise Bourgeois, Blue is the Color of Your Eyes, 2008, drypoint and ink on paper

In Blue is the Color of Your Eyes, Louise Bourgeois presents an abstracted view of the female chest, shown from above and in watery blue tones. Although the title refers to eyes, the image focuses on breasts, which appear throughout Bourgeois’s work as symbols of both sexuality and motherhood. The print shows two breast-like shapes above and three below, turning the body into a kind of landscape. The upper forms resemble the sky, while the lower forms resemble hills or earth, suggesting a cycle of creation and renewal.

Bourgeois often used body parts as metaphors for memory and emotion. For her, the body was not only physical but also psychological, shaped by intimate experiences and relationships. 

In this exhibition, Blue is the Color of Your Eyes contributes to the theme of women reimagining the female body on their own terms. For Bourgeois, this means representing the body as a landscape rather than an idealized figure.

7. Louise Bourgeois, The Fragile, 2007, digital print

This work comes from Bourgeois’ The Fragile series, a series of 36 compositions in which she explores emotional and psychological vulnerability through repeated images of the female body. In this work, the figure is shown with multiple rounded, breast-like forms clustered at the torso, giving the body a swollen, unsteady appearance. The loose blue washes and thin, wavering lines highlight the instability suggested by the figure. The figure’s facial expression feels blank or lost, which emphasizes the emotional uncertainty of the figure. 

In this exhibition, this work from The Fragile series contributes to the theme of women depicting the body in ways that move beyond idealization. Bourgeois presents the body as far from any traditional ideal of the female body, plagued with breasts depicted as heavy and overwhelming rather than desirable or beautiful.

8.  Katy Schimert, A Woman's Brain, 1995, wire mesh, straight pins, wool, electrical wiring, sockets, and bulbs

A Woman’s Brain is a floor sculpture in which Katy Schimert uses simple materials like wire mesh, blue and white felt, and small lightbulbs to create a large, diagram-like image of a brain. The branching blue shapes suggest the brain’s structure, while the lights highlight points of energy or activity.

Schimert’s work often centers on what is usually hidden inside the body. Here, she brings the brain into full view, reflecting her interest in the inner workings of thought and in cultural ideas about differences between male and female brains.

Placed as the penultimate work in the exhibition, A Woman’s Brain represents the many ideas, perspectives, and creative approaches of the women in this show. It serves as one of the exhibition’s culminating works as a visual representation of the collective thinking that shapes the show as a whole, while being made by a woman artist who is doing this same type of thinking.

9. Pipilotti Rist, Ever Is Over All, 1997, video

In Ever Is Over All, Pipilotti Rist presents a slow-motion video of a woman in a light blue dress and red shoes walking down a city sidewalk, smiling as she shatters the windows of parked cars with a hammer shaped like a large tropical flower.

This video is widely recognized as a seminal work of feminist art. The scene is bright, calm, and almost cheerful, even as each window shatters. She strikes the car, a masculine symbol, cheerfully but still with force. Critics at the time described the work as “relaxed feminism,” capturing how its bright colors and peaceful pace coexist with this act of destruction.

Her light blue dress echoes the dress worn by the girl in Kerry Stewart’s This Girl Bends, the starting point of this exhibition. Here, at the end, that girl appears again but transformed by seeing the many ways women artists have reimagined and reclaimed traditional images of the female body. Now, she is stepping out into the world and putting that sense of agency into action.

As the last work in the exhibition, Ever Is Over All is the culmination of the show’s ideas: a moment of liberation, confidence, and disruption. It closes the exhibition with a powerful final act.

About The Curator

My name is Eliza Ault and I am a sophomore at Williams College studying Art History and Spanish. I grew up outside of Philadelphia, where art museums first sparked my interest in how stories are told through objects. My Museum Culture course this semester pushed me to consider how I might tell a story of my own through curation. This Girl Bends grew out of that exploration. 

Thank you for spending time with the exhibition and for engaging with the ideas behind it. I’m grateful you were here.

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.