Nadia - "I've Been Good to Me"

 Ways of Seeing Chapters 2-3

"You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure." 

"But the essential way of seeing women, the essential use to which their images are put, has not changed. Women are depicted in a quite different way from men - not because the feminine is different from the masculine - but because the 'ideal' spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him." 

Understanding Patriarchy

"Of these systems the one that we all learn the most about growing up is the system of patriarchy, even if we never know the word, because patriarchal gender roles are assigned to us as children and we are given continual guidance about the ways we can best fulfill these roles." 

"Often in my lectures when I use the phrase 'imperialistic white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy' to describe our nation's political system, audiences laugh. No one has ever explained why accurately naming this system is funny. The laughter is itself a weapon of patriarchal terrorism. It functions as a disclaimer, discounting the significance of what is being named. It suggests that the words themselves are problematic and not the system they describe."

The Oppositional Gaze

"By courageously looking, we defiantly declared: 'Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality.'"

"One learns to look a certain way in order to resist." 

The Photographed, Collaged, and Painted Muses of Mickalene Thomas

“By selecting women of color, I am quite literally raising their visibility and inserting their presence into the conversation,” Thomas said in a recent interview. “By portraying real women with their own unique history, beauty and background, I’m working to diversify the representations of black women in art.”

"Thomas’s jazzy photomontages of women’s limbs and facial features can be construed as commentary on how female bodies are brutally picked apart in contemporary visual culture. But the social commentary in her work is never heavy-handed or preachy; her approach throughout is both playful and political."

Overlooked No More: Ana Mendieta, a Cuban Artist Who Pushed Boundaries

"These questions would echo in  her work, which explored themes that pushed ethnic, sexual, moral, religious and political boundaries. She urged viewers to disregard their gender, race or other defining societal factors and instead connect with the  humanity they share with others." 

“There’s a way in which her work is about performance... It’s about theater. It’s about kind of capturing moments through various forms of documentation. And she takes all of these things to the world at large that might not be considered fine arts. She turns them into something intelligent, harrowing and emotional.”