Mary Beth Edelson: Modern Artist Mary Beth Edelson is a modern artist born in the East of Chicago in 1933. Throughout the modern era she challenged both the society in which she lived while revealing the misogyny embedded in everyday life. She faced criticism for her strong will and desire to change the patriarchal narrative that surrounded her. Ever since the beginning of her career, she was critiqued for the topics and material she delved into due to their unapologetic nature. Even starting in college, her own professor took down her senior show because he believed it needed to be. Her work focused on changing gender dynamics and the inherent sexism embedded in our lives that we are conditioned to believe. In the 1970s she specifically focused on the aspect of reclaiming the female body. A body that society manages to shame regardless of what end of the sexual spectrum the individual chooses for themselves. She worked to empower and reclaim aspects that she herself did not accept about her own body. These beliefs are what made her one of the pioneers of the first wave of the feminist art movement. This daring and passionate precedent that Edelson set heavily influences feminist art to this day. The silencing, or attempt to silence, that Edelson endured throughout her most productive art making years, simply reiterates the point she was making in the first place. In this culture, it is commonplace for a man, most likely in a position of “power”, to attempt to silence the woman. This is where the aspect of both gender and women’s sexuality surfaces through her work. The mediums in which she expressed her thoughts were very cohesive to the modern art movement as a whole. She worked with an incredibly wide range of techniques and mediums such as photography, sculpture, collage and painting, but most integral to the modern art movement were her installation and performance art pieces. One of her most influential pieces, which obtained recognition almost immediately, is her repurposing of Leonardo DiVinci’s The Last Supper, in Some Living Women Artists/Last Supper (1972). This piece powerfully tackles the patriarchal nature of religion while also empowering and celebrating women due to the way she collaged their faces over the faces of Jesus Christ and his disciples. Similarly, she worked in the realm of goddesses and celebrating the female body and womanhood through glorifying powerful goddesses. She produces these pieces by overlapping and incorporating different solar or oceanic elements into the figures of celebrated goddesses. These elements help to highlight the beauty of the female body while also giving it a tremendous presence. The physical space and overpowering stance the figures take on completely dismantles the way in which women are taught by society to belittle themselves. During this period Mary Beth Edelson played an essential role in the creating and supporting various women’s art coalitions in New York while also organizing the very first National Conference for Women in the Visual Arts. It is the combination of both her art and her social activism that made her such an unstoppable driving force of the Feminist Art movement and the systems she put in place have been able to continuously inspire and empower women decades after their creation. Sources: http://www.marybethedelson.com/essay_wack.html http://clara.nmwa.org/index.php?g=entity_detail&entity_id=1321