Liz Taylor 'one of the most beautiful women in the world' from buzai232's blog

Liz Taylor 'one of the most beautiful women in the world'

This may sound like the start of a joke: what do a horse head, a pin-up girl, and the Sex Pistols have in common? But the answer isn't necessarily funny, as the three new exhibitions at the William Benton Museum of Art illustrate the contributions of female artists and their struggle for equality and notice.To get more news about 日韩亚洲综合在线一区福利, you can visit our official website.

Executive Director Nancy Stula says the museum doesn't usually tie together exhibitions with a similar theme, but the 50th anniversary of UConn's Women's Center gave enough reason to run the same string through three seemingly disparate shows:

"Encounters with the Collection: Celebrating Art by Women" in the Gilman Gallery, running through July 2024; "Ray Guns, Dames, and the Guilty Gaze: Feminism and the Golden Age of Science Fiction Pulps" in the Center Gallery, running through Dec. 18; and "Wild Youth: Punk and New Wave from the 1970s and 1980s" in the East Gallery, running through Oct. 16.

When isn't it a good time for a feminist look at pulp science fiction," asks UConn Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies associate professor-in-residence Barbara Gurr. "The common wisdom is that science fiction has historically been predominantly white, male, straight, and cisgender. Really examining how and why that both is and isn't true, and how it's changed, is an incredibly fruitful way of examining our society."

Gurr curated the pulp fiction exhibition with UConn illustration/animation associate professor Alison Paul who says she saw some of the work on display at the New Britain Museum of American Art - which loaned many of the pieces for the Benton show - and started thinking about ways to showcase the artwork "while not ignoring the inherent sexism, racism, and homophobia they often depict."
After connecting with Gurr, who teaches a class on feminism and science fiction, the two spent the next year sifting through the Robert Lesser collection at the New Britain Museum and the Loftus Becker collection at Trinity College's Watkinson Library.

"The more we worked with the material and did the research, the more we saw stories that we felt needed to be told," Gurr says. "For example, we wanted to discuss Mary Shelley and ‘Frankenstein,' but we didn't know at first how exciting it would be to discuss C.L. Moore and ‘Shambleau.' Learning more about the female writers and editors who worked behind the scenes, the ways that race has been both used and marginalized, considering the uses of the body in the illustrations, all these things told a story that became impossible to ignore."

Take the work of illustrator Margaret Brundage, for example, identified in the exhibition as "The Queen of Pulp Pin-Up Art" and one of the only female illustrators working during the Golden Age of pulp. She published in "Weird Tales" for the first several years using only an initial for her first name, a common tactic for women in the early 1900s to hide their gender.Examining pulp fiction from the Golden Age through a feminist lens really highlights some of the political and social issues both of that time - 1938 to 1950 - and of this time," Gurr says. "Immigration, gender, settler colonialism, race, sexuality, nationalism, power, these were foundational to the telling and illustrating of science fiction 80 years ago."

Paul notes that some of the imagery is graphic enough to startle visitors, so the pair posted a trigger warning at both entrances. They also included QR codes to some of the published works and included a case of contemporary science fiction from the 1970s to today, which provides more diversity and inclusiveness and serves as a "bit of a palette cleanser," she says.

"Something we said a lot while curating this show is that the content isn't easy, but it is important," Paul says, adding that a Wikipedia Edit-a-thon on Nov. 2 will add entries or fill out stubs for many of the women in the exhibition. "We wanted to give viewers outlets for the thoughts and feelings that the show might bring up."