Women Collecting: Gender, Beauty and Ritual

Tuesday, March 18 - Thursday, April 10 , 2003
Public Reception for exhibit: Tuesday, March 18, 6-8 p.m.

Women Collecting: Gender, Beauty and Ritual

In all cultures beauty is a gendered trait. Only women are beautiful. Women's rituals of defining, elaborating, and adorning are among our oldest documented cultural characteristics. Through time and across cultures, women assign meaning to objects and adorn themselves with color that accentuates their physical appearance. Standards of beauty emerge, evolve, change, and endure all at the same time, while the perennial definitions of beauty remain feminine.

Definitions of beauty as internalized elements of good character or inner radiance are often de-valued in favor of a greater emphasis on physical attributes, which are commonly sexualized and hold nearly supernatural importance. Spellbinding, dazzling, and irresistible beauty is enhanced by sexual innocence and fraught with danger, which is both mystical and mundane. Women and girls are cautioned both to control or repress their beauty and to cultivate, package, and exploit their most gorgeous traits. Beauty is encumbered by contradictions that excite and repel, enamor and corrupt, and covet and shun. Likewise, the rituals of beauty foster stereotypic, pervasive judgments that control and limit women's potential at the same time that they satisfy by cultivating admiration, influence, and recognition.

Social scientific research indicates that children who possess physical characteristics of attractiveness receive fewer reprimands by teachers and more classroom honors. Numerous studies indicate that attractive people are imputed to have greater warmth, poise, to be more sincere, and to lead more successful lives. In experiments where "stranded" strangers look "helpless," beautiful people are more likely to have others stop to help. Interestingly, none of the early studies on beauty included male subjects. The researchers recognized patterns that women understand, implicitly. Beauty is feminine and it is important to women's success in life. The findings are congruent with knowledge that women and girls internalize through socialization.

In this exhibit, artist Elaine Clance documents the artifacts, collections, and themes of beauty that punctuate women's lives. She delivers a mosaic of the ways in which women decorate, adorn, and color their worlds and themselves. The indefinable nature of beauty in women's lives is pulled together with shape, form, and interconnections among incongruous objects. Common threads of color and imagery pull the collections together to give viewers insight into the importance of feminine objects such as beads, dolls, pastel-colored figures, and articles of clothing as the socially constructed remnants of beauty.

The exhibit hangs the images into a quilt-like conglomeration of objects and illustrates the piercing contradictions in beauty imagery. It is, at the same time, painful and comforting. Faceless images and doll heads, for example, symbolically illustrate the ways in which women are trivialized, atomized, and deconstructed in beauty imagery. Yet, the cute, collectible decorative objects peppered through the exhibit comfort with reminiscence. This is, essentially, the impact of beauty ritual for most women. Comfort and pain intertwined and conflicting.

Women know that beauty is gendered. And, they know that the ability to meet the standards of beauty affects their lives in thousands of ways. The goal of this exhibit is to illustrate some of the ways in which women collect the objects that both illustrate and define beauty in our culture. While many of the collected objects in the exhibit are decorative, they also provide insight into the connections between decoration of space and decoration of women. In many ways, and across cultures, decoration of women is the same as decoration of objects. Women become objects of decoration and subjectivity is lost, as faceless paper dolls.

Polly F. Radosh, Ph.D.
Director of Women's Studies

 

elaine clance lynch

Art piece one from the Elaine Clane Lynch collection at WIU.Art piece two from the Elaine Clane Lynch collection at WIU.

So Rich, So Mild                                                       Judy and Mrs. Sam Fraise
mixed media on paper                                                mixed media on paper
2002                                                                         2002
26" x 36"                                                                   26" x 36"

Art piece three from the Elaine Clane Lynch collection at WIU.Art piece four from the Elaine Clane Lynch collection at WIU.

Art piece five from the Elaine Clane Lynch collection at WIU.Art piece six from the Elaine Clane Lynch collection at WIU.

I would Love to be your next Miss America
mixed media on paper
2002
26" x 36"

 

These are just a few examples of the pieces of work you will see in this exhibition. Please review the biography of Elaine Clance Lynch for more information about this artist.

The Women's History Month events are sponsored by:

  • Illinois Humanities Council
  • Illinois Arts Council
  • Western Illinois University Art Department and Art Gallery
  • College of Arts and Sciences
  • College of Fine Arts and Communication
  • Departments of Women's Studies, Music and English
  • Western Illinois University Women's Center
  • Western Organization for Women
  • Visiting Lecturer's Committee

 

Art Gallery | Art Department | Western Illinois University

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Art Gallery
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Macomb, IL 61455-1390
E-mail: JR-Graham@wiu.edu
Phone: 309/298-1587