Graduation Year

2022

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Art

Reader 1

Professor Blassingame

Reader 2

Professor Kovitz

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Abstract

As an art student at a historically women’s college, I place my self-portraits in conversation with those of women artists including Alice Neel, Charlotte Berend-Corinth, and Laura Knight as well as with the domestic scenes of Mary Cassatt, Jennifer Packer, and Hope Gangloff. Starting from the rise of Modernism in the second half of the 19th century and ending with our current era, together these artists and their oeuvres demonstrate an evolution, within society as well as the art world, of what it means to be an artist who is also a woman. For this project, I explore the female artist/female model relationship through the theoretical lens of the female gaze alongside the use of domesticity as a theme within artwork. For over a century and a half, developments of societal expectations have affected the interrelation between women artists and their models as well as the reasoning behind the incorporation of the private sphere within art. Given these generational changes, setting my paintings in my bedroom has a different meaning now than it might have had 150 years ago. I purposefully chose to depict myself—the woman artist and the woman model—in a domestic space as a reflection of these unprecedented times where life has become confined to the home. While I usually feel in control of my environment as a 21st-century woman, a virus universally restricts society to the private sphere.

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