Think/Act Art Exhibition

Smith College Museum, March 31-May 6

With the possible exception of the almond shape of the eye, the outline of a woman’s breast may be the most readily identifiable line in art.  Yet this simple, iconic form, so deeply and fundamentally imbedded in our consciousness, contains a multitude of meanings.  The image of the breast encompasses so much of the human experience -- first source of nourishment, locus of erotic power and pleasure, emblem of womanhood, hypertrophied object of pornographic exploitation – and its representations are as varied, and frequently as ambiguous as are its meanings.

The objects we have assembled for this exhibition include the works displayed in the teaching gallery, as well as a number of objects in the permanent collection, identified with the XX icon.  They are meant to capture the richness of representations of the female form, ranging from the humorous to the ecstatic, and from the overtly representational to the ambiguously abstract.  We invite visitors to juxtapose some of the apparently irreconcilable representations of the female form presented in this exhibition: the nursing Isenbrandt Madonna and Child in Interior (2nd floor) with the hedonistic Arnold Nude in Tub, or the powerful pearl-draped Lachaise Eternal Force with the lewd male fantasy depicted in Boilly’s A Young Painter and His Model.  From the mischief and wit embodied in Judy Dater’s photograph of Imogen and Twinka, Yosemite to thegenerative joy of Munakata’s Seated Female Nude, each of the objects in this exhibition evokes the power of the human form. We are eager to hear your reaction to this exhibition (or to any of the objects in it), and we invite you to record your thoughts and reactions here (list web address).  With your consent, your comments will become a living part of this virtual exhibit. 

This exhibition is part of the Think/Act project, organized by the Smith Breast Health Collective.  These works of art are meant as a counterpoint, or perhaps a complement to the intense, and sometimes anxiety-provoking conversations we hope to spark on the topic of Breast Cancer.  They remind us that the human body, with all its limitations, its inevitable wearing down and its potential to fail us by harboring disease is also a source of beauty, of pleasure and of comfort.