Gender and Artistic Representation: Four Examples From Gardner\'s Art Through the Ages
This paper examines four works from Gardner's Art Through The Ages--Artemisia Gentileschi's "Judith and Holofernes", Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein, Judy Chicago's "The Dinner Party", and Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial--in order to raise the question of the role played by gender in artistic creation and artistic representation. The paper examines each of these four works, and concludes that gender is approached in one of two ways: either the artist seeks to emphasize it as a subject, or the artist seeks to efface it in the interests of egalitarianism.
Character Response From All Souls
My name is Michael Patrick Macdonald and before I begin attending therapy sessions with you, I thought it best to introduce myself in hopes of explaining where I come from. My story begins in a housing project known as Old Colony, in the Lower End, which was an especially crime-ridden and impoverished area of the South Boston neighborhood affectionately known by residents as “Southie.” Despite the regular occurrence of murder, robbery and other violent crime, and no matter how badly my family and our neighbors struggled to make ends meet, Southie was always supposed to be “the best place in the world, as Ma used to say before the kids died.” But my four brothers did die and they are still dead, just like the hundreds of other young people for whom the crowds still gather at the old Gate of Heaven Church, where candles are lit and the neighborhood holds vigil for generations of fallen children. When I recently returned to Southie, encountered once again by the landmarks and monuments of my own broken childhood, “I didn’t know now if I loved or hated this place. All those beautiful dreams and nightmares of my life were competing in the narrow littered streets of Old Colony Project.” Despite the sense of loss which still pervades every corner store and stoop in Southie, the place is still my home, and I feel a sense of obligation both to my own four brothers, and to the untold number of young people who have succumbed to South Boston’s notorious underworld elements.