Fleming Museum of Art
Spring 2018
Artist’s Talk with Alison Bechdel: Wednesday, February 21st, 7PM in the Dudley H. Davis Center’s Silver Maple Ballroom. Free Admission.
Self-Confessed!
The Inappropriately Intimate Comics of Alison Bechdel
1/30 to 5/20/2018
A renowned cartoonist and graphic memoirist who lives in Bolton, Alison Bechdel is a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant winner, and the third Cartoonist Laureate of Vermont—a position unique to the state. Her pioneering comic strip about the lives of a group of lesbian friends, Dykes to Watch Out For, ran from 1983 to 2008 and was syndicated in over fifty alternative papers, including Vermont’s Seven Days, which recently published new Dykes strips by Bechdel focused on current political events.
In 2006, Bechdel published the graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, which explores her relationship with her father, her coming out, and his possible suicide. Fun Home was a New York Times bestseller and the basis of the Tony-award winning musical of the same name. Bechdel followed up in 2012 with Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama, which follows her relationship with her mother, girlfriends, therapists, and her exploration of psychoanalytic theory. Both books are works of multilayered complexity, employing nonlinear storytelling and a rich trove of literary and historical references.
“Self-Confessed” presents these primary bodies of work in depth through original drawings and sketches, while incorporating other aspects of Bechdel’s creative output, from early drawings to activist ephemera to large-scale self-portraits. The exhibition also includes a model of the set for the musical Fun Home, reconstructed for this exhibition.
The exhibition explores Bechdel’s work as a writer, an artist, and an archivist of the self, someone who constantly mines and shares her own experiences as a way to communicate something vitally human: the quest for love, acceptance, community, and social justice.
Image: Alison Bechdel (American, born 1960), Page from Fun Home (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006).
Honoré Daumier’s “Bluestockings”
1/23 to 5/20/2018
In 1844, famed French caricaturist Honoré Daumier (1808-1879) published Les Bas Bleus, or Bluestockings, a series of forty lithographs satirizing groups of upper-class women who sought intellectual stimulation in defiance of their narrowly proscribed roles in society. Daumier’s combination of word and image as well as his depiction, albeit mockingly, of the flouting of gender norms makes it a fascinating counterpoint to the work of Alison Bechdel, who cites Daumier as an early influence.
The Blue Stockings Society began in mid-eighteenth century England as a women’s literary discussion group, which represented a radical departure from the acceptable activities for upper-class women of the time. Though hosted by women, the society included learned men as well, and focused on equal intellectual exchange between the sexes. They supported each other’s creative pursuits, and many members became published authors. The name of the group is said to refer to the fact that participants were encouraged to wear their everyday blue stockings, rather than more formal black ones.
In France, Les Bas Bleus evolved into an informally organized women’s movement that continued to advance women’s literary and intellectual opportunities and ambitions. The term came to have derogatory implications, as men and women opposed to this liberation mocked bluestockings for being unattractive and insufficiently feminine. In Daumier’s images, women are depicted abandoning their domestic responsibilities of housekeeping and childrearing in favor of novel- and poetry-writing, intellectual discourse, and what was seen as “salon socialism”—the support of socialist causes from the comfort of a well-appointed salon.
Though Daumier’s message ridiculed women’s emancipation efforts, today we can see in his humorous cartoons the beginnings of a revolution, one that would eventually lead to women’s suffrage, women in the work force, and women’s freedom from reliance on men for their education or economic security.
These prints are generously loaned from the Arthur Ross Collection at the Yale University Art Gallery, whose donor intended that the works be shared with other teaching museums throughout the country. The Fleming Museum is grateful to Kimberley Adams, M.D., for facilitating this loan.
(text adapted from the venue’s press materials)
INFORMATION
Fleming Museum of Art
University of Vermont Campus
61 Colchester Avenue
Burlington, Vermont 05405
(802) 656-0750
Hours:
Tuesday, 10AM-4PM; Wednesday, 10AM-7PM; Thursday-Friday, 10AM-4PM
Saturday-Sunday, Noon-4PM
Closed for Spring Recess