Curated by Joy Pepe
Curator’s Statement
The current displays of works of art in Extra Human and Witchy are about or influenced by witches, their practices, and perceptions and misconceptions about them throughout time. Wonder Working is inspired by what links some of these representations with historical depictions of women with magical or divine abilities—magnificent, sublime, sometimes terrible—as they connect with issues of gender, age, spirituality, and nature.
The exhibit is divided into three themes. Titles and images are links to each of the exhibits.
Body
Throughout the history of persecution of women accused of being witches is their being connected with animals because of their biological systems of menstruation and pregnancy, which the patriarchal systems, in Puritanical America, for example, would associate with sexual compulsiveness and mental instability. In Europe, a religious inquisition within the Dominican order in the fifteenth century, approved by the pope, tortured women allegedly suspected of witchcraft and harm to humanity. Misogynistic hysteria was also expressed by Benedictines, denigrating Eve and associating her original sin with witchcraft, at the same time as the cult of the Virgin Mary grew. Yet, as Yale scholar Stephen Greenblatt points out in his recent study of Adam and Eve (The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, Norton Press 2017), the French medieval painter and humanist, Christine de Pizan, said: If anyone would say that man was banished because of Lady Eve…I tell you that he gained more through Mary than he lost through Eve…Man and Woman should be glad for this sin. (134)”
The Body section considers female biology of menstruation, fertility, the presence/absence of the body, and how biological determinants, rather than recall the despising and fear of woman as witch throughout Western history, disempowers and celebrates the female body - from misunderstanding as villainous witchy agent of ruin to forthright visual reconfigurations of their bold natural rhythms.
Nature
It is a truism that throughout Western thought, nature has always been related to female as culture was to male. One links with instinct, the other with reason. Because of their abilities to conceive and bear children, the fertility of women correlated to nature’s abundance. And, therefore, reason and the resulting complexities of cultural accomplishment was beyond her purview. The witch, in particular, was considered in medieval and Renaissance times to be a subversion of nature, most closely associated with lewd sexual intercourse with the Devil as the starting point for her practice of witchcraft.
Magic
The previous verse, spoken by the Three Witches or the Weird Sisters as they conjure up Macbeth’s doomed fate with a brew of plant and animal parts, are some of the best known in Western literature that express the actions of evil magic contrived by women over the fates of men. This section explores the bond between witches and magic, and reconsiders the stereotypical wicked intent of witchcraft, whether in its association with the female body and its reproductive ability, its sensuality and sexuality, or its symbiosis with nature’s cycles.