Allison Zuckerman’s “Woman at her Toilette” (2017) is one of the 60 works of art being showcased at Lehman College Art Gallery’s latest exhibit, “Framing the Female Gaze: Women Artists and the New Historicism.”
Photo courtesy Lehman College Art Gallery
As a response to the idealized portrayal of women in literature and the arts as submissive and naive sexual objects solely for the heterosexual male viewer, film theorist Laura Mulvey coined the term “the male gaze” in 1973. By placing the agency and focus into the hands of female artists, the Lehman College Art Gallery is challenging that patriarchal narrative with their latest exhibit, “Framing the Female Gaze: Women Artists and the New Historicism.”
Upon entry to the gallery, one finds themselves in the rotunda with its walls painted a sanguine burgundy and covered in dozens of vintage-looking picture frames with copies of historical paintings that feature the idealized woman. Sandro Boticelli’s “Birth of Venus” (1480s); Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’ “Grand Odalisque” (1814); Amedeo Mogdiliani’s “Nude” (1917) and others boast their sexuality at the viewer. Except there’s one slight alteration – a trickle of menstrual blood pours down the leg or stains the sheets of each work.
Lizzy Alejandro’s intallation, “Herstory” (2023), replicates the French art salons of the 1600s-1700s, but instead of offering dozens of nude women for the male viewer to gawk at, Alejandro takes these canonized works of art and humanizes its subjects with the appearance of menstruation — done with a few squiggles from a red Sharpie marker. A direct affront to the idealized woman and an interruption to “the male gaze” as well as the several cultures and religions that still stigmatize menstruation.
“With this series it’s a celebration of the female body,” said Alejandro who graduated from Lehman College with her master’s in art in 2019 with her thesis,…
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