Written by Tori Smith, Public Relations and Social Media Intern
To commemorate Women’s History Month, we wanted to highlight works of five women artists that are on view at DOMA. Please use this article as a scavenger hunt for your next visit to DOMA!
June Edmonds
June Edmond’s piece Convictions I lays noticeable and colorful in the western-most bay of the Ball Brothers Gallery. The thick individual strokes of paint represent the skin tones of people of color. Color has played an especially important role in the intersection of Edmonds’s personal, political and artistic journeys. Color associations can be tied to culturally symbolic imagery, trauma, and emotion, giving color the unique discursive ability to communicate about power and systemic disenfranchisement. According to her resume, she was born in and works in Los Angeles. She has earned two art degrees and a certification in Social and Emotional Arts. She has had exhibitions in California, Massachusetts and New York.
Christina Ramberg
Christina Ramberg’s piece Schizophrenic Discovery sits across from June Edmond’s piece. Ramberg’s painting notes the complex subjects of gender identification, objectification as a female and psychological distress. According to the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Christian was born in Fort Campbell, Kentucky. She completed both degrees at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). She eventually became a member of SAIC’s Drawing and Painting Department. Although she started her artistic career painting on Masonite as seen in the galleries, she eventually became a seamstress and a quilter.
Dorothy Dehner’s piece, Northern Wall #2, emulates street signs, graffiti, and the general street near Dehner’s Manhattan studio at 41 West Union Square, where several women visual artists and sculptors maintained a communal workspace. According to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Dehner was born in Cleveland. After realizing the title of actress wouldn’t fit her, she moved to New York to become a visual artist instead and learned to at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. She was married to David Smith, Indiana’s most famous modern sculptor, for 25 years before their divorce. She focused on painting and drawing while they were together, eventually “flourishing” as a sculptor.
Mainie Harriet Jellet
Mainie Harriet Jellet’s piece, Constructive Construction uses a Cubist style that breaks down the space of the canvas into different segments, focusing on shapes and bright colors instead of a realistic subject. After returning to her hometown of Dublin in 1921, Jellett became a passionate advocate of abstract art and the Modernist movement. Her painting style was often criticized, but she eloquently defended her ideas of eloquently defending artistic trends of the time and embracing non-objective imagery to communicate with the viewer. In 1943, Jellett founded the Irish Exhibition of Living Art.
Stella Snead
Stella Snead’s piece Advancing Monuments sits on the wall. The surrealist landscape is composed of female forms balancing precariously on receding rocky perches. Snead was born in England. According to Tate, a trip that Snead took in her twenties inspired her to go to painting school. She lived in Taos for four years which inspired some of her paintings, “Advancing Monuments” elements suggesting that the faceless figures in her composition were a part of the Taos Pueblo Indians. About Advancing Monuments, Snead said “In those days I often heard myself saying, ‘If I weren’t a painter I’d like to go on an expedition.’ I was fascinated by the earth’s phenomena, the more spectacular the better…”
As always, thank you for reading the DOMA insider and make sure to visit the museum soon! DOMA is free and open to the public; we are open Tuesday – Friday 9:00 a.m. – 4:30 p.m., and Saturday from 1:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. Check out our website at bsu.edu/doma.
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