Artist's Statements About Individual Works

The Judges • 1985

Charcoal, pastel, and ink on paper • 24 x 18

Deals with Church (symbolized by stained glass windows) and State in women’s lives. It was (and still is) routine for a woman to recite the word “obey” when being married in a religious ceremony, to take her husband’s name, and for fundamentalists in various faiths to consider the woman subservient to her husband. The mass media perpetuate this image as they routinely use the words, “I now pronounce you man and wife” — as if, upon being wed, he becomes a man and she relinquishes the parallel term, “woman.” Holding women in social and economic bondage was routine in the ’80s, and it still is today — as the statistics (and advertising, and the entertainment industry, and even groups who purport to work for justice) demonstrate. The beat goes on … and the beat go on.