malebeautyinart:

art-mirrors-art:

Sylvia Sleigh - Philip Golub Reclining (1971)

The male gaze and its relationship with the objectified female body is one of the most common tropes throughout art history. Sylvia Sleigh tried to reverse this tradition, turning conventional portraiture on its head by painting male nudes in poses that recalled the female subjects of artists such as Velazquez, Titian and Ingres, challenging not only conventional female iconography, but also images of masculinity. Late last month, she passed away in Manhattan at age 94.

Sleigh helped spearhead the feminist art movement of the 1970s. Though her oeuvre of paintings includes a variety of subjects, male and female, clothed and unclothed, she is best known for her reclining male nudes, which commented on the traditional gendered relationship between sitter and painter. Depicting her subjects (often friends, fellow artists, and even her husband) posed as a reclining Venus or odalisque, she drew attention towards the way in which women have traditionally been rendered in art, offering viewers a new way of conceptualising the gendered relationship: through a female gaze.

Some portraits allude to specific paintings, like the 1971 Philip Golub Reclining, which mimics the pose of Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus. Similarly, The Turkish Bath (1973) borrows the title and composition of Ingre’s painting, replacing his voluptuous harem women with a nude man strumming a guitar for five male companions.

But I think it’s important to note that her motivation wasn’t to ridicule or get revenge on men- her images are constructed with great admiration for the male body, carefully bringing out the dignity and individuality of each subject. By showing men in the light traditionally reserved for women, her paintings became an opportunity to show women a pleasurable and beautiful image of the male form.

As she explained: ‘I feel that my paintings stress the equality of men and women. To me, women were often portrayed as sex objects in humiliating poses. I don’t mind the “desire” part, it’s the “object” that’s not very nice. I wanted to give my perspective. I like to portray both man and woman as intelligent and thoughtful people with dignity and humanism that emphasized love and joy.’

[x]

(via bitchfaceart)

• Tags
• art
• objectification

bigandthebeautiful:

katyviquinn:

B E A U T I F U L <3

#motto

(via unapologeticfatty)

• Tags
• art

redefiningbodyimage:

katieanne:

(via obeast book update |)

Okay. This woman is seriously blowing my fucking mind right now. Check her artist’s statement and get into what she’s doing because it is brilliant. - Haley

From her statement:

My most visible role in the project is performing as the North American Obeast, a fictitious genus of endangered mammals.  I embody three species of male and female obeasts, which superficially resemble each other in the way that zebras, mice, crows, and other fauna do. This animalistic indistinction to the careless eye reflects and satirizes the socially perceived ‘all-the-sameness’ of fat people. This kind of dehumanizing, reductive thinking is brought to light in the MOCS project through exaggeration of the largely unexamined cultural perceptions and anxieties about fat. The obeast performs fat as our culture represents it: simple-minded, undisciplined, endangered yet threatening. By enacting the stigma and dehumanization of obesity literally, the everyday stigmatization of (and anxiety about) obese people becomes darkly humorous, rather than merely pitiable.

.

The narrative’s absurdity mirrors the real-life absurdity of ideological thinking, and creates an opportunity to consider a more nuanced perspective of ascribed and asserted identity formation. By borrowing the trappings of legitimizing scholarly fields (e.g. archaeology, history, biology, museology) to teach viewers about the fictional North American Obeast, the project asks viewers to think critically about how facts and cultural identities are made, and by whom. In this way, the work plays upon not only the stigma and cultivated anxiety surrounding the so-called “obesity epidemic,” but also the conventions of information dispersion in American culture.

• Tags
• writing
• signal boost
• obeast
• photography
• art
• artist
• stigma
• obesity
• activism

redefiningbodyimage:

Everybody deserves to take up exactly as much space as their body needs.  Fat people do not need to be thinner to “fit” better into a society that hates us and that structurally disadvantages us.

(via fattyforever)

• Tags
• wow I really needed to hear this today
• art
• body positivity

(via rimadeer)

• Tags
• art
• intersectionality

barbieisamyth:

beautiful! always relevant!

(via justaguywitharrows)

• Tags
• art
• privilege
• oppression

cryssymcfatfat:

lesbianoutlaw:

quietminds:

ilikeartalot:

San Francisco-based photographer Kerry Mansfield was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005, and photographed this series of self-portraits during her treatment.

I find it incredibly important that I reblog this.

Support the survivors.

Always! <3

(via rimadeer)

• Tags
• wow
• breast cancer
• photography
• art