Anita Steckel

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Anita Slavin Arkin Steckel (born Anita Slavin ; February 24, 1930 in Brooklyn , New York City ; died March 16, 2012 in Manhattan , New York City) was an American artist and feminist . She became known through paintings and photomontages with sexual motifs.

Life

Steckel was born in 1930 in Brooklyn , New York , to Russian Jewish immigrants Dora and Hyman Arkin . Her mother was physically and mentally abusive towards her and her father was struggling with a gambling problem. Steckel left home after an early graduation from Manhattan High School of Music & Art (now Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art).

As a young, single woman, Steckel dated actor Marlon Brando and worked on a Norwegian freighter bound for South America . She also spent a year on the US West Coast , where she worked as a dance teacher and was crowned Mambo Queen of Southern California at a dance competition. She then returned to New York to study at Cooper Union and Alfred University and to do postgraduate studies at the Art Students League of New York with the painter Edwin Dickinson . She considered Dickinson the teacher who had the greatest impact on her. Steckel taught art at the Art Students League of New York from 1984 until her death in 2012. In 1970, the artist moved to Westbeth Artists Housing in Manhattan, where she lived out the rest of her life.

Art work

Poster Feminist Party , 1971

From the late 1960s, Steckel began exhibiting her work in both solo and group shows. In her first publicly recognized work, a series of photomontages entitled Mom Art (1963), she criticized racism, war and gender inequality.

At Westbeth Artists Housing she completed two series of works, New York Skyline (1970-1980) and Giant Women (1969-1973), both of which were included in the 1972 solo show The Sexual Politics of Feminist Art at Rockland Community College. The exhibition provoked controversy as Steckel's work was sexually suggestive. Local authorities have asked for the exhibition to be closed or at least moved to what they believe to be a more appropriate location, such as the men's or women's restroom. After this incident, Steckel founded the Fight Censorship Group , an advocacy group that advocated for the rights of women's sexually-related art. Other members included Hannah Wilke , Louise Bourgeois , Judith Bernstein, Martha Edelheit, Eunice Golden, Juanita McNeely, Barbara Nessim, Anne Sharpe, and Joan Semmel.

In her Giant Woman series , Steckel painted oversized nudes of women on photographs of city scenes. In doing so, she addressed an idea of ​​the women's movement that women had outgrown their previously defined role in society. In the New York Skyline series , a mother feeds her muscular son his own sperm and tells him to "Eat your power honey before it grows cold." (German: "Eat your power honey before it gets cold."). She created a number of works of art with erections as the subject. In their defense she said: "If the erect penis is not wholesome enough to go into museums, it should not be considered wholesome enough to go into women". should he not be considered decent enough to penetrate women.").

The political content of her art was not only limited to feminism, but also dealt with larger issues of justice. She explained: "When you come from a culture that has been the underdog in a very brutal way, you tend to speak out against injustice." (English: "Coming from a culture that has been oppressed in a very brutal way, one tends to speak out against injustice.") Her Jewish parents were not religious, but Jewish culture was part of Steckel's childhood and is also reflected in her art. In the Skylines of New York series , the Hudson River is filled with gefilte fish and Hitler is portrayed as a patriarchal menace, with his throat slashed by a nude female character brandishing an ax between her legs.

The archive of Steckel's work is housed in the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC and her estate is represented by Hannah Hoffman in Los Angeles and Ortuzar Projects in New York.

In 2022, her work will be featured in a solo exhibition at Stanford University 's Stanford Art Gallery.

web links

itemizations

  1. ↑ abc Anita Steckel - Artist. Retrieved December 18, 2021 (English).
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g Rachel Middleman: Anita Steckel's Feminist Montage: Merging Politics, Art, and Life . In: Woman's Art Journal . 34, No. 1, 2013, pp. 21-29.
  3. ↑ a b c July 12, 2012 Deborah Fineblum Raub: Of Peonies & Penises: Anita Steckel's Legacy. Retrieved December 18, 2021 (English).
  4. ^ a b c About Anita Steckel. Retrieved December 18, 2021 (English).
  5. ↑ a b Paul Vitello: Anita Steckel, Artist Who Created Erotic Works, Dies at 82 . In: The New York Times . 2012 March 25, ISSN  0362-4331 ( nytimes.com [accessed 18 December 2021]).
  6. ↑ a b c d Gail Levin: Censorship, Politics and Sexual Imagery in the Work of Jewish-American Feminist Artists . In: Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies & Gender Issues . No. 14 , 2007, ISSN  0793-8934 , pp. 63–96 , doi : 10.2979/nas.2007.-.14.63 .
  7. ↑ a b Anita Steckel. Retrieved December 18, 2021 .
  8. ↑ Estate of Anita Steckel. Retrieved December 18, 2021 .
personal data
SURNAME Steckel, Anita
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Steckel, Anita Slavin Arkin (full name); Slavin, Anita (birth name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American artist and feminist
BIRTH DATE February 24, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Manhattan , NY
DATE OF DEATH March 16, 2012
PLACE OF DEATH Brooklyn , NY