Calls resonate for diversity in museums and the resignations of leaders of the old guard. It's clear that modern day museums can no longer exist without change--and without recognizing that Black people have been a part of the Western art world since its beginnings.
Whitney Chadwick's acclaimed study challenges the assumption that great women artists are exceptions to the rule, who 'transcended' their sex to produce major works of art. While acknowledging the many women whose contribution to visual culture since the Middle Ages have often been neglected, Chadwick's survey amounts to much more than an alternative canon of women artists: it re-examines the works themselves and the ways in which they have been perceived as marginal, often in direct reference to gender.
Conceived with delicious wit, boundless humor, and an eye for the telling aesthetic detail, Kunz's recreations are not only stunning paintings in their own right but a sly, revisionist social commentary on the male-dominated history of Western civilization.
