Audio Transcription

Two In The Pink pairs Pink Tax research and auction house results to acknowledge gender biased discrimination and consumption.

Pink tax is sometimes, but not always, a literal tax. Research has shown that women pay on average 7% higher for goods and services marketed to women and 13% higher for personal care products (not just tampons, but think deodorants, body wash, razors, etc;). Interestingly, states can determine what and how these products are taxed. Only a handful of states have passed legislature eliminating tax on these products, and I discovered that although Illinois, my home state, is on that list, they used to tax these products as luxury goods!

Tampons as luxury goods got me thinking about the art world. I found ArtNet data from auction house sales from about a ten year period, between 2008 and May 2019, which revealed that female artists represent only 2% of the art market, which is less than the total sales of Picasso alone. The data shows there was $196.6 billion dollars worth of total art sales, $4.8 billion of that were works by Picasso. And only $4 billion of that total were sales of works by female artists, which includes about 6,000 women. Of those 6,000+ women, there are five top performers.

For this series, the artworks are separated by male and female top performing auction artists, and feature text used in their auction catalog entries to describe the artist and their output, inspired by an Allan Schwartzmann quote on how the women artists of the 60s and 70s “changed the language of art,” making it acceptable to use words like delicate, vulnerable, fragile, tender, personal, diaristic, among others to describe the artwork.

The artwork titles correlate with their numbered ranking on that sales data list, inspired by the playground ranking system born from toxic masculine culture, including former President Donald Trump who ranked celebrity females on a scale of 1 - 10 in a 2005 Howard Stern interview.

The handcut letters puncture a slice of an artwork that the referenced artists sold at auction, pixelated to be barely recognizable, the squares piece together like a patchwork quilt with letters cut to mimic lace.

In this video, I’m featuring the Number Two’s: Joan Mitchell and Andy Warhol. I didn’t select the highest selling artwork by Warhol, but the price tag for the piece I did referenced was more than double that of Mitchell’s highest selling work to date.

Audio Transcription

The Collages on Color Kaleidoscopes, or C.O.C.K.S., combine feminine images cut from magazines and advertisements and pairs them with cutouts of artworks and floral motifs along with found objects and sewing notions. These nostalgia-femme works, saturated in color are descendants of magazine layouts and scrapbooking motifs.

These pieces riff on the ‘commonplace books’ of the 15th century, which compiled items like recipes, quotations, letters and poems. The ‘friendship albums’ of the 16th century, to the yearbooks and friendship books created by 18th and 19th century school girls. These replaced journaling as a way to document their experiences in a way that was aesthetically pleasing, using the ephemera and memorabilia from their daily lives, such as visiting cards, ticket stubs, plants and even trinkets. More personally, these are manifestations of growing up with a Mother that was a graphic designer, realizing those basic building blocks of design were imbedded in my psyche while sitting in on her ‘Graphic Design for Non-Art Majors’ in my pre-teen years, when I should have been concentrating on my math homework.

The collages in this series are focused on elements of nostalgia and word play or innuendo. Taking vintage cookbook recipes or advertisements glorifying the sexist landscape of the mid-20th century and turning its head on the feminine nostalgia of the cult of domesticity. Most of the items used to collage have been passed along to me from my Mother, Grandmother, and Great Grandmother. These objects of my lineage call to an era that seems so familiar and so foreign at the same time. Embroidery thread that I vaguely remember being taught how to make a blanket-stitch, now used to puncture the paper, creating a slash across the imagery. Round stickers, like the ones my Grandma used during her summer garage sales, alongside snippets of vintage recipes, the titles and descriptions shouting double entendre, “Pineapple Delight”, “Chocolate Coconut Twosome”, or in this case, a reader’s submission from the 1958 Happy Home Cookbook, “How to bake a batch of children.” This piece has a Lichtenstein eye, cut from an auction catalog, a floral from a Linder photograph featured in a contemporary magazine, a vintage camera advertisement, and a Playboy model from the year 1969.