Mary Beth Edelson

Mary Elizabeth Edelson (; February 6, 1933 – April 20, 2021) was an American artist and pioneer of the feminist art movement, deemed one of the notable "first-generation feminist artists". Edelson was a printmaker, book artist, collage artist, painter, photographer, performance artist, and author. Her works have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

She began her studies at the Art Institute of Chicago and continued as she pursued her Bachelor's and Master of Fine Arts degrees. She taught art at the college level, including School of Art and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and at the Corcoran Gallery of Art's Dupont Center for Advanced Studies.

Inspired by Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne and Édouard Manet, she made paintings of mothers and children in the 1960s. During that decade, she owned a gallery in Indianapolis. Her art changed markedly in the 1970s when she shifted to performance and other forms of art, as well as how women are depicted in art. Her studies of philosophy and psychology greatly influenced her art, both in terms of content and medium. Important works of the early 1970s are representations of goddesses, which Edelson used as a contrast against established, patriarchal viewpoints of women. In Some Living American Women Artists / Last Supper, the faces of the disciples are replaced with noted women artists, and Story Gathering Boxes explored stories of the feminine experience. Other notable works include The Negotiation and Kali Bobbitt.

She worked to increase the rate at which works of art by women are among museum collections. She helped found and was an active member of the Heresies Collective, which published the Heresies journal, to show and promote art made by women. She also joined the feminist cooperative gallery, A.I.R. Gallery (Artists In Residence), which held exhibits of Edelson's work, including The Memorial to the 9,000,000 Women Burned as Witches in the Christian Era. In that exhibit, the intention was to empower women attendees. She was also active in the civil rights movement.

Personal life Early life and education

Mary Beth Edelson was born Mary Elizabeth Johnson in East Chicago, Indiana, on February 8, 1933, He purchased Talbot Gallery as a wedding present for her. By 1972, Edelson was living with artist Robert Stackhouse in her Washington, D.C., house. The couple moved to New York in 1976.

In April 2024, three years after Mary Beth's death, her son Nick Edelson was reported to have ordered the disposal of art and ephemera outside of her studio in SoHo without notifying her estate's gallery. Part of the material was salvaged by passersby wishing to preserve some of the material.

Early career During the second half of the 1950s, Edelson became active in the emergent feminist movement and the civil rights movement. Edelson's feminist and conceptual art consists of bronze sculptures, paintings, collages, prints, story gathering boxes, and sketches. She is also a photographer, book artist, and performance artist.

The artist was included in the 2007-2009 "WACK! Art of the Feminist Revolution" traveling exhibition, curated by Connie Butler. She was interviewed for the film !Women Art Revolution. Edelson's personal archives are held by the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University.

Notable works Some Living American Women Artists / Last Supper

Some Living American Women Artists / Last Supper (1972) appropriated Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper, with the heads of notable women artists collaged over the heads of Christ and his apostles. The purpose of the exhibit is to question long-held beliefs and myths by learning and sharing stories with others. Paper cards contains a prompt inviting viewers to share personal stories on various topics, such as gender, childhood, and immigration.

Kali Bobbitt Edelson's life-size monument to Lorena Bobbitt, who famously castrated her abusive husband in 1993, is entitled Kali Bobbitt (1994). It was included in MoMA PS1's 2015 survey show Greater New York. The sculpture reimagines Bobbitt as the warrior goddess Kali, mounted on a ziggurat plinth, adorned with knives, and grasping a severed penis. She refers to Great Goddess theory throughout her work. She continues: "My rituals also provided resistance to the mind/body split, by acknowledging sexuality in spirituality, thus reconciling the experience of a united spirit, body, and mind."

Exhibitions (selection) Mary Beth Edelson's work has recently been the subject of various museum, gallery, and art fair exhibitions, including: 2018–2019 – Feminist Avant-garde / Art of the 1970s SAMMLUNG VERBUND Collection, Vienna, The Brno House of Arts, Brunn, Czech Republic. 2018 – Greater New York at MoMA PS1, Mary Beth Edelson, Feminist Humor as Political Device at Princeton University's Bernstein Gallery, The Devil Giving Birth to the Patriarchy at David Lewis Gallery, and Sex Work: Feminist Art & Politics at Frieze London. In March 2018, the entirety of Edelson's SoHo loft was digitally archived by The Feminist Institute (TFI), an online repository for feminist artwork overseen by Hunter College. ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany. 2017 — WOMAN. Feministische Avantgarde der 1970er-Jahre aus der Sammlung Verbund, MUMOK, Vienna, Austria. 2015–2017 – The Devil Giving Birth to the Patriarchy (2017) also prominently featured Edelson's Kali Bobbitt sculpture, previously exhibited at MoMA PS1 in 2015.

2013 – Making Eye Contact, a performance art experience and workshop where participants make eye contact with others, was held by Edelson at the School of Art and Design of Southern Illinois University Carbondale. 2013 – 22 Others was held at The Suzanne Geiss Company, SoHo, New York City. It was a restaged exhibition that of the same name that was held in 1973 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Henri Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Awards DePauw University gave her an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts in 1993.