Art of protest Nasty Women exhibit in New Haven studies ‘Rituals of Resistance’
The Nasty Women movement sprang into being in late 2016 as a feminist declaration against the presidential election. Three years later, the movement is still going strong in Connecticut. On March 8, International Women’s Day, the fourth annual Nasty Women Connecticut exhibition will open in New Haven. The theme is “Rituals of Resistance.”
Luciana Q. McClure, who is co-organizing the exhibit, said resistance is a fitting theme for a movement founded as protest. “In the last four years, there have been so many protests, on the community level, the national level,” McClure said. “What does protest look like? What forms can it take?”
McClure curated the 2020 show with Louisa Decossy, Attallah Sheppard, Julie Graves Krishnaswami and Sha McCallister. McClure said when she created Connecticut’s
Nasty Women chapter in 2016 with co-founders Sarah Fritchey and Valerie Garlick, they didn’t imagine it would still be active four years later.
“It was supposed to be just one exhibition, but after the response, we knew we needed to keep going,” she said. “This is more than an art exhibit. It gives people a sense of purpose and belonging. A lot of the artists, before this exhibit, didn’t have a reason to make art and didn’t have a space to show it. Artists have been producing a lot more political art in the last few years. This is a place to show it.”
In 2019, McClure was recognized with a CT Arts Hero award from the Connecticut Office of the Arts.
It’s called Nasty Women, but the show is not limited to female artists, but any art on social-justice protest themes. The work is both visual art and written-word pieces. Here are some of the artists:
Aedan O’Brien of New Haven, whose inspirations are celebrity culture and gay culture, hopes to see increased participation by LGBT artists in the local and national art scene. O’Brien’s portrait shows four glamorous women – Bella Hadid, Lara Stone, Paris Jackson and Ruby Rose – sitting on the floor of the ladies’ room at the Met Gala, sharing a cigarette. The image was taken from a photograph. “They’re doing almost a middle finger to the entire establishment by hanging out in the bathroom and not participating in this expensive party, wearing thousands of dollars worth of designer gowns,” O’Brien said. “It is clear that they are protesting the entire event, the fashion, the art market, ideas of decorum.”
Barbara Fenton of Branford worked as a therapist for more than 30 years and heard countless stories from her female clients. “I heard women for many years talk about being battered, abused, disregarded. Women have power but there is anger that we have not been recognized and listened to,” she said. Her acrylic-on-canvas painting, “We’re Not Going Away,” shows five women clustered together staring straight at the viewer. “I started this when Harvey Weinstein was in the news, the beginning of the hashtag #metoo, I watched the news and my paintings evolved from that,” she said. “We as women, as a group, are not going away. We are a powerful force. You could say we’re ‘nasty women’.”