‘Beauty and the Beast’ art exhibit opens in Festival Center
Student’s senior project explores gender stereotypes through art
Posted on January 14, 2008
The classic tale of “Beauty and the Beast” gets an artistic twist in the latest exhibit to open in the Gallery at Festival.
Senior Carolyn Stewart’s new show, “Beauty and the Beast: Revealing Sexual Agency and the Female Body,” opens today.
“I used ‘Beauty and the Beast’ as a metaphor to describe two of the most prevalent stereotypes which I’ve come across researching images of female nudity,” Stewart said, who put together the exhibit as a part of her art history honors thesis.
“Some works of art celebrate the female body as miraculous, and an art form in of itself,” Stewart said. “In other cultures, it is seen as being inherently dirty and corrupting. It has always fascinated me that something as fundamental as the female body can evoke such different and opposing reactions.”
The exhibit is composed of professional artwork and cultural pieces from the Madison Art Collection. Objects range from sculpture and pottery to prints and photographs from varying historical periods covering a wide range of cultural history. They were all chosen for their portrayals of the female body in order to investigate how various cultures and artists visually interpret the nude female body.
“Some may think that an exhibit focusing on the female nude body is inappropriate in a public setting,” Stewart said. “But the truth is, female nudity has been a very prevalent and accepted genre within the history of art, and my exhibit puts these pieces within an academic context to better understand the reasons why female nudity has become so prevalent and to look at the motivations and meanings behind nudity in art.”
Ultimately, Stewart hopes that audiences will gain a better understanding of the past cultural attitudes towards the body and become more aware of different motivations that are active in shaping the images of nudity today.
The exhibit opens today in the Madison Art Gallery, located on the first floor of Festival, from 5-7 p.m. It will run through mid-March.
