Ida Applebroog

"The late 1960s brought a push to make female sexuality more visible. As Michelle Murphy claims, 'although the vagina has been marked as inscrutable and unknowable--the site of women's secrets--in the history of medicine, psychoanalysis, and even some feminist theory, the feminist self-help movement recoded the vagina as accessible and knowable through commonsense and transparent techniques, like looking at your face in a mirror' but the ideologically freighted vagina is not equivalent to the face (though it, too, is ideologically marked), and Applebroog's Monalisa project returns to the stubborn fact of flesh, particularly its ability to make audiences uncomfortable."
Julia Bryan-Wilson, excerpted from Our Bodies, Our Houses, Our Ruptures, Ourselves in Monalisa.

Ida Applebroog was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1929. Her work belongs in the permanent collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. She has received many awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the College Art Association and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Achievement Award. She is represented by Hauser & Wirth.

ACTIVE BACKLIST

IDA APPLEBROOG: SCRIPTS
HATJE CANTZ
ISBN: 9783775728911 | US $10.00
Pub Date: 4/30/2012
Active | In stock

IDA APPLEBROOG: MONALISA
Text by Julia Bryan-Wilson.
HAUSER & WIRTH
ISBN: 9783952363003 | US $45.00
Pub Date: 4/30/2010
Active | In stock

OUT OF PRINT LISTING

IDA APPLEBROOG: NOTHING PERSONAL, PAINTINGS 1987 - 1997
Artwork by Ida Applebroog. Text by Arthur Danto, Dorothy Allison, Terrie Sultan.
D.A.P./CORCORAN MUSEUM OF ART
ISBN: 9780886750527 | US $35.00
Pub Date: 4/2/1998
Out of print | Not available

Ida Applebroog

In the late 1960s, artist Ida Applebroog made a series of X-rated self-portraits depicting her own vagina from the point of view of her evening bath. The "Vagina Drawings" were never exhibited, and remained in storage for 40 years until they were rediscovered by the artist in 2009. In "Monalisa," at left, Applebroog revisits the original drawings with a room-sized wooden environment papered with more than 100 new drawings of the same subject. Featured image is from 2009: gampi, mylar, ink, pigment, oil, watercolor and wood, 110 x 144 x 146 1/2 inches, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Thomas Mueller.

Ida Applebroog: Scripts

100 Notes, 100 Thoughts: Documenta Series 042

Published by Hatje Cantz

Artist Ida Applebroog uses a wide variety of media to express themes of struggles within gender and political roles. Scripts is a facsimile of a compilation of handwritten notes, storyboards, mise-en-scène drawings and musical notations. Among the fragments on these pages: "Silences are the undercurrent of all dramatic events." "Each performance should be more of silence than words." "Any silence must be punctuated by sound eventually." Annotation in several colors indicates that the artist has intensively worked through her notes several times. For Applebroog, the staged scenes function as "a mode of narration," and "the narratives are not meant to be truths; the characters simply are." With only a few words and brief instructions, Applebroog develops stage plays of great dramatic density that she simultaneously comments on, questions, and interprets.

Ida Applebroog: Monalisa

Text by Julia Bryan-Wilson.
Published by Hauser & Wirth

In 2009, a box of forgotten notebooks was rediscovered in the basement of Ida Applebroog's studio--Strathmore drawing tablets, with the words "Vagina Drawings" scrawled on the cover. Forty years prior, Applebroog took sanctuary from the pressures of the home in an evening bath. Her nightly soak offered her moments of meditation and, equipped with her drawing pad, she began drawing portraits of her crotch. Applebroog's newest body of work, Monalisa, is in many ways an extension of that ritual. The centerpiece of this project is a room-sized wooden structure covered with more than 100 new vagina drawings--reappropriations of the 1969 originals. In the catalogue essay, Julia Bryan-Wilson contends that the installation, "with its signature figural obsessions and urgent feminist force, feels like an epic culmination of [Applebroog's] entire oeuvre." Monalisa offers new insight into Applebroog's work with full-color reproductions of the never-before-seen 2009 drawings, images of the installation and an essay by Julia Bryan-Wilson.

Ida Applebroog: Nothing Personal, Paintings 1987 - 1997

Artwork by Ida Applebroog. Text by Arthur Danto, Dorothy Allison, Terrie Sultan.
Published by D.A.P./Corcoran Museum of Art

Ida Applebroog demonstrates the social and psychological deviations that dwell beneath the veneer of daily life. This catalogue is a comprehensive overview of Appelbroog's career over the last ten years.

Ida Applebroog: Are You Bleeding Yet?

Published by La Maison Red