Museum Exhibition Catalogues, Monographs, Artist's Projects, Curatorial Writings and Essays
"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.
Published by Verlag für moderne Kunst. Preface by Helen Hirsch. Text by Jo Applin.
New York artist Ida Applebroog (born 1929) began making her Angry Birds series as a result of an effort to draw birds nestling in trees. Quickly realizing that scientific ornithological draftsmen work from dead models, she and her studio began producing their own models in plaster and paint. The artist states of this work, "I started calling them Angry Birds of America. It was just something that stuck in my head. And then I realized I was in the middle of the Trump era. There was a lot of anger, not just me, but all over America. My feeling was, whatever I was doing, it had to do with angry, dead birds. For whatever it's worth, I feel like I'm living in a world where we're all very, very angry."
Ida Applebroog: Angry Birds of America also presents the series Mercy Hospital, which she executed during her stay in a psychiatric clinic during 1969–70, and which was rediscovered in 2009.
In 2009 Ida Applebroog’s (born 1929) assistants found a box marked “Mercy Hospital.” Inside was a series of drawings the artist made nearly 50 years ago, during a period of institutionalization after suffering a debilitating breakdown in San Diego in 1969. During this tumultuous period, Applebroog, by her own account, “withdrew from the world entirely, for a period hardly able to speak at all.” Instead she turned to drawing, producing works in graphite, India ink and watercolors, at times accompanied by text from authors such as Kafka and Freud.
The drawings oscillate between the figurative and the abstract, laying bare the female form and calling to mind art-historical precedents informed by psychopathology, particularly works produced in early and mid-20th-century France by the likes of Wols.
The publication of Mercy Hospital, with a text by Jo Applin, is the first time that Applebroog’s work from this period has been documented in full.
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.
Published by Hauser & Wirth Publishers. Text by Julia Bryan-Wilson.
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.
PUBLISHER Hauser & Wirth Publishers
BOOK FORMAT Clth, 8.75 x 10.5 in. / 136 pgs / 44 color / 6 bw.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 4/30/2010 Active
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2010 p. 94
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9783952363003TRADE List Price: $45.00 CDN $60.00
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Published by D.A.P./Corcoran Museum of Art. Artwork by Ida Applebroog. Text by Arthur Danto, Dorothy Allison, Terrie Sultan.
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.
PUBLISHER D.A.P./Corcoran Museum of Art
BOOK FORMAT Paperback, 9 x 10 in. / 128 pgs / 90 color / 30 bw
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 4/2/1998 No longer our product
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 1998
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780886750527TRADE List Price: $35.00 CDN $40.00
Ida Applebroog: Mercy Hospital
Ida Applebroog: Are You Bleeding Yet?
Ida Applebroog: Scripts
Ida Applebroog: Monalisa
Ida Applebroog: Nothing Personal, Paintings 1987 - 1997