'Seductive Subversion' exhibit focuses on female pop art

Roy Lichtenstein. Ed Ruscha. Andy Warhol. These are the names that surface from pop art. But a new exhibition at the Sheldon offers a fresh, and somewhat radical, perspective on the era of popular culture that dramatically shaped modern America. The female perspective.
"You see a lot of the same iconography… bright colors and the whole pop advertising, billboard mentality," Sharon Kennedy said, Curator of Cultural and Civic Engagement at the Sheldon. "But then you spend some time with it and you start to feel a difference… There had to be a difference, there was a different perspective."
"Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists 1958-1968" is a revolutionary exhibition, the first ever to show women's art from this time period. Women artists were marginalized and ignored during this era, much like women of all professions from the era. Much of the female perspective was lost, despite the revealing truths about the limitations and the superficiality of this era.
Curator Sid Sachs spent six years accumulating the art for the exhibition, using private collections and scouring through the past to bring what should have been prominent artists to light. "Seductive Subversion" was organized by the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and will only tour three other galleries, including the Sheldon in Lincoln.
The exhibition will be at the Sheldon from July 30 through September 26, and is the latest of the gallery's exhibitions to feature women artists.
"We consider this the year of the woman," Kennedy said. "We really wanted to make this concerted effort to try to fill in the blanks, to try to give women some equal status that they haven't previously had."
The exhibition displays many forms of art, from sculpture, like "My Heart Belongs to Rosy" by Niki de Saint Phalle, to soft-sculpture, which Sach's essay credits women with the invention of, to woven carpets, three-dimensional paintings, neon lights, and more. The variance of media in the exhibition exposes the obsession with material in this time period, but also the widespread inspiration of women to reflect this era using different forms of art.
("The Men of Pop tried to remove substance, submerging themselves in manufactured, slick surfaces, whereas the women tended to retain the facture of the handcrafted object,"  Sid Sachs said in the accompanying essay for the exhibition.)
The title "Seductive Subversion" refers to the advertising ploys, the movie stars, and the way this mentality shaped roles during this time period. But that women are redirecting the messages, revealing them to be empty promises tied to commercialism.
"Especially in the fifties and during this whole pop era, the female as the object was loud and clear," Kennedy said. "So what comes across in this collection is that the women are putting it back to us… For example, the whole consumerism ploy of that pop era encouraged marriage, because of course if you got married then you bought a home, and if you bought a home then you bought appliances. Women were encouraged to buy, that you've got to have these certain appliances to have the proper home."
This can be seen in Idelle Weber's portrayal of marriage, with a detachment felt through the silhouetted figures, the same sarcasm spin on society as in her work "Munchkins I, II & III" where the men become anonymous, seemingly-soulless robots of business and society.
"Seductive Subversion" is a rare glimpse, a 40-year old time capsule, into the reactions of women to the superficiality and limited roles they were experiencing.
"Male artists were addressing that whole idea of advertisement, but in a very sort of detached way and they could get away with it," Kennedy said. "They could also address women in the house, that whole domestic idea, where for women it was really difficult to counter that at the time or even to address it because they were right in the middle of it."
Women as objects is a focus of the gallery, especially evidenced through the hyper-sexualized "Green Triptych" by Marjorie Strider, 1963, where the woman's breasts and butt physically extend from the painting. Strider's work makes her point clear, women were (and still are) used as objects to sell products through sex appeal.
The exhibition is a bright and colorful exploration of the female perspective. The pieces are fun to look at, but meaningful as well, because they represent a transition period for women, bridging the gap between prescribed behavior and self-identity and freedom.
Several events will introduce the exhibition while it is in Lincoln, including a lecture from Sid Sachs on Tuesday, September 14 at 5:30 p.m. in the Sheldon Museum's Edith S. Abbott Auditorium.
University of Nebraska-Lincoln's  Christin Mamiya, Associate Dean, Hixson-Lied Fine & Performing Arts, will give a lecture in the Ethel S. Abbott auditorium at the Sheldon Museum of Art on Tuesday, August 31 at 5:30 p.m. Mamiya authored the book, "Pop Art and Consumer Culture: American Supermarket" in 1992, and the title of her talk for the exhibition is "A Woman's Work is Never Done: Pop Art and the Home." 
shannonsmith@dailynebraskan.com