What sort of person can you see at the museum?

All of the following artworks will come from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM)'s open storage. This means, these works are on display for the public, but they are not in an exhibition. The availability of these artworks is exciting--and, revealing of some of the limits of the SAAM's collection. A work that is exhibited is read differently than a work that is not: more of the burden of interpretation is placed upon the viewer.

There are several ways to read a work of art. It's likely that, as a viewer, the way you read a work of art by evaluating whether you like it or not. Further reading of a piece may only occur in the instances where a piece really speaks to you (there's a lot to see at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, after all!). You, at least, probably understand the content of a piece, or try to understand what it means when figuring out your opinion, though. If a work depicts a person, you have to understand that person: is a person a young or old; is a person a peon or aristocratic? Does a work depict a woman, and how could you know? You may make the same judgements about work that don't even portray portraits--the curators of museums certainly do. So: how do you decide a work is feminine?

Femininity is not just an aesthetic role. When art is gender conforming, gender is treated naturally (and often, naturalistically). For women, femininity is gender conformity. For men, it is gender deformity. For everyone else, it is somewhat implacable. Femininity isn’t gender, like womanhood, but it is gender-ing. It is a quality that is in flux. This archive aims to show how complicated femininity actually is. The complications of gender, though, should be understood to exist in everything. With this, art and artists can be less entrapped by gender.

Minnie Evans, Untitled (Head Flanked by Angels above Sunset), 1970, colored pencil on paper

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Chuck and Jan Rosenak and museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment, 1997.124.109

“You were a domestic servant when you made these.
"Draw or die," said a dream.
A symmetrical thing measures itself
according to itself. Shoulders make a vase.
Wings have their own faces. Life-forms
share surfaces and rally into medallions.
Because of the admonition-
which didn't say, "Draw and live."”

--Excerpt from “Outsider: Minnie Evans” by Sandra McPherson

Minnie Evans was a free-associative artist, and a folk artist.

Symmetry, large eyes, and feminine-androgynous figures were common elements of her work. It represents a transitive nature; God sees through these enlarged eyes, and thus, all life, and all people, are each other at different stages. The feminine can be the same as the masculine, but staged at a different point in time.

Evans’s art is often explained in the same breath as Nina Howell Starr’s curation of it. There was a concentrated effort from Evans to create art, as there was for Starr to have Evans received as an artist. Starr advocated for Evans to be evaluated as a free-associative artist as white male contemporaries would have, explaining that the unconscious has continuously been a powerful source of inspiration and drive for successful artists.

Image Source: SAAM.

Milton Avery, Nude with Guitar, 1947, oil on canvas

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Louis and Annette Kaufman, 1977.43.1

“It helps that Avery's personality -- his gentleness, his humor, his conciseness--is directly expressed in his paintings, so that the general audience sees not only an exemplary lesson in modernism (that they can understand), but a very agreeable one as well.”

--Review: Milton Avery’s Good Example by Wolf Kahn

‘Nude with Guitar’ is a posed work with little detail. Its soothing color palette and simplicity is good-natured and pleasing to see. Extra rustic detail is imparted onto the sitter’s stool and the burlap tapestry behind.

What is least detailed is the nude person at the center of the work. Beyond words already signaled by the title, this figure has few characteristics. As many nudes depict women, a viewer may first presume it has to be a woman. But as the form is naked, there are no gendering articles of clothing that would cement femininity or masculinity. The gender of the sitter, as it is not depicted, is therefore unimportant. Avery abstracts a nude down, not to its bare necessities, but to its most soothing and reassuring ones. This work exists in pure androgyny.