Women, Trauma & Visual Expression

WOMEN, TRAUMA & VISUAL EXPRESSION explores the hows and whys of women artists' visual expressions of personal, cultural, and collective trauma. Amy Stacey Curtis compares the lives and work of nine women artists (four from our past--Artemisia Gentileschi, Kaethe Kollwitz, Frida Kahlo, and Eva Hesse--and five contemporaries, including Curtis herself, from Chicago, Washington State, San Francisco, New Jersey, and Maine). Drawing from extensive research, ambitious surveys, interviews, and personal experience, Curtis discusses the anatomy of trauma, the history of women's trauma research, the artist's work process and connection to audience, trauma's content, symbols, patterns, and archetypes, the stigma of trauma and "trauma art," and the collective visual manifestation of coping mechanisms used to survive trauma.