Reproductive: Health, Fertility, Agency at Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College

Jess T. Dugan, Self-portrait with Vanessa and Elinor (2 days old), 2018

By EMMA FIONA JONES October 15, 2024

Within the Western art historical canon and the art market, the term “reproduction” typically connotes a decrease in value. But what if we were to reframe acts of repetition, ritual, perpetuation, modification, or regeneration as inherently precious?

Reproductive: Health, Fertility, Agency at Vassar College’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center embraces embodied research and intergenerational knowledge as modes of artistic practice. As its name implies, the exhibition deals with the production and reproduction of bodies—both human bodies, and bodies of work. In the space of three galleries, narratives of pleasure and pain unfurl in image, form, and text, mapping the creation, transmutation, and deterioration of organic forms.

Before entering the exhibition proper, viewers are confronted with a grid of 12 mixed-media collages by Wangechi Mutu that challenge hierarchies of bodies, matter, and meaning. Collectively entitled Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors, the series rewrites—or, more accurately perhaps, overwrites—representations of the Black female body within medical texts. Layering glitter, faux fur, magazine cutouts, and other materials over the pages of a nineteenth-century medical folio depicting uterine and cervical disease, Mutu renders abstracted, expressive faces that assert their presence on the page with wry vitality.

Wangechi Mutu, Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors, 2006

A mysterious rectangular form suspended from a metal pipe and encased in plexiglass hovers a few feet from the back wall of the first gallery. What at first glance appeared to be a quilt abruptly morphed into a slab of meat as I got closer. Both impressions were, in a way, correct: The lifeless form, at once body and textile, comprises strips of fleshy silicone, stapled together in the form of the flag of the thirteen original U.S. colonies. Here and there, short, stiff hairs protrude from suggestive folds.

KING COBRA, documented as Doreen Garner, seeks to honor three enslaved Black women—Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey—who were repeatedly subjected to painful experiments at the hands of J. Marion Sims, often known as the “father of modern gynecology.” The work, titled Betsey’s Flag, encapsulates registers of meaning grounded in the body that cannot be rationalized or articulated in image or text. Garner provokes the question: Whose bodies are sacrificed so that other bodies can be preserved, protected, perpetuated?

KING COBRA, documented as Doreen Garner, Betsey’s Flag, 2019

The back of Betsey’s Flag is a dizzying amalgamation of vivid pinks and reds, a patchwork of fleshy terrain in varying states of scarring and repair. Gobs of beads protrude from mottled mounds of silicone. I found myself longing to step back from the work to view the back from a distance, which its proximity to the wall precluded. However, given the evident immense weight of the form, the positioning of the “flag” no doubt faced structural limitations that restricted curatorial choice.

Works such as Candice Breitz’s The Matrix engage the senses while eluding fetishization, shifting the focus from the reproductive body itself to the nebulous matter that dwells in the space within and between bodies. The Matrix is a photograph of a placenta, created during the production of Breitz’s science fiction fantasy video titled Labour. Lying on a worn, stained, white sheet with the umbilical cord gently furled in a nest of tissue and blood vessels, the enigmatic mass, neither living nor inert, asserts the quiet power of reproductive processes and intergenerational bonds.

A short passageway formed from two plexiglass panels encasing images primarily sourced from alternative feminist publications of the 1970s provides a short reprieve from the weight of the surrounding works. Carmen Winant’s A History of My Pleasure is beautiful in its mundanity. The sea of images evokes French feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous’ call for écriture féminine, a creative force grounded in the “female” body, in her seminal 1975 essay “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Young girls lie semi-clothed on a couch, legs intertwined in the air, laughing; nude figures splash through frothy rapids in innertubes; two women in leotards stand back to back as other dancers flit past them. The collection of photographs raises the question: What would our collective identity look like if we tended to archives of pleasure and care with the same reverence as visual legacies of nationhood, domination, and destruction?

In the next gallery, a documentary-style video plays on a loop. Candy Guinea’s Mariposa documents her arduous journey to conceive via insemination with her nonbinary partner, Castro. In light of recent threats to access to in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and other contemporary reproductive technologies in the U.S. and beyond, Guinea’s work takes on renewed urgency. At the same time, the work provides a rare vision of queer futurity, the power of which cannot be overstated.

Rounding the corner, viewers are met with the soft, tired gazes of two figures each in turn holding a sleeping baby swaddled in white. The pair of photographs, depicting the artist Jess T. Dugan and their spouse with their newborn daughter, evokes Audre Lorde’s articulation of the erotic:

“. . .a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire.”

The two figures exude a sense of stillness that radiates into the gallery. Looking directly into the camera, each one meets the viewer’s gaze with a protective stare that is at once vulnerable and impenetrable.

The fleeting joy embodied in the work of Guinea and Dugan cannot nullify the brutal exploitation of Black womxn on which the modern medical industry is built, or the fragility of queer access to reproductive care. As we face a renewed effort on a national and global scale to paradoxically constrict access to both contraception and conception, the bodies of Black and queer womxn are once again in the crosshairs. And yet while the works presented here draw on histories of violence, they also serve the vital role of sustaining legacies of collective resistance and care.

On view September 28, 2024 through February 2, 2025. WM