By: Corina Li
Doreen Garner is an American performance artist, sculptor, and tattoo artist born in 1986, in Philadelphia. Graduating with an MFA in glass from Rhode Island School of Design in 2014, she did not move to other cities nor countries to further study or work. Instead, she is still currently working and living in Brooklyn, New York. Most of her artworks feature themes such as violence, history, women rights, and racism. All of her artworks consists a sense of gruesomeness and she purposely created this kind of emotion through adding other materials into her artwork. For example, Doreen Garner would often explore with elements such as colored beads, crystals, and synthetic hair to make her sculptors more realistic and like the actual insides of a human.
However, she never meant to scare the viewers with her gruesome looking artworks. Doreen Garner quoted “It’s not about creating a gruesome work. It’s about creating subtle nuance where you don’t completely know how to feel. And maybe that’s what stays with you”. As mentioned before, Doreen Garner’s artworks mostly revolve around one concept which is the enslavement or mistreat of black women in history. For example just like the art exhibition, “White Man On a Pedestal”, which she held in Brooklyn, New York. Those exhibited art pieces in this exhibition are all gruesome looking and are about how Dr. J. Marion Sims (Known as the father of gynecology) performed painful experimental surgeries on enslaved black women. In this exhibition, Doreen Garner concentrated on how Black people were mistreated and exploited in the medical field because they believe that Black people suffered from less pain than White people.
References:
“Doreen Garner.” Art21, https://art21.org/artist/doreen-garner/.
Deanna Lee, Brian Redondo, and Lindsey Davis“Teaching History by Sculpting Experience.” Art21, Mar. 2018, https://art21.org/read/doreen-garner-teaching-history-by-sculpting-experience/.
Comments