Between Tongue and Teeth, artist Angela Fraleigh’s first collaboration with the Everson Museum, is a collection of paintings and sculptural works that question and reimagine the roles of women in art history, New York history, and contemporary media. In a style that weaves together realism and abstraction, Fraleigh creates works that range from intimate portraits to monumental figure paintings. Exploring themes of gender, sexuality, femininity, and power dynamics, Fraleigh’s artworks feature females who are no longer forgotten historical figures or background characters bound by male-dominated narratives. The women Fraleigh depicts become daring protagonists in stories of their own.
Plucked from old master works, or straight from New York history, the heroines of these artworks have been removed from their original contexts and gifted autonomy within the dreamscape-like realms of Fraleigh’s paintings. These immersive painted environments combine swirling abstract spaces and bold voids of color – the seen with the unseen. Fleshy forms are obscured by vibrant pours of color or lavish gold-leaf designs, while turned heads and cropped faces tease mysterious narratives of desire and whispered secrets. The ambiguity of these richly painted worlds, and the secretive nature of the females who inhabit them, create an unmistakable sense of allure, yet the resistance of Fraleigh’s female protagonists to submission, helplessness, or passive visual consumption, challenges typical notions of the role of women in an artistic space.
In this particular series Fraleigh highlights not the stories we've come to know, but the storytellers, and the act of storytelling, drawing attention to the power of narrative, and belief to shape the world around us. Hanging in the center of the five paintings is Scherezad from 1001 Arabian Nights, telling her sister complex tales to save her life and the lives of all other women after her.
- Subject Matter: Portrait
- Current Location: Hirschl and Adler Gallery