UNLV Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art
Las Vegas, Nevada
We believe everyone deserves access to art that challenges our understanding of the present and inspires us to create a future that makes space for us all.
MessageSeeing/Seen
- September 24, 2021 - February 26, 2022
- Exhibition
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- Artwork
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- Artists
Q’Shaundra James
Saints: THE MOTHERS of Gynecology, 2021
digital painting
Courtesy the artist
Her name was Anarcha. She gave birth to children we do not know or remember.
Betsey the same. Lucy was first on the table—her body cut, limbs restrained, without anesthesia. They did not heal, but learned the names and applications of the implements
used to pierce them. With this knowing, they practiced the healing of the women
who came after.
On loan to physician J. Marion Sims from 1844 to 1849, they were recognized not as women but as chattel. Hands bound to cook his meals, bodies conscripted to earn his legacy, each was splayed open. He bade them bend, forehead pressed to table, hind-parts lifted. Through their bodies, they birthed the renown of an enslaver textbooks would christen “father” of modern gynecology.
What did the Mothers see when they were summoned, brought there on the back of a master’s wagon to fix what had been broken? Did they divine two centuries forward to find us as we are resplendent. Degreed. Monied. Free. Did they imagine us seen—in full possession of our bodies, visible in our hospital beds, voices heard, wounds tended.
- Created: 2021