Every time art professor Maureen Kochanek teaches the women artists course at Seton Hill University, she concludes with the same statement.
“In a perfect world, I wouldn’t teach this course,” she tells her students at the Greensburg school, explaining how female artists have been pushed to the periphery of the field.
For Kochanek, the “Women in Art” exhibit at You Are Here art center in Jeannette is essential to breaking down barriers for female artists. Around 30 artists identifying as women submitted work to the art center’s biennial exhibit, which opened March 2.
“I know historically that women have been marginalized in every career,” said Kochanek, of Pittsburgh. “In visual art, even how you could be educated as a female artist — you couldn’t study the nude. You couldn’t study the body.
“If you couldn’t do the figure, you couldn’t compete with the big boys and do history paintings and religious paintings. You were already 10 steps behind.”
A guest curator for the exhibit, Kochanek worked with center co-founders Mary Briggs and Jen Costello to assess the submissions.
The curators added a twist to the exhibit this year, said Costello, of Hempfield. Each artist who wanted to submit work to the exhibit was assigned one of four prompts to push them out of their creative comfort zone — the male or female gaze, female connection to the natural world, nature versus nurture and the fully realized body.
“Sometimes as artists, I think we become very settled within our own patterns of what we do and how we create our art,” Costello said. “We wanted to give something a little challenging and have them think outside the box — politically, socially, personally — to see what type of art would be submitted.”
The prompts were effective, Costello said. Some of the artists submitted personal pieces, including an oil painting of a mother breastfeeding and a collage that features a poem, which the artist read during the opening reception.
Many of the pieces celebrated female body positivity, Kochanek said.
“It wasn’t a Barbie perfect kind of thing,” she said.
The center’s Gallery Veronica will feature a tribute to Grace Marrow, a longtime Pittsburgh artist and teacher who died at the age of 73 in 2021.
“I would like to see the viewer not just understand the social impact of each of the statements that the artists make,” Costello said, “but also maybe connect (to) it emotionally through their 2D or 3D work.”
