Named after Picasso’s groundbreaking 1907 painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon reimagines his five anonymous, mask-like prostitutes as individuals. I drew five real, emerging women artist from life In Sharpie on a wood panel, which I carved in relief to make a printmaking woodcut.
The woodcut f is an image capable of generating many versions of itself which is something that artists and, some women can do. As prints, these portraits become literal “working girls,” a play on Picasso’s subjects and the euphemism for sex workers, but also a nod to creative labor and the fraught cultural expectation that productive artists “sell themselves.”
The choice of wood also references the carved African masks that inspired two of Picasso’s figures, reclaiming their presence and symbolism. Unlike the masked women he depicted, these working artists are unhidden, unmasked. They are portrayed in an iconographic style reminiscent of an altar triptych as gesture of reverence and in hope that their work will endure and be celebrated in our, culture where female artists so rarely become cultural icons.
