Amidst national uncertainty swirling about politics and a global pandemic, one woman decided to paint the walls a suffragette purple. “I Beseech You: Women, Art, Power, and Politics” made its debut on September 8, 2020 as the latest exhibition of the Schmucker Art Gallery at Gettysburg College, complete with purple walls and all. Gallery Director Shannon Egan, who was responsible for the paint color, explained that the greyish shade of lilac is meant to mimic the suffragettes’ hue of choice as a symbol of loyalty to the movement. These past couple months, controversy has been stirring around two incredibly powerful women: Amy Coney Barrett superseded the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg in October as the new U.S. Supreme Court Justice in a highly contested nomination. Similar to these two ideologically opposed justices, “I Beseech You” might appear fragmented at first glance since the artwork covers subjects ranging from global warming to domestic abuse. However, there is one clear motif that holds the minimalist space and our country together in these times of division: It’s all about women.

        This fall installation of the Schmucker exhibit gets its namesake from the hallmark of the exhibit: a purple-tinted chromogenic print of a lone sailboat out at sea. Titled after the text printed across the photograph, Tell me, I beseech you, when I casted my vote to you, did I cast it to the wind? (1996) is the work of Carrie Mae Weems, an American artist from Portland, Oregon who has a talent for repurposing other artists’ work in ways that politically thematize otherwise benign pieces. This purple print of the sailboat, for instance, loses any connection to the sunny beach day it once depicted, once it has been drenched in Weems’ violet hue. In addition to latent connotations of the suffragette color, passionate femininity, and Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple (given Weems' identity as an African American Artist), the purple shade also deepens the contrast already found within the image. Light, puffy clouds overhead turn seemingly stormy, the waters mercilessly dark, and the little sailboat quite alone in the wide world. The title words are written in a quaint, nineteenth-century-esque font that indicates that women’s voices being lost to the roaring wind is a historical rather than contemporary phenomenon. As the statement piece of the exhibit, Weems’ print suggests that the surrounding gallery is a place for women’s calls and opinions to be heard through art, setting the tone of works to follow.

        Nonetheless, Weems’ lonely sailboat seems benign in comparison to Sue Coe’s Butcher (2011) positioned directly on its right. The title is bolded in a somewhat Germanic font that, colored a blood red tint in contrast to an otherwise black and white drawing, makes for a chilling, Dracula-esque effect. Below the vampiric word, an emaciated cow hangs from a lamp post as other cows, pigs, sheep, and hens shuffle forward from the mass of silhouettes in the background to the disturbingly vivid foreground of the work, where they await slaughter from maniacal men with clubs and pitchforks. The idea for this very of-the-times piece about feminist ecocriticism, however, did not originate from Coe’s 2011 rendering. Coe’s inspiration came from an ur-Butcher entitled An die laterne or “To the Lamp Post” by German expressionist Max Pechstein in 1919. The original was produced as a commission for a postwar journal of the same name, promoting the Social Democratic Party and emphasizing the reign of terror that would result if the young Weimar Republic were attacked. Coe’s work is a near replica in style and tone of Pechstein’s, however, the original is devoid of animals, depicting a man’s corpse hanging from the lamp post instead and a score of protestors pumping fists in the air and bearing red banners as they take to the streets. The historical callback to Pechstein has proved somewhat of a problem for Coe, whose work has been criticized for misusing history related to the Holocaust and comparing the slaughter of humans to animals. 

        Despite its controversial subject matter, however, Coe’s work does pair surprisingly well with Jessica Houston’s miniature collection of pieces named The Call of Things (2019). The main attraction of this collection is simply a bright pink plastic bag in a glass case. The bag embodies Houston’s use of “talking objects” to confront contemporary issues surrounding the environment, colonialism, and politics. A series of images by Houston that seem to be largely blotted out by bright, monochromatic spray paint accompany the artistic trash; a 2015 work entitled North Warning (Dew Line Station, Cambridge Bay) is covered in a sickening shade of sunshine yellow that fills the vast majority of the frame, leaving only a tiny sliver of blue sky at the top. Houston’s minimalism emphasizes the growing dangers of global warming in truly poignant yet graphically blunt ways.

        Judy Chicago’s collection The Birth Project (1980-1985) takes the cake for gorgeous yet jarring graphics. Chicago found inspiration for the project when she noted the absence of the birthing process from most iconographic artwork. As the title suggests, two of her needlework pieces in the gallery explicitly depict women giving birth, their abdomens fissuring like ground under earthquakes as the noticeably sperm-shaped seed of life shoots forth, and wavy lines of pain and ecstasy emit from the mothers’ bodies. Chicago’s third featured piece is subtler and moving in its quietude: nestled in warmth and safety, it depicts the living being of the unborn child.

     “I Beseech You: Women, Art, Politics, and Power” features other female artists including Faith Ringgold, Donna Ferrato, Käthe Kollwitz, Alison Saar, Zoë Charlton, Ana Mendieta, and Kay Walkingstick. Although the exhibit reached its conclusion on November 20, the superpower of women and art lives on. This evolving female-centered subset of artwork shows that now, a hundred years since the 19th Amendment first gave women the right to vote, there is still much to be written in the American story of powerful women.

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