Truncated Virgins

Between Christmas and New Year’s, I headed into D.C. to meet a friend, visiting from Papua, New Guinea, to see the new exhibit at the National Museum for Women in the Arts:  Picturing Mary:  Woman, Mother, Idea.  Picturing Mary: Woman, Mother, Idea | National Museum of Women in the Arts  According to the NMWA website, the exhibit “examines the concept of womanhood represented by the Virgin Mary and the power her image has exerted through time.”  To be honest, I was disappointed by the relatively one-dimensional representations of Mary depicted throughout. In all fairness to the exhibit curators, I should have read the website description more carefully beforehand, so that I understood the exhibit was presenting exclusively Renaissance- and Baroque-era masterworks (6^th to 18^th century) from museum, church, and private collections in Europe and America.  Had I done so, I would have known not to expect more unorthodox and, dare I say it, irreverent depictions of Mary.  Even while this impressive array of works revealed Mary in her myriad roles as daughter, cousin, and wife; the mother of an infant; and a bereaved parent, I could not help feeling impatient with these, to my mind, truncated representations of a mostly submissive and chaste Mary. 

                                          Elisabetta Sirani, Virgin and Child (detail), 1663.

Before going further here, and in the spirit of full disclosure, I feel obliged to confess myself a lapsed (read, recovering) Catholic.  But despite having left Catholicism behind as early as 1976 if not before then, I continue to nurture a fierce admiration for a Mary who I see as something other than a patristical icon of femininity, love, suffering, and chastity.  The Mary who I hold in my psyche is not such a unilateral figure.  Rather, she is a courageous feminine spirit who more closely aligns, in the way I’ve internalized her, with her Virgen de Guadalupe and Black Madonna manifestations.  That is, as Guadalupe, she is an intercessor, closely connected to the major events in a woman’s life—sexuality, childbirth, the loss of a child.  As the Black Madonna, she is the Queen of Nature, the agent of all fertile transformation in the outside world and in the psyche. These more cthonic Marys, with their potent feminine energy, speak to me much more strongly about what it means to construct a powerful and resilient female identity than the admittedly gorgeous images of passive maternal compliance depicted in the NMWA exhibit.

 "Coyolxauhqui Returns as Our Lady disguised as La Virgen de Guadalupe to defend the rights of Las Chicanas" by Alma Lopez. 

I think I speak for most D.C. area feminists when I say that I have always viewed Frida Kahlo as the NMWA’s poster woman.  The museum’s permanent collection proudly showcases Kahlo’s 1937 “Self Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky,” and NMWA’s gift shop prominently displays numerous items sporting Kahlo motifs.  Part of Kahlo’s genius was her willingness to take on taboo subjects which challenged cultural norms not to mention feminine beauty ideals.  I can only imagine how Kahlo, with her penetrating, unwavering gaze and a heavily arched eyebrow, is viewing the truncated Virgins who have taken up temporary residence in her D.C. home. 

                                       Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky, 1937