The 100 Day Project #4

Museum in Shrouds

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, 2017

The 100 Day Project, Day 4

I often make photographs inside museums. They are some of my favorite places — and also some of the most complicated. Within their walls, tensions between history, gender, and culture push up against every viewer's experience, whether they're looking for it or not.

Shortly after completing my master's degree in Art History at the University of Arizona, we moved to Philadelphia. I spent a lot of time at the Philadelphia Museum of Art during that period, wandering the galleries while contemplating what might come next for my career.

I made this photograph when the PMA was undergoing exterior work. The shroud caught my eye — the metaphor felt too on point to ignore. To me it represented the ways in which art history and museum acquisition practices have long concealed the work of women and people of color. As a fierce feminist, I walk through museums with a persistent question: whose art is not here, and why?

For centuries, women were denied access to formal art training — including, absurdly, figure drawing classes, because the models were nude. Never mind that those same women could walk through any gallery and encounter nude figures in painting after painting, sculpture after sculpture. The logic was never really about propriety. It was about who got to be an artist.

I'll be sharing many more museum photographs throughout this project, and the ways I continue to explore my complicated relationship with these spaces as well as the ways in which I work to disrupt it.

About the 100 Day Project: A global creative challenge where thousands of artists share a piece of their practice every single day for 100 days. I'm joining creatives around the world, and I'm excited to bring you along. Each day I'll be sharing one of my photos — some recent, some old, and some from my current project — along with the story behind it: where I was, who I was with, and why I love it.