VIRGINIA REATH
Artist, Clinician, Activist
15x11 Mixed Media Collage
In the late 60’s and early 70’s, as a young artist, I became increasingly involved in the anti-war, feminist, and abortion rights movements alongside my art practice. While in art school, I began to find the practice of making art very confusing during such political upheaval. It certainly did not help that the art world was screaming loud that painting was dead!
It was during that time that I began to consider pursuing medicine & health care as my political work. I was motivated by a deep desire to change the world – to guarantee and protect autonomy and agency over our bodies sexual and reproductive. I left the formal study of art soon after, and went on to become a women’s health provider in women’s sexual and reproductive healthcare for the next 40 years.
In 1972 my best friend was at Brown and showed me a plastic speculum she had gotten at an event sponsored by Lonnie and Jeannie Hirsh, a mother and daughter team, teaching self-help speculum exams. They co-wrote a journal called “The Monthly Extract, An irregular periodical ", sponsored by Feminist Gynecological Self Help Clinics of America. To say the least, I was intrigued!
The right to know and the medical rights of women as patients was becoming a powerful movement that was gaining popularity across the country. Abortion had been legal in NYS since 1970, but now there was demand to make it national.
I ordered several plastic speculums and convinced my women’s group at Bard to become a self-help group, lit by flashlights and dorm lights we looked at each cervixes and checked our fertile mucous. I studied female anatomy at night and subsequently became a dedicated women ’s health advocate.
Performance piece at Cooper Union "Carnival Knowledge”
My interest in the experience of body and flesh has been deeply ingrained in me as a woman, as an artist, and intimately as a clinician. Even as I immersed myself as a clinician and activist in women’s health, I continued to be pulled back to art making as an essential life practice.
My medical practice in Gynecology has allowed me direct access to matters of the flesh, the interior organs, bleeding, sex, birth, pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion, disease, death which resist the idea of the body, as a singular static object…. these are the living situations of the body, which have become my interest and vocabulary in my own artwork.
The art work of Eva Hesse, Joan Snyder, Elizabeth Murray, Ana Miendeta, Carolee Schneeman, Hannah Wilke, Louise Bourgeois, Judy Chicago, Nancy Spero, Harmony Hammond, Joan Mitchell were and continue to be strong influences.
Simone de Beauvoir’s statement, “The Body is not a thing, but a situation,” best describes my work, both medical and artistic. In both art and medicine, I hope to reveal and respond to the situations of the female body.
The recent collection of sculptures, paintings & collages are my response to my despair and rage, when in 2022 The Dobbs Decision by the Supreme Court gutted the federal and civil right for a safe and legal abortion.
Blood Gloves Series
BLOOD GLOVES is a direct response to the blood and hemorrhaging shed by so many women and pregnant people trying to access health care for their own bodies.
So this is my history….as an artist, as a clinician, as an activist.
I have come full circle in knowing that art can be profound and political – which, like medicine, requires empathy and wonder – the antecedents to creativity and the imagination.
To look, to look away
To look back, to look
Again and back again
Understanding is action
Action is political
Art is the making
Life is the art of living on the edge of contradiction.
Repo Rights Stickers, 2024
