Puerta’s artworks strike a gentle balance between whimsy and sincerity.
female body
Posted inArt
Last of China’s Lotus Feet Women
As the last generation of Chinese women with bound feet ages into their final decades, Jo Farrell set out to photograph the survivors of this brutal beauty tradition.
Posted inArt
Dumb Racist Art Project: White Woman Sells Naked Oprah
Artist and fashion designer Peggy Noland’s four dresses of Oprah’s face Photoshopped onto variously sized black female bodies perpetuate American pop culture’s rampant racism. Modeled by a white woman, the dresses suggest that anyone can go ahead and “try on” a black woman’s body in sizes “petite, average, or obese,” all categories defined by white beauty standards.
Posted inArt
Blue Is the Color of Desire
Blue Is the Warmest Color, which clocks in at just under three hours, may be one of the most ambitious film love stories ever made. There are movies that paint first romance as a coming-of-age story; others try to capture the process and feeling of falling in love; some dissect the series of events leading to the end of a relationship. In Blue, director Abdellatif Kechiche has brilliantly captured all of the above.
Posted inOpinion
Deconstructing Barbie’s Disproportion
The blogosphere and the mainstream media have exploded this week over the story of artist Nickolay Lamm, who used 3-D modeling and Photoshop to create a “normal”-looking Barbie. But lest we forget, the fact of Barbie’s ridiculous proportions is not news.
Posted inArt
Female Artists, Female Bodies
I was standing with a female painter friend in the Metropolitan Museum recently, in front of work by Van Gogh, when she said, “There are no rules.” Then, after a beat, she added, “Or he was hallucinating all the time and painted exactly what he saw.” For women, rules define a set of social expectations that are meant to keep them under control. In the arts, purportedly so much more liberal than the rest of society, this problem is acutely magnified, since culture tells us who we are, both literally and imaginatively.
