The home that the Woman's Building built: Cheri Gaulke and Sue Maberry construct a visual narrative of the lesbian family.
Artists Cheri Gaulke and Sue Maberry's feminist activism learned at the Woman's Building, combined with their lesbianism, radicalized them to create ongoing documentation of their family. This article examines how Gaulke has intertwined her domestic, private imagery and narrative with her artistic, public work in a way that reveals a useful mode for her to examine the range of experiences as lesbian, parent, and artist. Thus, these two bodies of work co-exist and inform each other in her oeuvre and in her art with partner Maberry. They have created a kind of sexualized display sometimes inverting heteronormative conventions while other times presenting the family as a single unit, transgressive in its happiness and unity.
Swartz
Anne
A
Department of Art History, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA 31402-3146, USA. aswartz@scad.edu
D003142:Communication; D005190:Family; D005260:Female; D019513:Feminism; D018452:Homosexuality, Female; D006801:Humans; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D011173:Portraits as Topic; D012933:Social Identification