Janie Cohen

What does it mean when an item within a museum talks back? How are the concepts of the trained gaze, the panopticon, and the sacred feminine connected? Artist and writer Shanta Lee Gander probes these questions and more in Dark Goddess: An Exploration of the Sacred Feminine. This book accompanies the exhibition of Gander's photo series of the same name, on view at the Fleming Museum of Art at the University of Vermont from February 8 to December 9, 2022. This innovative exhibition catalogue features essays by University of Vermont professors Dr. Vicki L. Brennan (Department of Religion) and Dr. Emily Bernard (Department of English), alongside interviews with Gander's models for the Dark Goddess series, and original written work inspired by items in the Fleming Museum of Art's collection. Conceived in tandem, the publication and exhibition weave together themes of the human gaze, an artist's self-inquiry, history, ethnography, and an exploration of the duality of sacred and profane.

The catalogue of a 2015 exhibit at the Fleming Museum. Picasso's major 1907 painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, created an uproar in the Paris art world and laid the foundation for the development of Cubism. The Fleming Museum's exhibition explored Picasso's extraordinary process in creating the painting, through innovative installations and advanced technologies that transformed the museum experience. The painting's ongoing legacy is examined through the work of a diverse group of American, African, and European contemporary artists. Picasso found inspiration for Demoiselles in art history and contemporary visual culture. Through a variety of new visual technologies, visitors to the exhibit could understand how he synthesized and transformed these diverse sources - from Iberian, African, Oceanic, and Egyptian art to Baroque painting, Cezanne's and Gauguin's work, and colonial photographers' images of African women - to launch a radically new artistic vocabulary. The largest section of the exhibition highlighted the continuing pull of the painting - over 100 years after its creation - as evidenced in the work of international artists, including Leonce Raphael Agbodjelou, Gerri Davis, Damian Elwes, Julian Friedler, Kathleen Gilje, Carlo Maria Mariani, Sophie Matisse, Stas Orlovski, and Jackson Tupper.