Ito Shinsui 伊東深水 (1898-1972)

ages 10-30: in the labyrinth

Build a life that is unmistakably yours. Form your identity. Explore and refine your taste. Know what moves you, what inspires you. Be your own muse, go to shopping malls and smell new perfumes/try the clothes on instead of getting your inspiration online. A woman without a strong sense of identity risks losing herself in this world.

I remember my mother once saying that she had "nothing." That sentence has stayed with me. Many women were robbed of their identity whether by marrying the wrong man or by being reduced solely to the roles of wife and mother. They were never truly given the opportunity to explore their womanhood in all its depth.

Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson on the set of Lost in Translation, Sofia Coppola, dir. (2003)

Louise Bourgeois, Fillette (1968-99)

Robert Mapplethorpe’s iconic 1982 portrait of Louise Bourgeois, who died recently at 98, speaks volumes about Bourgeois’ free-spiritedness, grace, tenacity and the kinky perversity of her work. In it, the 71-year-old sculptress looks like a shaman seductress, one of Munch’s vampiric castration queens, a maker of voodoo dolls and a diva grandmother rolled into one. Under her arm she casually cradles her 23-inch long, seven-inch circumference latex-over-plaster sculpture of a phallus, Fillette (1968). In French the term means “helpless little girl.” While Bourgeois was no little girl, there’s something radically vulnerable about how she’s holding the work – she almost seems to pull back the sculpture’s foreskin and give the thing a little tickle. Bourgeois said this gnarly abstract penis, with ovular testicles and a hook at the top, was “the shape of my husband, the shape of the children” (she had three sons). “I wanted to represent something I loved,” she said. “I obviously loved representing a little penis.” Little? Anyway, as Bourgeois later said, “It’s very complicated.” Indeed it was. As she said, “I have nothing against the penis. It’s the wearer.”