#FlashbackFriday ~ This month thirteen years ago my work appeared in BUST, a hard copy lifestyle magazine that has been on the racks since 1993 covering the arts, sex, and culture through a third-wave feminist lens. It was incredibly validating to have a leading progressive women's publication acknowledge my work.
Back then, people rarely categorized my work as art. What I created lived in limbo between high art and sportsmen trophy mounts. Even though a “no kill, no waste” ideology was the foundation of my work, my character was relentlessly attacked. Meanwhile, no one blinked an eye when men worked with animal materials that were not humanely obtained. How my art related to the modern feminist movement and its mission to challenge gender-role stereotypes was barely acknowledged in those days. Taxidermy has traditionally been practiced by men. In the last quarter century a small handful of people, primarily women, began recontextualizing taxidermy by using its components in unorthodox ways to create fine art sculpture. This slowly began to neutralize the stigma attached to these materials. Now females are proliferating in the field of conventional taxidermy as well as the fine art world of rogue taxidermy/taxidermy art. BUST was great exposure for me, but more importantly it encouraged women to explore new territory. Many women over the years have told me this article introduced them to my work and inspired them to work with animal materials. Some of these women even became taxidermy instructors. These female instructors have noted their student body consists mainly of women and that some of their female students have gone on to become instructors themselves. Ethical taxidermy workshops have since spread across the country, and in doing so, played a key role in the taxidermy revival that is currently occurring. Taxidermy is now enjoying a level of popularity that it hasn’t experienced since the Victorian era.
So, a shout-out to @BustMagazine and writer Christy DeSmith. Thank you for fostering the feminist aspect of the Rogue Taxidermy art movement and supporting a genre that is reshaping the forefront of contemporary art. A lot has happened in the art world this past decade, and someday people will be reading about it in art history books.
“You’ve come a long way baby”
