Ida Applebroog: Monalisa

In 2009, a box of forgotten notebooks was rediscovered in the basement of Ida Applebroog’s studio–Strathmore drawing tablets, with the words Vagina Drawings scrawled on the cover. Forty years prior, Applebroog took sanctuary from the pressures of the home in an evening bath. Her nightly soak offered her moments of meditation and, equipped with her drawing pad, she began drawing portraits of her crotch. Applebroog’s newest body of work, Monalisa, is in many ways an extension of that ritual. The centerpiece of this project is a room-sized wooden structure covered with more than 100 new vagina drawings–reappropriations of the 1969 originals. In the catalogue essay, Julia Bryan-Wilson contends that the installation, with its signature figural obsessions and urgent feminist force, feels like an epic culmination of [Applebroog’s] entire oeuvre. Monalisa offers new insight into Applebroog’s work with full-color reproductions of the never-before-seen 2009 drawings, images of the installation and an essay by Julia Bryan-Wilson.