When We Worshiped Women
The New York Times has posted a review of the newly opened exhibition “Worshiping Women: Ritual and Reality in Classical Athens” at the Onassis Cultural Center. According the the article, a main goal of the show is to correct the misconception that women led a passive existence in Athenian society.
“It is true that they lived with restrictions modern Westerners would find intolerable. Technically they were not citizens. In terms of civil rights, their status differed little from that of slaves. Marriages were arranged; girls were expected to have children in their midteens. Yet, the show argues, the assumption that women lived in a state of purdah, completely removed from public life, is contradicted by the depictions of them in art … it is using art to survey where, within a system of institutionalized restriction, areas of freedom for women lay.”
Where were these areas of freedom? According to the show’s literature, from within a religion that honored goddesses.
“…the exhibition brings together 155 rare and extraordinary archaeological objects in order to re-examine preconceptions about the exclusion of women from public life in ancient Athens. The story told by these objects, and experienced in the galleries, presents a more nuanced picture than is often seen, showing how women’s participation in cults and festivals contributed not only to personal fulfillment in Classical Greece but also to civic identity.”
The show is divided into three sections: “Goddesses and Heroines”, “Women and Ritual”, and “Women and the Cycle of Life”, each presenting a different vantage point to consider women’s roles, both divine and mortal, in the Athenian context. The show runs through May 9th, 2009. If you’re in the New York, New York area, it certainly seems worth a look. One can only imagine how differently Western culture would have developed if, in the gradual arc towards women’s liberation and equality, we had kept the goddesses around.
ADDENDUM: As if by synchronicity, shortly after writing this, I came across a listing for another goddess-themed art exhibition in nearby Brooklyn.
“Nine extraordinary ancient female figures are the focus of the third Herstory Gallery exhibition in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. The Fertile Goddess explores these objects that served as a source of inspiration for the depiction of the Fertile Goddess at The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago, on view in the adjacent gallery. The exhibition, which will be on view December 19, 2008, through May 31, 2009, includes both the oldest sculpture in the Brooklyn Museum’s vast collection, made by people living in Mesopotamia in the late fifth millennium b.c.e., and a ceramic figure made by Judy Chicago in 1977.”
For more information on this exhibit, click here. You may also want to check out my blog entry on Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party”. Looks like the beginning of 2009 is shaping up to be pretty friendly to the feminine divine (at least in the art world).
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