Anita Steckel : Anita Of New York

The Suzanne Geiss Company
76 Grand Street
New York, NY

Anita Steckel’s large-scale New York Landscape collaged paintings fuse imagery inspired by the human, art historical, and  urban bodies. Supine female figures, erect phalluses, dollar bills, the Mona Lisa, and other massive cultural symbols are inserted into the skyline. They sit on skyscrapers, make love, even battle in a humorous take on the city’s fraught, psychosexual sense of identity.

 The Giant Woman series explores a more directly personal agenda. In these black and white photo collages, Steckel superimposes her own face onto vast female nudes that are embedded into recognizable New York City sites and events. In one iconic scene, a Giant Woman hangs over the Chrysler Building, her abdomen pierced by the spire.

 Steckel engages with the deeply personal to highly political by combining socio-political commentary, sense-of-place imagery, surrealism, and personal fantasy. An active member of the social movements of her time, Steckel embodies the feminist mantra “The Personal is Political” and was at the forefront of introducing erotic ambiguity into the field of feminist art. In 1972, a Rockland County legislator attempted to censor many of the works that will be included in this exhibition due to their sexual imagery.  Admonishing the censorship of art in general, Steckel’s response was that, “If the erect penis is not wholesome enough to go into a museum, it should not be considered wholesome enough to go into women.”

Download Press Release