Marisol Escobar

Stable Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above on January 4, 1963 for $5,400

Chicago, Arts Club of Chicago, Marisol, December 1965 - January 1966, cat. no. 16, illustrated
Milwaukee Art Museum, on extended loan, 1975-2005
Chicago, The David and Alfred Smart Gallery, University of Chicago, Selections from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Robert B. Mayer, January - March 1976, cat. no. 45
Milwaukee Art Museum, From Figure to Floor: Sculpture in the 20th Century, September - November 1998, cat. no. 39

Nathaniel N. Bennett, M.D., "Have Sexual Attitudes of your Patients Changed in the Last Ten Years?", Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality, vol. III, no. 12, December 1969, p. 17 illustrated in color
Carolyn S. Howlett, Crafts and Individuality, New York 1969-70, illustrated
In Time Magazine, December 28, 1970, illustrated in color on the cover
Elaine Donelson and Jeanne Gullahorn, Women: A Psychological Perspective, New York 1976, illustrated
Myron F. Weiner, M.D., "Money Mismanagement: Impact on Family Life", Physician & Patient, August 1982, illustrated in color
Dictionnaire Encyclopedique Ouillet, Danbury, CT, 1982-83, illustrated
Avis Berman, "Marisol", Smithsonian Magazine, February 1984, illustrated
Thomas Lathrop, Tanto Mejor, New York 1986, illustrated
Charlotte Rubinstein, Woman Sculptors of America, Boston 1990, illustrated
Exh. Cat., Washington, D. C., National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Magical Mixtures: Marisol Portrait Sculpture, 1991, p. 22, illustrated
Heather Anderson, "Making Women Artists Visible", Art Education, March 1992, p. 20, illustrated in color
Exh. Cat., Milwaukee, The Patrick and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, Dolls in Contemporary Art: A Metaphor of Personal Identity, 1993, fig. 7, p. 15, illustrated
Sawako Noguchi, ed., Contemporary Great Masters: Marisol, vol. 15, Tokyo 1993, p. 16, illustrated in color
In The Sciences, March/April 1996, illustrated in color on the cover
Jonathan Fineberg, Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being, New York 1995, fig. 7.22, p. 193, illustrated
The Open University of Israel, "The Psychology of Gender" (study booklet), 1997, fig. 15, illustrated in color
Exh. Cat., Purchase, Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, Marisol, 2001, fig. no. 8, p. 22, illustrated in color

“The artistic practices of women require deciphering, like monuments from lost or unfamiliar cultures.”  (Griselda Pollock, Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts, London 1996, p. xv).

Art critic, Griselda Pollock, has argued that art made by women is different – but not in ways that are easily recognizable. It is a difference, rather, punctuated by the social, sexual and cultural responsibility that weighs on the artistic psyche of the female artist.  This proposition is particularly relevant to the oeuvre of Marisol Escobar whose assemblages emerged from the shadows of the male-dominated Pop Art movement.  Defying the social and gender hierarchies that existed, Marisol, in addition to female sculptors such as Niki de Saint Phalle and Lee Bontecou, received a great deal of critical attention in the 1960s, as their art work could not be reduced by Formalist aesthetics or immediately recognized for the sex of the artist. Marisol’s early works were autobiographical and explored the self in relation to society and family. 

The Family was a highlight of her second Stable Gallery exhibition in New York. In it, she renders a middle class outing and saturates it with satire. The stylish mother, whose hat covers her eyes, grips the bar to her babies’ carriage and wears an elated, but seemingly mindless smile. The deliberate placement of the children alongside the mother suggests the weight of responsibility on the mother and becomes a visual affirmation of the mother’s existence, role and reality. The assemblage of the father towers above the other figures and possesses a surprising autonomy, perhaps since his role in society was the most fixed at that time. The doll clutched by the elder child is a small stuffed image of the artist herself, an image used before in a more amplified fashion in Baby Girl and Baby Boy (1963). The artist has noted “The boy represented America holding me.” (Nancy Grove, Magical Mixtures: Marisol Portrait Sculpture, Washington, D.C., 1991, p. 23).

Marisol has whittled and carved and assembled her family on a specific mold, where the characters appear benign enough upon cursory examination. Look more closely at Marisol’s family, an image poignant enough and representational enough to grace the front cover of Time magazine, an image borrowed to illustrate an article about the generic American family dynamic entitled Help in December of 1970. Marisol’s The Family becomes a visual coup d’etat – whispering silent volumes of the identity and existence of a generation. Her work can be understood as an ongoing dialogue between the self and society that depended, in the 1960s, upon her ability to identify with people from every walk of life– appropriating her own body and image as a found object.  Created at a time when the potency of one generation was ending and a new one just emerging, Marisol’s The Family remains, today, an important visual essay on the social dynamics of family life.