Chris Pontello

Idealizing Innocence: Lisa Yuskavage’s Process of Free Association  Lisa Yuskavage’s artwork consists of highly sexualized, but seemingly innocent, subjects with exaggerated anatomy and suggestive positioning. Her work leads some critics to accuse Yuskavage as pandering to the male gaze and thus continuing the history of objectification of the female figure. However, Yuskavage admits that despite being aware that the viewer will perceive her subjects as “sex machines” she is also “trying to include how they feel about their own predicament.” This is best explored through a process of free association, a process of one word or image spontaneously suggesting another without any apparent connection, which is what Yuskavage uses throughout the evolution of creating her work Triptych, 2011. In an interview with Monica De La Torre she admits that she likes to reach into the unknown to figure out where the painting is going, explaining further that, “I put the canvases up on ...

73 rd and Lowe, Englewood, Chicago; August, 12 th 1963. Photo Credit: Gordon Qu inn and Jerry Temamer of the Chicago Tribune. Bernie Sanders was arrested for resisting arrest during a public-school segregation protest on August 12 th , 1963, at age 21. He was protesting in response to the Chicago school board putting black students from overcrowded schools into trailer classrooms to avoid moving them to adjacent underutilized white schools. Martin Luther King was inspired to come to Chicago in 1966, which was the first northern expansion of his protests in the south, because of the success of Chicago’s school desegregation demonstrations in 1963-1965. Senator Bernie Sanders was arrested within a summer when one hundred and fifty-nine other protestors were also arrested, but only four were fined, including Sanders. The penalty was $25, which equates to $202.73 today. He was one of the few signaled out because he acted in a position of leadership, instigating the prote...