By the time she set off for a research trip to Tibet a decade ago, artist and former professor Claudia DeMonte had already been all over the world. So imagine her surprise when, working alongside Tibetan women to produce fabric squares appliqued with images she considered feminine, she realized her horizons still weren’t broad enough.
” When I talked to the women and tried to show them things, they don’t wear high heels or use toasters, and I realized how Western-based my images were,” she says.
The finished applique project, Women’s World, is part of Claudia DeMonte: A Silhouette, a collection of DeMonte’s artwork on display through March 15 in the university’s Art Gallery.
The exhibition highlights some of DeMonte’s defining works from 1976 to 2005, almost the same time period she taught at the university. Starting in 1972, DeMonte commuted to College Park from New York City to teach a variety of art classes, including painting and art theory. She was named Distinguished Scholar Teacher and professor emerita after she retired in 2004 to focus on her art, which was gaining more and more recognition.
DeMonte’s art had already appeared in solo and group exhibitions all over the world before she started getting increased attention during the past decade for her works, which focus on global women’s issues.
One example is her most recent project, Real Beauty, which she curated rather than created. Throughout DeMonte’s world travels, she collected traditional dolls from more than 80 countries, each reflecting its country’s standard of beauty, which varied from the heavier Kenya doll with thick black hair to the Estonia doll with long blond hair and blue eyes.
“We’re all supposed to be the same and age the same and not look different from one another, and I’m really opposed to that,” DeMonte says. “We should really rally around our uniqueness and appreciate that in each other.”
The hanging fabric installation DeMonte is currently working on has a similar theme. Fabrics from more than 120 countries, each with an embroidered country name tag, will be used to literally express the concept of interwoven global culture, she says.
DeMonte’s interest in global women’s issues started when the lessons she learned while creating Women’s World in Tibet inspired her to take on the role of curator for the first time.
“I naively said to my husband, ‘I think I should ask a woman in every country in the world to send me an image that means woman to them. I think it will take six months,'” she says.
Three and a half years later, DeMonte finished Women of the World: A Global Collection of Art, an assembly of works answering that question by female artists from 177 countries. The project quickly became DeMonte’s most popular, although it is not on display at the university.
As in Real Beauty, each country’s contribution was as varied as its culture. Submissions from developing countries showed women toiling in the fields or serving their husbands, and Afghanistan’s contribution, for which its creator received death threats, was a picture of a woman begging on the street, DeMonte says.
Equally touching, she says, was the universal theme of England’s submission – a bulletproof baby’s vest.
“The reaction to Women of the World has just been tremendous,” she says. “People have cried.”
DeMonte’s projects were born of a love for travel she has nursed from her childhood days in Queens, the most ethnically diverse county in the country, where she was surrounded by the National Geographic magazines her mother bought for her and where she watched her building superintendent drive up every day in a car plastered with bumper stickers of places he had been to, she says.
“I remember thinking, ‘When I grow up, I want so many stickers you can’t see out my car window,'” she says.
Years later, two inspiring art teachers who had traveled all over the world moved DeMonte to do the same. She and her husband, also a teacher and artist, would use their breaks to take trips, usually to the more remote corners of the world such as Laos, New Guinea and, for a year, Bangkok.
The trips transformed the way DeMonte created and taught art, she says.
“They say pink is the navy blue of India, and when you go somewhere and the color sense is that different, it just completely changes the way you think,” she says.
DeMonte’s experiences made her the perfect person to run a lecture series on women and minorities in the arts during the years she taught at the university. The series was named for her after she retired.
“Teaching is one of the greatest gifts in my life,” she says. “It was really a wonderful 33-year ride.”
Contact reporter Alia Malik at malikdbk@gmail.com
