Marisol Escobar passed away this weekend at the age of 85. A member of the 1960s NYC art scene she traveled in the same circles as Andy Warhol and Willem de Kooning, drifting from pop art party kids to abstract expressionists (who hated each other, of course.) Characterized by wooden, sculptural figures, Marisol’s work had a folk art aesthetic but played with a pop art sensibility, using bright colors and American cultural commentary. She seemed to take what Rauschenberg was doing with his assemblages or Warhol’s celebrity obsessions and made them even more imposing. There’s a one-upping quality to her craft; a piece like her version of The Last Supper is a good example of this. A Marisol sculpture swallows a whole white-walled gallery room whole, every other piece in the room looks too dull, too flat in comparison.
Her work just couldn’t be so neatly defined. But whether she really was a pop artist or not, Marisol didn’t care what people labeled her work as long as she was making it. She was acutely aware of how fleeting fame could be and how her beauty played a part in it. It’s hard to find writing from the ‘60s and ‘70s about Marisol’s art that actually is about her work, mostly its about her looks. Whether she was as quiet and mysterious as the media made her out to be is up for debate, I kind of suspect she just didn’t like talking to reporters, particularly men. What’s clear is that Marisol hated it.
I think you get to a point in all areas of history or journalism when you realize the people of the past were doing it wrong, and have always been doing it wrong, for women. When you write about women’s art badly, you are erasing them. It’s devastating to think about the centuries of women artists whose lives were erased or misconstrued in history books, let alone an artist popular during the 1960s. If the texts of the past are sexist, misogynist, can we really know the women they describe? Hyperallergic’s post on Marisol’s death seemed to say it all “Marisol, Innovative Pop Art Sculptor Written Out of History, Dies at 85.” Marisol has lived in New York City pretty much since the early 1950s, but she only had a solo show at a museum here last year. Even then, it was a traveling exhibition. A few years ago people were reporting a resurgence in her work. It’s really not too late to write her back in.
