Sheroes ’97 was a lineup of the finest in contemporary painting, photography and sculpture by 50 local women artists, held in the elegant second floor of Hanson Gallery on Royal Street in the Quarter. The show was a big, rich bowl of gumbo (if you’ll forgive the hideously overused metaphor) of styles and intentions that ranged from the glamorous photo-realism of Adrian Deckbar, to the gentle, dream-like surrealism of Monica Zeringue, to the passionate, political banner-making of Sharon Jacques. Now, generalizing about women’s art is a good way for any male critic to paint a target on his ass, especially if he’s a hairy, marginally evolved, male critic like myself. Nonetheless, a show like Sheroes that assembles artists using their sex as a principal criterion demands that we ask ourselves what distinguishes female art in general.

Here are two observations I’m willing to make. First, I see no formal or material distinction between female and male art. There’s no such thing as a typically female composition, or typical female style. Women paint with violent expression, they also paint with lilting romanticism; they render the human figure accurately, but they also distort reality wildly; they weld, but also knit; their works are small and intimate, they are also inescapably large and dramatic. They do it all. Sheroes shows that local female artists swim in the mainstream of contemporary art using all the same tools as their brothers. Now there are discernible differences in subject matter between female artists and their male counterparts: more domestic images and issues. Less phallic symbolism (replaced, of course, with vaginal symbolism), and these days perhaps more attention to the female anatomy. Of course male artists have traditionally dwelt (sometimes obsessively) on the female form, but women artists make psychic use of their own anatomical image in a much different way than the boys.

That leads me to one of the many subtexts in the show: the symbolic reclamation of the female form by females. If you walk through any museum you’ll notice that one of the major themes in all of art history is the female nude. You’ll find room upon room filled with images of naked women that were painted or sculpted by male artists. The paintings and sculpture of the naked women were sold by the male artists to male collectors who marveled endlessly over the immodesty of the naked women, as they heralded the talent of the male artists. Eventually the paintings and sculpture ended up in museums—bought in large part by male directors or donated by male patrons. Images of naked women were articles of commerce, objects to be coveted without the complication of mind or emotion. Left out of the socio-commercial equation entirely were the dignity and individuality of females everywhere.

But it’s 1997 and things have changed. In her small tempera painting Scars, featured in Sheroes, Mary Jane Parker used a bilious green, female torso shattered into icy shards, to indicate the emotional fragility that sometimes lies just beneath the skin. In Parker’s work, a woman’s body, which was traditionally an object of desire, becomes a symbol of the complicated, psychological netherworld to which men have traditionally tried so assiduously to remain oblivious. Likewise, Robin Levy’s small, handsomely made relief sculptures of balsa wood and waxed paper which she calls her Suture Study Series dwell on the physicality of a woman’s body in a way no male artist would go near. Here layers of translucent paper are sewn together with surgical catgut over small renderings of the naked female torso. This combination of the allure of nudity and the repellence of medical procedures is a wry, visual wisecrack on the incompatibility of romance and realism in traditional images of females in art. Elaine Jennifer Williams’ blown glass objects cover similar psychic territory. Her piece titled Sensory Investigation is a small grove of attenuated, clear glass vessels that seem to rise off of a silken pillow like a brood of plasmic snakes The serpents’ heads might be oxygen masks, they might be vaginas, they might be the anatomical structure that leads ova away from the ovaries and into the uterus. This amalgam of truly magnetic beauty, dignity, a certain sense of deliberate nastiness, and one of the best uses of glass as an art medium that I’ve ever seen, blows the walls off the gallery like TNT. Another devastating poetic explosion is Shelley Boles’ In Store, a perfectly crafted leather suitcase in the shape of a young lady’s bust. Boles’ piece resists simple, linear interpretation, but it seems to me to cry out that a woman’s body belongs to her alone, the valuables are kept inside, and that she will grab her bag and hit the road whenever she chooses. In all of these works, women artists have taken their bodies back, artistically speaking, and they ain’t never gonna let em go. Sheroes wasn’t designed as a political exercise per se, but any show that is exclusively dedicated to one group or another has to accept a little political musing by onlookers. Here’s my take: politically, Sheroes was more a celebration of victory than a call to action. Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, female artists had to struggle for their share of the art establishment pie, but now, it seems, women artists are a huge part of the scene. Sheroes demonstrates the depth of accomplishment of the female part of the art community. And if inequities still exist, Sheroes demonstrates that they will not persist for long. Unfortunately, Sheroes is gone. I came down early in October, but I understand it’s an annual event, so don’t miss it next year.

On November 1st, I want you to come see Steve Rucker’s installation Fish Farm Blues at the Contemporary Arts Center. There, I’ve said it. I know that the needles on your conflict-of-interest meters are probably creeping toward the red. Is it fair for me, the curator of the CAC to use my OffBeat forum to invite you to a show? In my own defense, the show is free, and more importantly I’ve been a fan of Steve Rucker for going on twenty years, since way back when he was lighting hay on fire under his ceramic sculpture up on the levee. Every time Steve has had a show—and it doesn’t happen that often—I’ve tried to get people to attend. Steve’s artistic philosophy goes back to the 1960s and ‘70s. Back then, one of the popular artistic—not to mention social—impulses was a bare-footed, Henry David Thoreau-influenced, anti-industrial return to the earth. Crafts such as weaving and wood-carving flourished, but nothing was more earthen than clay. Ceramics enjoyed a popularity unmatched since the Arts and Crafts movement at the turn of the century. Another artistic impulse at the time was Installation or Environmental art. Why, artists began asking themselves, does a painting have to be contained in a frame on the wall? Why does sculpture have to stand on a pedestal? Couldn’t you just make the art stretch from the floor to the ceiling, and from wall to wall? Steve Rucker remains the best installation artist I know. He takes ceramics, ordinarily a very object-oriented medium, and makes it into an experience.

This time out, Steve plans a huge pile of glittering fish flopping amidst the legs of cartoon fishermen in the shape of river hazard markers, with fearsome giant hooks and hopelessly tangled line dangling from every appendage, as basketball-sized red and white bobbers drift overhead like satellites, all made of ceramic, all lit with unearthly aqua-blue neon light, all as weird as can be. Steve never fails to deliver more than just a selection of objects for sale, he gives his audience an experience, a sensation, something to relish in the moment. His installations are very demanding to make and they take up too much space to stay around for long. In other words, catch Fish Farm Blues while you can.