The classics professor Mary Beard asked a similar question in her TV series Shock of the Nude, which aired earlier this year in the UK.
“It’s a form of feminist ventriloquism – my voice, being spoken through a third party with AAB is the equivalent of a ventriloquist's dummy.” “This way, I can lead people gently into those conversations,” Williamson tells BBC Culture. Williamson began the project as way to engage students with feminist ideas, and in particular the way women are portrayed in art. The placard bearer is ArtActivistBarbie, a Barbie doll posed in front of artworks and monuments, and the playful alter ego of Sarah Williamson, a senior lecturer at the University of Huddersfield. Is the Renaissance nude religious or erotic?
How black women were whitewashed by art Gauguin’s beautiful and ‘exploitative’ portraits Another sign beside a statue in Iowa, US – of a bronze topless woman arching her back and holding her breasts as if to deliberately enhance her cleavage – reads: “Iowa as a mother figure offering nourishment to her children? Yeah.”
It shows a seated man bathing his feet surrounded by a clutch of fawning semi-naked women. At the time the Black Lives Matter campaign in the UK was drawing the national spotlight to the statues of slave traders, another activist was highlighting the way women are represented in civic statuary. “Just look at what you are being socialised to accept as normal…” says the activist’s placard, focusing on a monument outside the Trafford Centre in Manchester.