Women on Wednesdays series highlights female artists for more representation

The Women on Wednesdays speaker series is an event held on the 2nd and 4th Wednesday of each month, highlighting the achievements and research of women working in the academy. This past week’s speaker, Katherine Weiss, the chair of the Literature and Language Department and a professor in the English Department, discussed the art of a little known German artist, “Claire-Lise Holy: An Artist’s Reflections on Theatre and Literature.”

Holy was a visual artist who worked in costume and set design as well as painting. Holy’s artwork was on display in the Reece Museum during Weiss’ talk, accenting the speech with their haunting images. Weiss’ connection to Holy’s artwork is well beyond the simply academic. Holy was Weiss’s aunt and a source of inspiration for the professor. Weiss decided to discuss Holy’s artwork in order to explore a common artistic response to the pains of modernity, violence and isolation in Germany in the 20^th century.

Holy’s work is filled with shadowy figures, fractured selves and conspicuous windows. A deep alienation runs through her artwork, an aesthetic sensibility that further aligns her work with those of playwright Samuel Beckett, the subject of much of Weiss’ scholarship. Holy worked on a production of Samuel Beckett and Mortan Feldman’s opera “Neither,” as well a television documentary on German playwright Bertolt Brecht.

Though she has worked alongside many prominent artists and writers, Holy’s work has largely gone unrecognized. Though working within the confines of television, Holy established herself as an auteur in her own right.

Women’s work continually goes unrecognized as their male peers are celebrated for equally visionary work. The voices of modernism, despite the insistence of academia, thrive from the margins. Weiss’s speech, alongside Holy’s artwork, helped bring to light the art and labor of women often excluded from the dominant narratives of history.