Missing Women and Missing Parents at Tacoma Community College

by Molly Gilmore

When Will Muse Marry? from the Missing Parents series, acrylic on board, 25.5 X 37.5″ – photo courtesy of the artist.

Lynette Charters, whose playful yet pointed paintings highlight the many ways women have been overlooked, is the subject of an in-depth solo show at Tacoma Community College. The show, open through Jan. 31, is the Olympia painter’s largest-ever solo show, featuring 57 paintings.

The bulk of the gallery is devoted to a museum-like installation of 32 paintings from the Missing Women and Missing Parents series, Charters’ best-known work. The acrylic paintings reference familiar works by male painters, replacing the disregarded subjects’ faces and bodies with expanses of unpainted wood; knots suggest eyes or nipples.

“Women are presented but not represented in art, society and history,” the artist writes on her website (http://lchartersart.com). “There’s a kind of a general erasure of the female lived existence unless we’re in the home looking after kids and it’s Mother’s Day,” she said, adding that the same is true of parents regardless of gender.

Charters’ dedication to diversity and inclusion landed her the show, according to gallery coordinator and faculty member Jennifer Olson, Ph.D. “Her work really underscores the mission and the values of the college,” Olson said.

The first work you see when you walk into the gallery is DaVinci’s Vitruvian Muse, a takeoff on the drawing Vitruvian Man, which is meant to depict a physically perfect man. Charters chose to make her focus a woman of more or less middle age and middle size. “DaVinci really thought the perfect person was a man not a woman,” she said. Lots of people do still. … Even in this modern day this world is not designed for women; it’s designed for men.”

Missing Cecilia Payne — painted on a tea towel — shows Payne, an astronomer and astrophysicist, and a metallic gold “tea stain” that could also be seen as the Sun or a hydrogen atom. In her 1925 doctoral thesis, Payne proposed that stars were made up mostly of hydrogen and helium. Photo by Rachel Payne.

Olson arranged the Missing pieces according to the period of the works upon which Charters is commenting, heightening the feeling that the viewer is walking through a museum. That feeling shifts at the rear of the gallery, where one wall holds 25 smaller works, clustered like treasured objects in a grandparent’s parlor.

These variously shaped works — depicting women of achievement on decorative dishes, tea towels and other everyday objects — comprise the Matilda Effect series. (The title refers to the work of Matilda Joslyn Gage, a 19th-century suffragist who, like Charters herself, publicized the contributions of forgotten women.)

The pieces are cheeky, yet they make a serious statement: Women are rewarded for domestic service yet little recognized for accomplishments in the wider world. “Women have invented things,” Charters said. “We are great scientists. We are great world explorers. It’s seen as somehow unfeminine or unwomanly to go out and do things. It doesn’t get recorded in history.”

The artist is having fun setting that record straight. “The Matildas are the joyful part,” she said. “The Missing Women pose the question of why women aren’t included in exhibitions and museums and history, but the Matildas are all about what women achieve and how important their achievements are. We don’t know most of these women. This work has been very gratifying.”

Cholmondeley Muses and Children, from the Missing Parents series, acrylic and foil on board, 63.5 X 32″ – photo courtesy of the artist.

The breadth of work on view isn’t the only reason to make the trip to Tacoma. The Jan. 9 reception will also include a theater piece. As at past Missing Women shows, John Serembe (Charters’ husband and OlyArts’ publisher) will play a clueless docent whose sexist comments are both hilarious and disturbing. “A couple of people walked out of John’s docent tour at one of his performances,” Charters said. “He has such a dry delivery, and they thought he was being serious.”

Lynette Charters of Olympia is having her largest ever solo show at Tacoma Community College. DaVinci’s Vetruvian Muse, her stunning takeoff on his drawing Vitruvian Man, has a wall to itself near the gallery’s entrance. Photo by John Serembe.

Solution: Actor/playwright/director Kate Ayers — who by the way owns three Missing Women paintings — wrote a script in which the paintings get the last word. The performances, at 5:45 p.m. Jan. 9, feature not only Serembe and Ayers but also Heather Christopher, Andrea Weston-Smart, Bill Peer, Yuri Serembe, Michael Gaden and Jamie Crawford Kidd, who also provided costumes and props.

Charters, who was just chosen to create the image for April’s Olympia Arts Walk map, is continuing work on both the Missing Women/Parents series and on the Matilda pieces. She’s also aiming to add more multimedia elements to future shows. “I’m really thrilled about the extra dimension of the theater,” she said. “I want to come up with some other fun things to do.”

WHAT:
Lynette Charters exhibition

WHEN:
Through Jan. 31
Opening reception Jan. 9, 5-7 p.m. with performance at 5:45 p.m.

WHERE:
The Gallery at Tacoma Community College,
6501 S. 19th St., Building 4, Tacoma

GALLERY HOURS:
10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday (open till 8 p.m. Jan. 16) and 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Friday

LEARN MORE:
http://tacomacc.edu/tcc-life/arts-culture/the-art-gallery

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