Our society’s essentializing stereotypes often cast members of the female gender as superior communicators, for better or worse. At best, women who know how to use words well are often cast as harmlessly garrulous. At worst, a woman’s communicative command incites fear and begets blame. Was it not Eve who caused the fall of all man from one all-knowing god with her simple power of persuasion when she asked Adam to eat of the apple? Was it not Hillary who put Trump in the Oval Office with her emails?! Either way, it seems that history has a way of turning women’s words against them.Taking as its theme the powerful yet limiting structure of language, Coustof Waxman’s “Grammar” features drawings by four women artists — Drea Cofield, Esther Kläs, Linda Matalon, and Jeannie Weissglass. The show suggests that drawing, like good grammar, can be a tool to express both one’s inner thoughts while reflecting a greater political structure in which we all participate. Consider Weissglass’s “Lion Strut, “which depicts a topless woman riding a male lion, controlling the beast with naught but reins attached to her nipples. Despite the potent imagery, the work is infused with anxiety thanks to the artists’ heavy-handed smudges and erasures, the bulk of which obscure the woman’s face. Similary, Cofield’s lush Matissie-ian landscape, “Sleeper,” features a figure with long, flowing hair and male genitalia dozing aimlessly in the foreground. In the middle of the composition, a male form displays buttocks red from punitive spanking. He vaguely charges with a hand in the air toward someone in the background; whether the furthest form is a man or a woman is unclear, but they hold their head in their hands in a weeping gesture. Sadness, abuse, rage, ambiguity, and apathy are all represented in the drawing, but none of the figures seem to be aware of the other.What “Grammar” reveals is a language of pain and persistence that doesn’t require words, because sometimes words fail us or fall on deaf ears and we must seek new modes of communication, whether it be through drawing or, today, marching.
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