Rachel
Returned to lender
This work of art was on loan to the museum and has since been returned to its lender.In New York in the late 1970s, Lankton began making expressionistic papier-mâché dolls of celebrities and downtown personalities. This doll-mannequin of the performance artist Rachel Rosenthal (1926–2015) was once clothed and stood in a boutique window in the East Village. Lankton’s work reflects her own traumas, addiction, and life as a transgender person. The emaciated Rachel evokes the fragility and queerness of a body in extremis, even as she strikes a pose that emphatically proclaims presence and demands renewed engagement with androgyny, fixed notions of identity, and the nature of beauty.
Artwork Details
- Title: Rachel
- Artist: Greer Lankton (American, 1958–1996)
- Date: 1986
- Medium: Papier-mâché, metal plates, wire, acrylic paint, and matte medium
- Dimensions: 28 × 21 × 11 in. (71.1 × 53.3 × 27.9 cm)
- Classification: Sculpture
- Credit Line: Collection Eric Ceputis and David W. Williams, promised gift to the Art Institute of Chicago
- Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art