Connections/Anonymous

My name is Amelia Peck. I'm a decorative arts curator in the American Wing, and my topic today is anonymous.

The majority of things I work with not only are they anonymous, but they are by women. Women are lost from the historical record most of the time.

What is left sometimes are just little scraps of fabric, a sampler, a quilt.Also

many portraits of women may be the only thing speaking for them.

It seemed very much that it was images of women I was attracted to, and it was images of everyday women, women like me.

This little votive, it's actually an image of a woman in childbirth and a very realistic image. There's something almost shocking that in 300 B.C. they were comfortable enough that they would actually make sculptures of something like this.

This is a Cycladic fertility figure. I look at it as a friend. I look at it and I always smile, because she's everything that I probably think is wrong about myself. And there she is being worshipped, and so she always makes me feel good, I go and I see her and I go, "all right, things aren't looking so bad."

I really enjoy powerful images of women, images in which they're active, in which they're taking their space and their place in the world.

The first time I registered this Roman portrait bust I was walking past many years ago, I had to stop and look at her because she looked like someone I knew. The deep intelligence that radiates from her eyes and her hand seems to be pushing out as if she's trying to get free, trying to have some agency in the world. I find

And this little dancer, she's caught in this moment of dancing, and you can imagine what steps she's going to take next.

that I'm attracted to images of women and daughters, and one of my favorites is of an accomplished woman who's playing a musical instrument and a little girl who stands behind her, looking at and looking up to this accomplished woman seated in front of her.

My fantasy about this piece is that the mother had the upholstery made for the front, and then she said to her daughter, "You're at school, I'll send you a canvas

shaped exactly the right way, please make me a back." And the

needlework on the back is clearly a schoolgirl work. It's kind of crude. And the back of this chair would have faced the wall. This was sort of a little secret.

This image, it is the ultimate anonymous portrait. This is a back, and a back of the head. It has a huge amount of power and a huge amount of sexiness, but I also am a little angered by it, because the woman has become ultimately, totally an object. The story

behind this quilt was that Adeline decided who were the most important people. She sent

out these little pieces of silk, she asked them each to autograph

the quilt that was going to be a portrait of her time.

Abraham Lincoln is on this, other presidents are on it, woman authors. This is like the Facebook of its day.

Sometimes I go to exhibitions where I am looking to be awed, I'm looking to be taken out of myself, but then I think there are other times where I may be going to look at art that will

explain to me who I am and my place in history itself. I'm really one of those anonymous women, when I'm gone

I will have some books that will be my record, but that's it and I do think about that and so I seem to like to put myself in line with all these women who've gone before me.