Ode to Domesticity

The jaguar was originally painted by Audubon in 1849 which is also the year that Wisconsin criminalized abortion as a felony offense.
During the later half of the 19th c. the medical profession united with legislators and eventually clergy, all white males of course, to criminalize women’s healthcare. The Comstock Act (1873) criminalized women learning about their bodies including menstruation and birth control. Legislation was also created refusing admittance of women to medical schools such as Harvard and criminalizing homeopathic and herbal remedies practiced by poor women to induce menstruation when pregnancies were unwelcome or dangerous.
I reinterpret the jaguar using charcoal that is both organic and fragile, messy and ethereal. She emerges from a collage background of bible pages and 19th c wallpaper design. The jaguar expresses her displeasure, railing against the confines of subjugation and the weight of patriarchy. Audubon is internationally renowned, but only very recently have we considered his anti-abolitionist views and enslavement of human beings. His complicated history was intentionally deleted from his legacy, from history, like the criminalization of women's healthcare.