Last summer, Anne Buckwalter visited the house where Emily Dickinson once lived in Massachusetts. In a parlor, she studied a painting of the Dickinson children above an ornate fireplace.
The answer is now on the wall at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland. Buckwalter painted an ornate living room similar to the one she visited at the famous poet’s home. But above the fireplace is a portrait of Marsha P. Johnson, a prominent figure in the gay liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
Buckwalter’s paintings are full of these little Easter eggs. She uses domestic spaces to explore femininity and sexuality, and the scenes she paints are both everyday and erotic. She developed this body of work in part by visiting the historic homesteads of women who lived in New England in the 19th century, including Dickinson. She then transposed those period details with the fixtures of her own life in the 21st century.
“The house as a framework takes center stage,” said Jaime DeSimone, chief curator at the Farnsworth. “Then there are all these layers of interpretation in subject matter. As you pause and peel back the layers, there’s this slow reveal, should you see it, of Anne’s deep curiosities of gender and sexuality and erotica and public and private space and women’s rights...”
-Megan Gray
