Artist: Micol Hebron
Exhibition: Gendered Equity: The Gallery Tally Poster Project
Media: Social influencer/ Mixed
Website: http://micolhebron.com/
Instagram: @unicornkiller1
Micol Hebron is an American born artist that is based in Los Angeles. Hebron studied theater and visual arts at the University of California, San Diego from 1991 to 1992, and the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, Venice, Italy, from 1993 to 1994. She went on to graduate summa cum laude from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a Bachelor of Arts in fine art in 1995. In 2000, she graduated from the UCLA with a Masters of Fine Arts in new genres and contemporary art history. She is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Chapman University.
Hebron is most known for her “inappropriate” artwork as facebook and instagram would call it. Her art normally involves ways of working and includes both individual projects and crowd-sourced, collaborative projects. She almost never includes the fabrication of objects like painting, sculpture, or drawings. She is a feminist who presents her ideas and thoughts throughout her artwork and actions. Micol’s art is constantly getting taken down from Facebook and Instagram because of their censorship guidelines. In 2013 Hebron launched Gallery Tally, a collaborative art project in which people around the world were tracking women’s representation in art galleries and creating posters for exhibition.
Micol Hebron’s art is very eye opening to the problems with society that we face today. One particular piece that consisted of male nipple stickers covering a female’s has the most meaning in my opinion. Her meaning behind it was to show how unfair it is to censor women’s nipples but not nipples that belong to men. It all feeds to the idea of women’s bodies being sexualized which only makes life harder for women. She poses topless in her pictures to make a statement that she won’t succumb to the rules of the patriarchal state that the world is currently in. Her passion towards gender equality is shown throw these powerful images of her body. Her body represents power and is a form of feminist activism in today’s day and age.
I believe Micol’s art is bold and beautiful. It corrects us from our wrong depictions of the woman’s body and pushes us in the direction of giving women the respect to not sexualize them. One thing I can connect her art with is Ancient African Art. When I visited Ethiopia last summer, I saw lots of different kinds of art. One thing I noticed was the amount of art that displayed nudity. I came to understand how different the Western world is compared to the African world. It shows how they don’t view the body as a sex symbol, but value the human body for it’s beauty. I believe that is one of Micol’s main messages in the art she produces.
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