Book Review: Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists

Reviewed by Sophia Ihlefeld

Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists
Nonfiction by Donna Seaman
Bloomsbury, February 2017
$35.00; 480 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1620407585

Donna Seaman’s biographical compilation, Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists, fights to reverse the injustices history has inflicted upon women artists. With this noble mission, Seaman invites us into the lives of seven forgotten women artists: Gertrude Abercrombie, Joan Brown, Christina Ramberg, Lois Mailou Jones, Ree Morton, Lenore Tawney, and Louise Nevelson.

Seaman’s narrative shows strong, complex individuals who cannot be defined simply by their gender, race, or even profession. These artists were interesting, talented people with incredible life stories to share through their work. For example, the figurative painter Joan Brown created several pieces based off her life experiences, including the time she almost drowned while swimming across the San Francisco Bay from Alcatraz Island.

The artists in Identity Unknown tackle subjects that are relevant today. For instance, Louise Nevelson, the self-titled “original recycler,” was an abstract sculptor who used not marble but “used and discarded” wood, creating “wonder boxes” and “dream houses” painted entirely black. Seaman writes astutely, “How fitting it is that in this time of accelerating climate change, environmental crises, and unmanageable waste, an artist who perceived trash as treasure and found illumination in life’s cycles has herself been reclaimed and resurrected.” Toward a separate contemporary concern, Chicago Imagist Christina Ramberg’s feminist and fetishistic paintings are extremely applicable to women’s rights. Ramberg focused primarily on the female form, the subject often shown only from the neck down, bound and forced into submission by her wardrobe, hair, or hands. Her paintings offer countless metaphorical interpretations about women’s freedom. Additionally, Seaman illuminates the dual plight of Lois Mailou Jones: “Her gender was a mask not of her choosing, as was her skin color.” Jones’ perseverance paid off; she was the only female African American painter of the 1930s and 40s to achieve the fame and recognition she deserved.

Seaman’s refreshingly intimate descriptions of these women are as candid as they are beautiful. Seaman describes Gertrude Abercrombie—a surrealist painter whose unconventional and provocative self-portraits earned her the title “bop artist”— “she was not confident about love, marriage, or motherhood. She was insecure, often blue, lonely, angry, irascible, and narcissistic.” She writes as if she knew them personally, and refuses to gloss over their imperfections, even while she lauds their artistic geniuses. She speaks as much about their “adorable” children as she does their complicated marriages and overzealous drinking habits.

Identity Unknown’s call for remembrance of female artistic brilliance is thorough, poignant, and elucidating. Side by side with in-depth investigations into the lives of the aforementioned seven women, Seaman interweaves descriptions of other female artists and their work, including Toshiko Tazaezu, Frida Kahlo, Agnes Martins, Rebecca Shore, and Margaret Peterson.

Upon finishing Identity Unkown, we wonder why these accomplished women were allowed to shrink to footnotes in our art history books. Donna Seaman describes the forgotten art pieces so well, so beautifully, we can see them in our mind’s eye as if we’re the artists themselves, standing before the easel. She does the work of these “art sisters” justice. Like Seaman, “in the presence of their work, [we] undergo an illuminating frisson, an electrifying recalibration of [our] perception.”

Sophia Ihlefeld is entering her final year at Boston College, earning her B.A. in English with a Creative Writing Concentration. She is currently interning in the editorial department at Red Hen Press, and has also worked for Post Road Magazine and Fresh Ink Magazine. Her short stories, essays, and articles have appeared in Pour Vida Zine, the Boston College Medical Humanities Journal, The Seething Medusa Zine, and the Odyssey Online. She also has a children’s book, Dophia and Delia Dare the Dune Devil, available for purchase on lulu.com.