Throughout her career, Madeleine Lemaire (1845-1928) painted hundreds of works depicting women in various states of dress—and undress—and companionship with other women. These images tended to receive positive notice in both exhibitions and the popular press, with no recorded commentary on the purported appropriateness of a so-called “woman artist” representing seemingly Sapphic scenes. Yet today it remains common to hear that “women artists” on the whole did not paint such images, and when they did, such images were rarely if ever sexualized. In this presentation, Ringelberg will share a number of these images and ask the audience to rethink the mental frameworks that cause us to be unable to see them in their complexity.

Kirstin Ringelberg is Professor of Art History in the Department of History & Geography at Elon University in North Carolina. Their book Redefining Gender in American Impressionist Studio Paintings: Work Place/Domestic Space was re-released in paperback in 2017. Recent articles include “Reading Cisheteronormativity into the Art Historical Archives” in Arts, spring 2024, “Trans visibility and trans viability: a Roundtable,” co-edited, with Jill Casid and Cyle Metzger, in the Journal of Visual Culture in 2022, and “Prismatic Views: a look at the growing field of transgender art and visual culture studies,” co-authored with Cyle Metzger in the Journal of Visual Culture in 2020. In 2024, Ringelberg was the Every Page Foundation Fellow at the Clark Art Institute, for work on their book-length project Chez Madeleine Lemaire: Gender and Genre in the Queer Belle Époque (in progress).