1929 – 2023
Born in New York, Ida Applebroog explored themes of gender, politics, sexual identity, and violence in her art, which consisted of paintings, sculpture, books, as well as film. She was a feminist boundary-breaker who dealt with cliched concepts of female beauty, sexual pleasure, gender roles, power dynamics, and violence in ordinary life.
In 1960, as Ida Horowitz, she checked herself into a mental ward where drawing – in India ink, watercolor, and pastel – would become her salvation. In the hospital for six weeks she made over 100 fantastical images in which abstract forms collided, flowed, and were engulfed by others.
While her maiden name was Applebaum, she later renamed herself ‘Ida Applebroog’ as she burst onto the New York art scene at age 45. She joined Heresies, the feminist art collective, which published a journal of art and politics.
She used comic-like images of simplified human forms with bold outlines in her art. Her “Mona Lisa” 2009 and her “Modern Olympia Scrolls” 1997-2001, a riff on Manet’s “Olympia,” celebrated women’s freedom to revel in the pleasures of their bodies. She studied taxidermy for her series called “Angry Birds of America,” a twist on Audubon’s “Birds of America.”
She had many solo exhibitions in the United States, France, and Germany. The winner of a MacArthur Achievement Award, her work resides in the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim, and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. She was the subject of a documentary, “An Arc of Light.”
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