Women And War: From Troy To Terrorism

About This Show

Ann Stewart Anderson’s exhibition Women and War: From Troy to Terrorism presents images created to emphasize the roles women have played during war.

History is filled with depiction of battles: wars fought with swords and bombs, on horseback and with drones. Troops are killed and injured. Some are decorated heroes, others remain the unknowns. Generals plot, front liners lead surges with bravery and valor. Military events form national histories of territorial expansion, of ideologies defended and defeated.

The combatants leave wives and sisters, mothers and aunts, grandmothers and lovers, children and mothers in law-thousands of women whose lives are clouded by war induced grief. They mourn the deaths of sons, raise fatherless children, and live with husbands and fathers who bear permanent physical and psychological wounds.

There are no Arlington Cemeteries for mothers, no Arc de Triomphes for orphans, no Wall of Remembrance for widows, no Eternal Flames for sisters.

Anderson presents these survivors through painted images of the iconic women from antiquity who have become symbols for the effects of war on females, modern female combatants and widows, of mixed media depictions of the men lost in battle. Women and War: From Troy to Terrorism acknowledges and honors the women for whom war is about destruction and who inevitably live out lives permeated with the unfathomable sorrow of wartime loss.

Show Details

Dates: Opening Night: November 15, 2011 Final Performance: December 18, 2011