“This is my response to George Bush and the Supreme Court, which is no. Women are going to have their rights taken away. The Supreme Court bonehead idiots, testosterone-driven power mongers, are saying that we’ve got to roll backwards. My piece is saying that with the fetus, you tell it to roll backwards and whatever they’ve decided its new definition is it will agree with. The same thing with the child. But a woman has the choice to say no.”
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Activist painter Diane Grams is talking about Only the Innocent Must Obey Orders, for which she won an honorable mention in a group show currently at the Hyde Park Art Center. Dense and textural like most of her work, the red, white, and blue piece combines varying thicknesses of linseed oil and paint with strands of human hair. Across the surface are words roughly stenciled and line drawings of a fetus and a Girl Scout somersaulting backward while a woman holds semaphore flags that spell out “no.”
Grams works from the conviction that artists must be resolutely engaged in addressing social issues. “We are the people who have the vision. I’m fascinated by the activism kind of art. I could live off selling things to the Merchandise Mart, but what I value in art is when I look at something and it opens up a space in my brain that wasn’t there. That’s what I want my work to do.”
