I Dream Therefore I Am: Women Artists in Surrealism at Ava Gallery in Lebanon!

Kate Conley, Guest Speaker

I Dream Therefore I Am | Women Artists in Surrealism

Friday, November 13, 5:30-6:30 PM

Surrealism began with friends sitting in the Paris apartment of André Breton in 1922 and experimenting with putting themselves into self-induced trances in an attempt to access their inner beings through a kind of Freudian automatism. Two years later, Breton published the “Manifesto of Surrealism” in which the surrealists jointly declared their wish to integrate dreamlife and the unconscious into our understanding of what it means to be human, to adapt the humanist Cartesian formula “I think therefore I am” into a new version: “I dream therefore I am.” Only men signed the “Manifesto,” but there were always women in the room; women were always part of the surrealist conversation. In a movement founded in friendship, women found their place and by the 1930s, women artists and writers were exhibiting and publishing with their male partners and friends. This talk looks at a series of women artists linked to the surrealist movement from the 1930s to the present day, all of whom sought to define what surrealism was for themselves and, in many cases, what surrealist women looked like and sounded like by providing personalized answers to the dreamy portrayals of women found in the poetry and paintings by men. Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, Léonor Fini, Remedios Varo, Claude Cahun, Jacqueline Lamba, Lee Miller, Kay Sage, Joyce Mansour, Suzanne Césaire, Frida Kahlo, and Meret Oppenheim all defined what it meant to be a woman in surrealism through their work. As they become increasingly recognized today, more contemporary artists are continuing to advance the legacy of surrealism, including Penny Slinger, Sam Ainsley, Lilia Ziamou, Susanna Wald, and Breton’s daughter Aube Elléouët.

Biography | Kate Conley is Chancellor Professor, Emerita, of French and Francophone Studies at William & Mary and Edward Tuck Professor, Emerita, of French and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth. She is the author of Surrealist Ghostliness (Nebraska, 2013), Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and the Marvelous in Everyday Life (Nebraska, 2003), and Automatic Woman: The Representation of Woman in Surrealism (Nebraska, 1996) and editor and co-editor of books and special issues of journals on women in surrealism, Robert Desnos, and surrealist collecting. She published “From the Studio to the Field: Breton’s ‘Hopi Notebook’” along with her translation of André Breton’s “Hopi Notebook” in the Journal of Surrealism and the Americas in 2023. Her current book project is on “Mapping the Surrealist Collection.” She is co-editor of the International Journal of Surrealism (University of Minnesota Press, 2023-).