ABSTRACT
In a small study, executed in acrylic and permanent marker, Martha Edelheit identified her allegorical female role model as Hero Woman. She eventually transposed and elided the two-word appellation to form a neologism, Womanhero. Although Womanhero unequivocally replicates the pose of Michelangelo's David, Edelheit significantly transformed the biblical hero of her sixteenth- century forebear. Edelheit's fascination with the interchangeability of gender, which indisputably influenced Womanhero, is already evident in her erotic watercolors, executed between 1961 and 1966, especially the fragmented paper doll motifs that eventually found another form of expression in Anna and David and Portraits: Flesh and Stone. Maureen Connor's engagement with the strictures of traditional femininity found another manifestation at Acquavella Galleries in 1982. Woman led the artist to work with the organs of animals and humans, cast in glass, which are 'aspects of the body that aren't so seductive or commodifiable'.
