NEW LONDON, CT.- The Lyman Allyn Art Museum presents the exhibit Femme Brut(e) through February 4, 2007. This exhibition features works by significant women artists who demonstrate an interest in pushing the limits of their medium, whether it is photography, drawing, or painting, as well as those who challenge traditional expectations of women’s subject matter. The show features works from the Big Daddy series by May Stevens, Nancy Graves’ lunar map prints, works by Barbara Kruger, Miriam Schapiro, Nancy Spero, Mary Frank, Sally Mann, Louise Nevelson, and Irene Rice Pereira. In addition there will be an installation of new work by contemporary lens-based artist Ellen Carey. Carey’s work explores the photographic process using large-format Polaroid cameras. Her large-scale images are abstract—they do not record images seen through a camera lens—but rather the chemical process of photography.

Barbara Kruger’s Savoir c’est Pouvoir (Knowledge is Power), photo featured in this article, was one of twenty artworks commissioned by the French Government to commemorate the 200th Anniversary of the French Revolution in 1989. The Wake Forest lithograph is one of six printers’ proofs.

Kruger brings the experiences of a woman in a male-dominated society, the sensitivity of a poet, and the training of a graphic designer to create her powerful photomontages that question power, sexual politics, and the hidden meaning of images. The chief designer of Mademoiselle in the early 1970s, she began to deconstruct mass-media images visually and verbally in the 1980s. After appropriating the pop culture image, she then enlarged, cropped, and juxtaposed the photograph with text set in boldface type. Kruger has suggested that the instantaneous message of advertising may be the only way to be heard.

Her messages are displayed in art galleries, museums, and public spaces as well as on posters, T-shirts, electronic signboards, and billboards.