“Lisa Yuskavage: Drawings,” at New York’s Morgan Library and Museum, is the first comprehensive museum exhibition of works on paper by the figurative artist, featuring sketches and studies from the 1990s to the present that chart the development of Yuskavage’s unique treatment of the female form. In celebration of the show, Artforum revisits “Blonde Ambition: The Art of Lisa Yuskavage,” a feature essay by Katy Siegel published in the magazine’s May 2000 issue.

“Most people wouldn’t think of Lisa Yuskavage as a particularly inward-looking artist, but it is in making her own world that she defies social expectations—not by tweaking our nude-proof, seen-it-all sensibilities,” writes Siegel. “Despite the fact that she is often saddled with some variation of the ‘bad girl’ title . . . Yuskavage has traced and played with a more complex set of issues that bridge the material, the personal, and the art historical.”
—The editors

“In this Artforum Dossier, we have gathered texts that focus on artistic practices that reflexively engage with the specific materiality of celluloid—the transparent plastic that served as the most common substrate for moving images before the advent of analog and digital video. These practices typically focus less on storytelling than on the aesthetic possibilities of directly manipulating celluloid film stock, creating sequences of celluloid film frames, or running celluloid film strips through projectors. The results usually emphasize our perceptual experience of light, color, sound, pattern, movement, and space—that is, those elements that provide the language of all moving-image experiences.”
—Tina Rivers Ryan