“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