Untitled II (Portrait)
May Wilson
Contemporary Art
At the age of 71, determined to become an artist, May Wilson left rural Maryland and a decades-long marriage for New York City, where, on the advice of her pen pal, mail artist Ray Johnson, she took up residence at the Chelsea Hotel. Generations older than the avant-garde artists she was drawn to, and largely self-taught, Wilson acquired the nickname “Grandma Moses of the Underground.”
Wilson typically embellished and bedazzled found objects with some relationship to her early life, such as nineteenth-century portraits of women and old-fashioned button-up boots. In her Ridiculous Portraits, Wilson collaged ludicrous photo-booth self-portraits onto images she collected from picture postcards, reproductions of famous paintings, mainstream magazines, and soft-core pornography. Produced as personal mementos and often exchanged through the mail with other artists as gifts, her Ridiculous Portraits attacked sexism, ageism, and the cult of beauty with a wry sense of absurdity. A feminist long before the term was commonly used, Wilson relished her years in New York, becoming a beloved if anomalous fixture of the downtown art scene.
Wilson typically embellished and bedazzled found objects with some relationship to her early life, such as nineteenth-century portraits of women and old-fashioned button-up boots. In her Ridiculous Portraits, Wilson collaged ludicrous photo-booth self-portraits onto images she collected from picture postcards, reproductions of famous paintings, mainstream magazines, and soft-core pornography. Produced as personal mementos and often exchanged through the mail with other artists as gifts, her Ridiculous Portraits attacked sexism, ageism, and the cult of beauty with a wry sense of absurdity. A feminist long before the term was commonly used, Wilson relished her years in New York, becoming a beloved if anomalous fixture of the downtown art scene.
MEDIUM
Albumen photograph with glitter, round mirrors and red paint.
DATES
1966–1967
DIMENSIONS
mount: 10 3/4 × 13 7/8 in. (27.3 × 35.2 cm)
image: 12 3/4 × 10 5/16 in. (32.4 × 26.2 cm)
frame: 16 × 13 × 1 3/8 in. (40.6 × 33 × 3.5 cm) (show scale)
COLLECTIONS
Contemporary Art
ACCESSION NUMBER
2007.11.2
CREDIT LINE
Emily Winthrop Miles Fund
EXHIBITIONS
MUSEUM LOCATION
This item is not on view
CAPTION
May Wilson (American, 1905–1986). Untitled II (Portrait), 1966–1967. Albumen photograph with glitter, round mirrors and red paint., mount: 10 3/4 × 13 7/8 in. (27.3 × 35.2 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Emily Winthrop Miles Fund, 2007.11.2. © artist or artist's estate (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 2007.11.2_PS9.jpg)
IMAGE
overall, 2007.11.2_PS9.jpg. Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2019
"CUR" at the beginning of an image file name means that the image was created by a curatorial staff member. These study images may be digital point-and-shoot photographs, when we don\'t yet have high-quality studio photography, or they may be scans of older negatives, slides, or photographic prints, providing historical documentation of the object.
RIGHTS STATEMENT
© Estate of May Wilson
The Brooklyn Museum holds a non-exclusive license to reproduce images of this work of art from the rights holder named here.
The Museum does not warrant that the use of this work will not infringe on the rights of third parties. It is your responsibility to determine and satisfy copyright or other use restrictions before copying, transmitting, or making other use of protected items beyond that allowed by "fair use," as such term is understood under the United States Copyright Act.
For further information about copyright, we recommend resources at the United States Library of Congress, Cornell University, Copyright and Cultural Institutions: Guidelines for U.S. Libraries, Archives, and Museums, and Copyright Watch.
For more information about the Museum's rights project, including how rights types are assigned, please see our blog posts on copyright.
If you have any information regarding this work and rights to it, please contact copyright@brooklynmuseum.org.
If you wish to contact the rights holder for this work, please email copyright@brooklynmuseum.org and we will assist if we can.
RECORD COMPLETENESS
Not every record you will find here is complete. More information is available for some works than for others, and some entries have been updated more recently. Records are frequently reviewed and revised, and we welcome any additional information you might have.
![[Untitled]](https://d1lfxha3ugu3d4.cloudfront.net/images/opencollection/objects/size2_sq/CUR.2007.35.JPG)
