Feb 2nd 2024

Marilyn Artus: BURLESQUE DIVA DIA MUERTOS

@ Epiphany Center for the Arts

201 S Ashland Ave, Chicago, IL 60607

Opening Friday, February 2nd, from 6PM - 9PM

On view through Saturday, March 23rd

Slemmons Gallery

Oklahoma-based artist Marilyn Artus was a burlesque promoter for 3 years. The performers she met were talented and expressed female sexuality in a joyful way. Their skills, costumes, props, and artistry were inspiring. The neo-burlesque movement is, in her opinion, filled with talented performance artists. Women reclaiming their sexuality and completely turning a male driven exploitation into new feminist art with women in control. These skull mixed media sculptures are tributes to many of the founding divas of burlesque. Their lives were wild and filled with complicated stories. They were earning a living and on their own when most women were still not in the workforce.

Marilyn Artus is a mixed media artist and equality activist. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Oklahoma and then rolled into a commercial art career for 16 years. In 2003, Artus co-founded The Girlie Show, an all-female art festival in Oklahoma City that drew artisans from all over the United States to exhibit and showcase female talent, which ran for ten years. In 2009, she began a full-time career as an artist and since then, has participated in solo and group exhibitions nationwide. To honor the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment in 2020, she created a huge nationwide art and travel project by collaborating with a woman artist in each of the 36 states that ratified the amendment into law called Her Flag. This work was exhibited at the Clinton Presidential Center in 2020, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. in 2021, and Her Flag will make its first appearance in Chicago at Epiphany Center for the Arts during the Democratic National Convention in August 2024.

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