Exhibitions at CASE Gallery

Exhibitions at CASE Gallery

CYNTHIA MAILMAN: ORIGINS OF GOD

Coming soon, in honor of the 45th anniversary of The Sister Chapel, Rowan University Art Gallery & Museum presents Cynthia Mailman’s series Origins of God. Origins of God is a visual and verbal dialogue across thousands of millennia, in which primordial and prehistoric imagery is paired with modern concepts and quotations. After creating a female incarnation of God for The Sister Chapel in 1977, Cynthia Mailman began to investigate the ancient representations of female deities that were later devalued and subordinated as mere “goddesses.” Mailman’s Origins of God began as a book but became an ongoing series that centers on modern conceptions of a male creator-god, biased interpretations of prehistoric artifacts, and contemporary challenges to women’s bodily autonomy.

Cynthia Mailman was born in the Bronx, New York, to Russian immigrant parents. She graduated from the School of Industrial Arts (now the High School of Art and Design) in Manhattan, earned a B.S. in Art and Art Education at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and completed an M.F.A. at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She was a founding member of SOHO 20 Gallery (est. 1973), an artist-run feminist cooperative in New York City, and has had over two dozen solo shows, in addition to participating in numerous group exhibitions. Mailman taught visual art in the New York City Public School system; at Livingston College, Rutgers University; and at Queensborough Community College, City University of New York, Queens. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Akron Art Museum; New Jersey State Museum, Trenton; Everson Museum, Syracuse, New York; Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University; Staten Island Museum; Rowan University Art Gallery; Dow Jones; Port Authority of New York and New Jersey; and Prudential Financial Inc., Newark, New Jersey. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Art News, Arts Magazine, Soho Weekly News, The Feminist Art Journal, Staten Island Advance, and other publications.