Last February, just about now, I found this image.

Creative disruptors change the way we look at the world. Here, an icon is turned around, and our perception of what we thought we saw is something  entirely different.

 

One of my favorite artist disruptors is Louise Bourgeoise.

“One must accept the fact that others don’t see what you do.” – Louise Bourgeoise

Born in Paris in 1911, Louise Bourgeoise was an inspiration, an outlier, and a disruptor throughout her life. Bourgeois died in New York in 2010 at the age of 98. Her images and sculptures may not be everyone’s cup of tea-but that’s what art is about.

I discovered her at the Tate Modern in London, 2002, where art is always disruptive and resistant to the status quo. A massive thirty foot spider standing in the atrium of an old power station startled me and made me want to know more about this woman artist who was then only 92.

As she put it, “Art is a guarantee of sanity.”  And so it is for me, too.

“The Spider is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver. .”- Louise Bourgeoise

Bourgeois transformed her experiences into a highly personal visual language through the use of mythological and archetypal imagery, adopting objects such as spirals, spiders, cages, medical tools, and sewn appendages to symbolize the feminine psyche, beauty, and psychological pain.(1)
Through the use of abstract form and a wide variety of media, Bourgeois dealt with notions of universal balance, playfully juxtaposing materials conventionally considered male or female. She would, for example, use rough or hard materials most strongly associated with masculinity to sculpt soft biomorphic forms suggestive of femininity. – (1) The Art Story

I never tire of finding life in her face and in her work.

 

“#ItWasNeverADress is an invitation to shift perceptions and assumptions about women and the audacious, sensitive, and powerful gestures they make every single day. In science, technology, arts, mathematics, politics, houses of worship, on the streets, and in our homes, insightful women are often uninvited, overlooked, or just plain dismissed… When we see women differently… we see the world differently!” –  Axosoft

 

Read more about Louise here: MOMA’s archive has a wealth of information.