User:Angelories96/sandbox

= Artist/Director = Ann Fessler is an author, filmmaker, video-installation artist, and a professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work reconciles the division between lived history and recorded history from a feminist perspective. She is especially known for her work dealing with adoption before legalized abortion and the experiences of women who surrendered children in the 1950s and 60s; particularly women who were seen as unfit mothers due to being a single parent. Anne Fessler's work utilizes the stories of women and focuses on how myths, stereotypes, and mass media images, can impact women's lives and their intimate relationships. Fessler is best known for her 1984 installation created for the Washington Project of the Arts on the subject of rape and violence against women. The installation appropriated images of French painter Nicolas Poussin's famous 17th-century painting, "The Rape of the Sabine Women," to show how art history itself has become a silent conspirator in the subjugation of women and the equation of female gender with passive victimhood. Multiple bodies of her work have been widely exhibited in galleries, museums, and film festivals since the 1980's. Her work is included in the Whitney Museum, NY; Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the RISD Museum. Fessler is the recipient of visual art and film grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the LEF Foundation, the Rhode Island Foundation, Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, Art Matters, NY; and the Maryland and Rhode Island State Arts Councils. Kessler using her own story of adoption as a basis for her book who was 56 years old when she first met her biological mother who was 75, she tells the story of over a million women who surrendered children for adoption prior to legalized abortion.