User:Kaylajustice99/sandbox

Biography
Maria Poythress Epes comes from a long line of feminists she says, she feels like it's encoded in her DNA. Four generations of women behind her to teach her the importance of standing up for yourself. Her father died when she was 11, causing her mother to have to raise her on her own and instill these ideas into her brain. This is when her obsession with death began. She wanted to understand that it was a natural part of life and began to take look underneath the skin of humans as a result. She went to an all-girls school growing up, until college where she got a degree in printmaking at Cornell University.

Epes liked the idea of exploring space when she young, so when she was allowed to work with NASA it was a bit of her childhood dream coming true. She worked in an art program on the Space Shuttle and saw launches and worked at Cape Kennedy several times. She was in an exhibition for women in the NASA art program at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

She briefly lived California, then she spent twenty-five years in New York pursuing a career of book design and art directing. Epes's works in galleries such as La Mama and Broadway Windows. This supported her feminist art that didn't sell as well. She lived in Barcelona for a time as well, the Spanish audience was a tad more responsive to her more feminist and morbid works. She ventured in England for a time, before returning to California where she is currently.

Her Art Statement
The art Epe's finds her passion revolves around issues of the body, she likes to show just how complicated the female body can be. She used her own menstrual blood in a series of paintings, wanting to change the societal view that it's gross instead of an essential part of the reproductive system. She's also used random rocks and sticks to make art. Making things we see as meaningless into beautiful works of art. She got her shooting license for a few of her works, so she could shoot bullet holes into the work. She did this to speak out again male violence towards women. They were images of love, tender embraces, filled with bullet holes. Some even featuring a cat or a dog. They were meant to show the destruction that can come.

Her pieces are meant to show different tenses, like we do with words in English. She makes art the represents patriarchal structures and has women invisible, crucified, dismembered, or sexually unclean in the eyes of society part of the past. The present pieces show sexual harassment and abuse, as well as the genocide of male predators. She even built her own coffin to represent her relationship with death, much of her art revolving around the idea of pain and death.