Self-Portrait, Vertical Motion Down, Medium

A native of Evanston, Illinois, Blythe Bohnen completed her Masters of Fine Arts at Hunter College in New York in 1972, and was a founding member of A.I.R. Gallery, a women’s cooperative arts organization. She became known for paintings and drawings that engaged deeply with the physical gesture as artistic expression, often accompanied by precise verbal summaries of particular motions used to accomplish the work. She first began using a camera to photograph her hand and arm in the systematic process of mark-making, capturing motion through time to record the gesture as a shape. In a series of self-portraits, such as the one here, Bohnen expanded on those initial themes to make her own body the work itself, moving her head in different ways during an exposure of several seconds to produce a blurred trail.