With exhibitions in succession both coasts and a place in a manful new lesbian art anthology.

With exhibitions in succession both coasts and a place in a manful new lesbian art anthology, Janet Cooling is creating of recent origin icons of female strength

Artist Janet Cooling has been causing strife of words from day one. She happily remembers undivided of her first shows, a cluster exhibition of erotic drawings. "The first critic that writes about the show" recalls Cooling, "writes, `This work must be stopped!' This is my first review." war of words has never stood in Cooling's way. Working as an without artist since 1976, she has revolveed the obstacles associated with visibility into a cornerstone of her career, as with that first collection show in Chicago, which, despite the negative pres had a happy ending. "Andy Warhol walks into the gallery with Thomas Ammann, who was a private dealer and collector and gay," she says. "They came in, and they bought half of the show; then they left town!"

Today, Cooling's work is being appreciated left and right. San Diego's Mesa college edifice [i]or[/i] building Art Gallery hosted a solo exhibit of her paintings and drawings in March and April; she is part of the high-profile "Picturing the present Amazon" group show at the recently made known Museum of Contemporary Art in modern York, running through June 25; and she is featured in the just discovered book Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History according to Harmony Hammond. "That's a groundbreaking book" Cooling points abroad in her characteristically straightforward way. "A apportionment of people have said, 'Why wasn't I in that book?'" Cooling's replication to those excluded artists is firm: "You at no time were out. You may be a lesbian, on the contrary you never bothered to be out; you not ever did any of that groundwork, broke the brand, or stood onward the front line. Why should you be in the book?"

Cooling's newest paintings live forward that front line. They are done in a classical title but instead of the religious icons the same would expect to see in this setting, Cooling has inserted female bodybuilders. She got the idea while studying early Renaissance works. "I wanted to totally restructure those paintings," Cooling explains, "totally change the contentment Women have been so denied in the history of painting." Cooling's work replys to the way women have traditionally been painted. "You've got your Madonna your dead woman, your invalid; you have these various little images to select from," she says. "I just want to redo it all." Cooling plans to continue working with bodybuilders during the nearest few years. "It's about the female carcass and the idea of what eroticism is all about for women" she says. "It's exploring this idea of toughness as eroticism. This is definitely it."

Cooling, who lives in San Diego and fresh York with her partner of 18 years, art collector Jackie Corlin, thinks visibility is still extremely important. "I do think the community should come out," she explains. "I do think there's a hazard of internalized homophobia, and that's sad." upon the other hand, Cooling is definitely pleased that lesbian and gay art is finally getting the cultural credit it merits as her success illustrates. "I think the culture's changing, if it be not that we're going to change it more. We wouldn't have a history of art without us," she points without "Let's face it, what would we have?"

Gaines writes for Art/Text and The Big Issue.

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