Debra Cartwright is an American artist whose painting practice explores her experience as the daughter of a black American female gynecologist. Through her work she reconciles the horrific past and present of womens' healthcare, more specifically concerning the black female body, and her own introduction to the practice as a child.
Read MoreAcknowledging the past influences the present, Cartwright incorporates the ghostly reflections of disembodiment seen in Gericault's Morgue studies and Philip Guston's depictions of the Holocaust. She blurs time periods, not only through the gestures of blending but the fragments of modern manicures with inferences of internal violence. Exploring the interior and exterior of the body, she paints several watercolor studies drawn from her mother's gynecological surgery journals while simultaneously cutting from historically black magazines such as Ebony, Essence and Jet, publications she worked at during her twenties. Combining these representations of interior and exterior, she creates collages, a violent merge of source material re-embodying the subjects of James Marion Sims* as persons connected to her own experience. From this collage Cartwright oil paints, keeping in mind De Kooning's declaration that oil was created for flesh. To truly recreate these women's stories, to return their subjecthood, she builds fleshy, layered, large-scale oils.
Debra Cartwright (b. In 1988 in Annapolis, Maryland) graduated with a BA from University of Virginia (2010). She later attended Parsons the New School for Design from which she received an AA (2011). In 2022, she graduated with an MFA from the Mason School of Art at Rutgers University. Cartwright has participated in group exhibitions at Fridman Gallery, New York (2020); Black Microcosm, CFHILL, Stockholm, Sweden (2020); Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey (2020); and Allouche Gallery, New York (2021). She currently lives and works between New Jersey and New York.
*James Marion Sims (born January 25, 1813; † November 13, 1883) was an American physician and surgeon who was highly controversial for the ethical issues involved in developing his techniques.
