Doreen Garner Sculpts Our Trauma

Can an artist induce trauma to fight trauma? With an ambitious exhibition and performance project at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, artist Doreen Garner forces audiences to face the profound racism underlying the life and work of Dr. J. Marion Sims. Sims, long considered the “father of modern gynecology,” performed torturous procedures on enslaved Black women without anesthesia or consent, for the purposes of experimentation and research.

As part of the two-person exhibition White Man On A Pedestal with artist Kenya (Robinson), Garner creates visceral, life-like sculptures made of silicone, pearls, Swarovski crystals, and glass beads, that acknowledge the brutality endured by Sims’s subjects. For her performance Purge, Garner recreates the monument to Sims that stands in Central Park, casting a silicone replica of the statue. With a group of Black female performers, she then enacts the very gynecological surgery that Sims became famous for—repair of the vesicovaginal fistula—upon this silicone body. “I’m operating in a really weird place,” explains Garner. “I’m a Black woman horrified by these actions, and yet I have to show all these actions so that it’s not a situation where people are able to overlook this information anymore.”

In January 2018, after growing public scrutiny, the City of New York decided to relocate Sims’s monument to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where Sims is currently buried. The statue will be installed without its pedestal and accompanied by informational plaques that contextualize his legacy of medical experimentation on Black women.

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