Older Women Face ‘Realities’ of Aging : Fullerton Photo Exhibit Focuses on Their Lives

“I think the time comes when you start thinking about the end, and if you’re lucky, you start thinking about it like a new adventure,” the elderly woman said.

“My pain is restrictive,” said another. “I smile about it, but I’m not happy about my pain and my restrictions. I’m angry. I don’t see why this has happened to me.”

These candid observations are part of a film by Suzanne Lacy, one of fourAmerican artists featured in a new Cal State Fullerton photography exhibit that focuses on a segment of society that’s often disregarded in a youth-oriented culture: older women.

“It’s an affirmation of what women are experiencing, both the positive and negative experiences of aging,” said Sharon G. Blair, a Cal State Fullerton graduate student who curated the show. “Even women (themselves) deny the aging issue. . . . Some don’t even want to use the words age or older ,” Blair said recently.

“Realities: Body and Mind,” through Feb. 28, contains about a dozen photographs dated 1978 to 1991 by Lacy, Hannah Wilke, Anne Noggle and Ruth Mountaingrove. They range from Wilke’s photo of her mother, shown bare-chested shortly after a mastectomy, to Noggle’s poetic depiction of a woman’s well-weathered hands with a pair of false teeth resting in one palm. The exhibit also includes Lacy’s 28-minute film, which documents her 1984 performance piece in which 154 women, aged 65 to 100, gathered at a sheltered La Jolla cove.

The theme of “Realities” is not new. The artists, all between the ages of 45 and 69, have focused on women’s issues since the height of the women’s art movement in the 1970s. But the show is among a growing number of similar exhibits that may be the result of what Lacy calls a “backlash” to a “repression” of women’s issues in the 1980s.

“I know a ton of women working on shows about battered women right now,” said the 46-year-old artist in a recent phone interview. Lacy, who has staged several large-scale, public performances and was a pioneer of American feminist art, is now dean of fine arts at the Bay Area’s California College of Arts and Crafts.

Blair, 45, was born in Australia, and before moving to Fullerton in 1989 she lived for several years in Northern California, working as a curator and art preparator. She organized the show as her master’s thesis for a degree in exhibition design and certificate in museum studies.

“I’ve always been interested in women’s issues,” she said. “It seemed like a natural for my thesis.”

The film of Lacy’s La Jolla performance, “Whisper, the Waves, the Wind,” is at one end of the exhibit’s spectrum, Blair said. Its participants, all dressed in white, stroll along the coast, talk of aging, sit around small white tables and hold hands. They are told by Lacy that the performance is “a statement to let people see how beautiful, meaningful your lives continue to be.”

“The whole point of (Lacy’s performance) was the celebration of senior womanhood,” Blair said. “The other extreme is Hanna Wilke’s work, which is so compelling and (yet) repulsive.”

Wilke, a New York artist, explores her bond with her mother. In a diptych from a 1978-1981 series, she places the color post-surgical photo of her scarred mother, who died of breast cancer in 1982, next to a self-portrait in which she has put small, abstract metal objects on her bare chest. Beside the diptych hangs another self-portrait, taken after Wilke’s lymphoma, another form of cancer, had been diagnosed in 1987.

“The objects I placed on my body were about the internal wounds people carry within them, and sometimes these scars never go away,” Wilke said by phone from New York this week. “So I juxtaposed them with real wounds of my mother’s breast cancer.”

Wilke, 51, added that she took many photographs of her ailing mother “out of love. I used her in a positive way. She would laugh each time I clicked the camera, so I really felt I was saving her life.”

Noggle, 69, recently published a book of photographs of women aviators of World War II. But her black-and-white works at CSUF address aging and beauty and sexuality with self-portraits. In one, also a still taken from a video, she lounges sensuously on a bed, staring straight at the camera, a bra strap slipping from her shoulder.

“I can remember when I was young, I said to my mother, about my aunt and uncle, ‘They don’t still have sex, do they?’ ” she said by phone recently from her home in Albuquerque. “I think that a lot of young people believe older people don’t have sex.”

With the same sense of frank confrontation, photographs by Mountaingrove seek to shine some light on the “invisibility” of older women, Blair said, in this case, the aging lesbian in particular. Taken eight years ago, the large-scale, black-and-white close-ups of the artist’s face show every deep line and wrinkle.

“My intent was a rather in-your-face kind of thing,” said Mountaingrove, a writer and photographer active in the Northern California lesbian community. “This is the way women look when they are 60; there’s no beauty parlor in between me and that picture, it’s all pretty much out there.”

Response to the exhibit has been positive, prompting several women visitors to open up about their own personal lives and discuss aging. One, whose mother was to have had a mastectomy, was so moved by the show that she volunteered to help “gallery-sit,” Blair said. Still, she hopes men and people of all ages will take notice.

“I didn’t target any specific audience,” she said.

“Realities: Body and Mind” continues through Feb. 28 in the West Gallery at Cal State Fullerton, 800 N. State College Blvd., Fullerton. Hours: noon to 4 p.m. weekdays; 2 to 5 p.m. Sundays. Closed Feb. 17. A public reception will be held Saturday from 6 to 9 p.m., during which four local poets will offer related readings. Admission: free. Information: (714) 773-3262. RELATED STORIES: F25, F29