Bare Shouldered Beauty

Bare-Shouldered Beauty and the earlier Monkey and Flower (Smart Museum 2006.75.1-8) offer valuable opportunities to consider Suellen Rocca’s expressive direction from one print state to the next. The former features the same imagery that she explored during the mid-1960s in various works, for instance, her etchings Secret Origins (2001.389) and Ring Girl (2001.386), and her large-scale canvas entitled Ring Painting, circa 1966‒1967 (2001.385). Rocca’s early works evoke fantasies, obsessions, and romantic confusion at the tipping-point of the enormous cultural upheaval in 1968 following San Francisco’s Summer of Love in 1967. In contrast to the burgeoning “free love” promoted by Hippie sub-culture, her personal iconography of femininity is a combination of images drawn from the newspaper “funnies” and advertisements, the grocery store circulars, and the Sears catalogs that appeared regularly in her mailbox. This array of imagery that she accumulated was associated with entrenched cultural expectations of female desire—romance, engagement rings, dancing dates, sweet treats, pantyhose, poodles, wiglets, hairbows, and handbags. Although it was not intentional, she put the spotlight on advertising in the mass media and its role in purveying dreams to young female consumers in the 1960s like herself, in particular, the ways in which it packaged feminine power as a mixture of vulnerability and sex appeal.