JANINE ANTONI (American, born Bahamas, 1964) Umbilical, 2001 Edition 14/35. Silver 3 x 8 x 3" (7.6 x 20.3 x 7.6 cm.) Sarah Norton Goodyear Fund, 2003
	JANINE ANTONI (American, born Bahamas, 1964) 2038, 2000 Edition 10/10. Color print 20 x 20" (50.8 x 50.8 cm.) Sarah Norton Goodyear Fund, 2003

Janine Antoni embraces the practices of 1960s and 1970s process and performance art, using ritual and her own body in much of her work. She first made her mark on the international art scene in the early 1990s by gnawing on 600-pound cubes of chocolate and lard and then refashioning the chewed pieces of chocolate into heart-shaped candy and the lard into lipsticks. For her most recent piece, she walked and fell from a tightrope, which she had painstakingly made by hand. Antoni works intuitively, extracting images and ideas from childhood memories, feminist preoccupations with the female body, and the beauty she finds in the routines of daily living.

The sculpture, Umbilical, and the photograph, 2038, are two fine examples of Antoni’s work recently purchased for the collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Both artworks relate directly to Antoni herself and are layered with her feminist-inspired wit and wisdom. Umbilical is a silver cast of the inside of the artist’s mouth around a spoon that was cast from the Antoni family silver. The spoon is held in a silver cast of the palm of her mother’s hand. Mothers, babies, and nurturing are immediately called to mind, as is Antoni’s intimate, and on-going relationship with her own mother. Nurturing is also a theme in the photograph 2038 in which the artist herself, in an old-fashioned bathtub, appears to be nursing a cow identified as #2038 by the metal tag in its ear. Here Antoni conflates the nurturing roles of woman and cow, contrasting the tenderness of this encounter with the reality of the cow’s existence as milk, meat, and hide for human use.

- Jennifer Bayles, Educator for Special Projects