Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin.
Fingernails on a blackboard: Bella
Sharon Hayes
- Art Funded
- 2019
- Dimensions
- 16 minutes in duration; the audio track is silent
- Vendor
- Tanya Leighton Gallery
Sharon Hayes is an American artist who came to prominence in the early 1990s.
She works primarily in video, installation and performance to explore issues such as queer theory, sexual politics and activism.
In the film Fingernails on a blackboard: Bella, Hayes addresses class and gender imbalance through the transcript of a meeting between the New York Congresswoman Bella Abzug and her vocal coach. The text reveals the pair working to neutralise Abzug’s regional accent and soften her tone ahead of the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston, Texas.
This work, acquired alongside a letterpress print called May 1st, now joins the collection of GoMA, Glasgow’s main gallery of contemporary art.
Provenance
The artist through the Tanya Leighton Gallery