Eliza Douglas

Douglas maybe best known for Faust, the provocative performance piece created with her partner Anne Imhof for the 2017 Venice Biennale, but she’s also a painter, as evidenced by her two canvases installed in the Jewish Museum lobby. In each, pairs of realistically rendered hands emerge from abnormally long shirtsleeves limned with thick gestural strokes. Though Douglas serves as her own model, the canvases are dedicated to her great-grandmother, Dorothy Wolff Douglas, a former head of Smith College’s economics department, who lost her job after being swept up by the McCarthy era’s anti-Communist hysteria. Snaking along the perimeter of each composition, Douglas’s arms seem to be reaching out to make sense of an historical wrong that was never righted.