Blog / 2024 / Making Art about Complex Subjects

If you’re a young woman, you almost certainly know what I’m talking about. It’s the chronic underestimation of your abilities that might be useful if only you could figure out how to leverage it to make sexists look like the chumps they are. But, unfortunately, it appears that those who don’t believe you’re smart enough to do anything worthwhile might actually be right, because you’re so incensed at having your every contribution dismissed that you can’t figure out how to turn their own small-mindedness against them.

For years, I struggled to have my work taken seriously. Over a decade ago, after making a book about the queerness of animals and earning a review from the online science and tech zine Boing Boing, I made a lot of sales and also earned a ton of ire from people believing themselves to be more expert than me when it comes to biology. In response, I wrote a thoughtful takedown of unimaginative people everywhere.

A few years later, my book about why I don’t claim copyright and why I think other artists might want to rethink their use of it as well really steamed the potatoes of most male artists I knew at the time along with a few non-male ones as well. The “how dare she?” of all their responses was tedious, and I mostly didn’t address the misogyny—internalized and otherwise—except when one of the haters started calling me “stupid” and I wrote an open letter to him and his ilk.

When I published my mental health workbook earlier this year, I anticipated more of the same. Instead, almost no one has disputed my right to make art about why our brains can make us miserable and what we might do about it.

At first, I thought that maybe the lack of criticism came from mental health’s seeming squishiness. After all, compared to topics like science and our legal system, our ideas about emotional wellbeing feel far less structured, meaning that even someone without a degree in therapy might be permitted to bring something to the discussion.

Then I realized it was probably a function of visibility. My mental health workbook hasn’t yet been reviewed by a publication with an audience the size of Boing Boing’s. Plus, I quit social media a few years ago, insulating me from the worst of the online hate.

But eventually it dawned on me: now that I’m 43 and openly genderfree, people might finally be done classifying me as too young and too female to have the grey matter required for creating complex art.

It certainly seems like that’s the answer when The Trauma & Mental Health Report publishes a glowing review. I’d never heard of the report until my web alerts pinged me about the use of my name on this academic corner of the Internet.

And then there’s this art literacy board at an elementary school in Oregon. The photo is courtesy of one of the teachers there. She happens to be someone I went to high school with, and she was shocked to see my art where paintings by people like Picasso and Monet are usually displayed. Neither of us know how my work was picked for this honor, but I suspect it has something to do with the free high school art lesson plan that’s part of same project as the mental health workbook.

However this board came to be, it assuages one last fear I had about my mental health project: that it would never be used in most schools because my pronouns are now they/she. It’s a relief to know that, despite the censorship of queer voices in schools and the bullying of teachers who refuse to comply, some educators recognize complexity both in art and in life, and they choose to value it.