Cy Twombly is at MOMA, my mother-in-law Sophie announces; I’m going. Sophie teaches art in women’s prisons. She gets furloughs and buses prisoners to the Met, the Frick, the Guggenheim. She strolls in, copper earrings, silver bracelets clanking and glinting in the pinpoint spots. I’d never seen Cy Twombly’s pale canvases of Latin words and clouds of blood in oil. I put on my readers, and in the lower corner of one large canvas is a pale wash of gray. Twombly has drawn in graphite a flock of tiny penises and buttocks squirting and shitting like what I drew on my eighth-grade Bible History workbook. I blurt out, Cy Twombly draws dicks and ass. A crowd gathers, thinking I am a docent. Of course he does, says Sophie. He’s known for that. All male artists do that. At home in Yonkers, Sophie shows me her students’ work. On the back are stickers: Property of New York State Women’s Prison System. I bring these home, she says. Otherwise the guards throw them out. Above her medicine cabinet hangs a plywood tiger painted forest green. She shot her husband, Sophie says. Did ten years for it. She was talented. As an artist.

—For one of my favorite people: the late Sophia Miller Corwin (1915–1999)

Publisher’s Note:

Sophia “Sophie” Miller Corwin was an American abstract-expressionist painter, sculptor, and printmaker. Born in New York City in 1915, she completed her 17th solo exhibit at NoHo Gallery in NYC two months before her death in May, 1999 at the age of eighty-four. (Source: The New York Times, 6 June 1999.)

Over a 50-year period, her work spanned major art movements of the twentieth century, from Cubism to Abstract Expressionism to Minimalism, returning to Figurative Abstraction later in her career. She created in multiple media, including welded metal sculpture, carved marble, oil painting, etching, and lithography. (Source: AskART.)

Sophie Miller Corwin was a member of the Vectors Artist Group in New York from 1963-1967 and participated in at least five of their public exhibitions. This group featured strong female representation, more than 50 percent, especially noteworthy during a time when women artists were under-promoted and under-recognized. (Source: “Vectors Artist Group” by Jennifer Uhrhane at Libbie Mark: Features.)

Links retrieved on 15 December 2024.

Bill Ratner

is a voice actor and author of the poetry collections Lamenting While Doing Laps in the Lake (Slow Lightning Lit, 2024) and Fear of Fish (Alien Buddha Press, 2021); and the poetry chapbook To Decorate a Casket (Finishing Line Press, 2021). His writing appears in The Baltimore Review; The Best Small Fictions 2021 (Sonder Press); Feminine Collective; The Missouri Review (audio); and other journals. Lascaux Review nominated one of his poems for Best of the Net 2023, and he’s a nine-time winner of The Moth StorySLAM.

Bill is a trained grief counselor, serves as an officer in the union SAG-AFTRA, and teaches Voiceovers for SAG-AFTRA Foundation and Media Awareness for Los Angeles Unified School District.

Author’s website: https://billratner.com/about-bill-ratner/

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Quarantine Ride, a prose poem by Bill Ratner in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 5, October 2020); reprinted in The Best Small Fictions 2021 after being nominated by MacQ