Marisol Escobar

Marisol Escobar (May 22, 1930 – April 30, 2016), otherwise known simply as Marisol, was a Venezuelan-American sculptor born in Paris, who lived and worked in New York City.

Maria Sol Escobar was born on May 22, 1930, to Venezuelan parents in Paris, France.

She was preceded by an elder brother, Gustavo.

Her father, Gustavo Hernandez Escobar, and her mother, Josefina, were from wealthy families and lived off assets from oil and real estate investments.

This wealth led them to travel frequently around Europe, the United States and Venezuela.

At some point in time, Maria Sol began to be known as Marisol, a common Spanish nickname.

Josefina Escobar committed suicide in 1941, when Marisol was eleven.

The tragedy, followed by her father shipping Marisol off to boarding school in Long Island, New York, for one year, affected her very deeply.

Marisol decided to not speak again after her mother's passing, although she made exceptions for answering questions in school or other requirements; she did not regularly speak out loud until her early twenties.

Although Marisol was deeply traumatized, this did not affect her artistic talents.

She had begun drawing early in life, with her parents encouraging her talent by taking her to museums.

She frequently earned artistic prizes in school before settling in Los Angeles in 1946.

Marisol additionally displayed talent in embroidery, spending at least three years embroidering the corner of a tablecloth (including going to school on Sundays in order to work).

As a child, Marisol was very religious.

During her teen years, she coped with the trauma of her mother's death by walking on her knees until they bled, keeping silent for long periods, and tying ropes tightly around her waist.

After Josefina's death and Marisol's exit from the Long Island boarding school, the family traveled between New York and Caracas, Venezuela.

In 1946, when Marisol was 16, the family relocated to Los Angeles; she was enrolled at the Marymount High School in Los Angeles.

Marisol Escobar began her formal arts education in 1946 with night classes at the Otis Art Institute and the Jepson Art Institute in Los Angeles, where she studied under Howard Warshaw and Rico Lebrun.

She did not fit in at this institution and was expelled; she transferred to the Westlake School for Girls in 1948.

Marisol studied art at the Paris École des Beaux-Arts in 1949.

She then returned to begin studies at the Art Students League of New York, at the New School for Social Research, and she was a student of artist Hans Hofmann.

After experimenting with terracotta, bronze, and wood sculptures inspired by Pre-Columbian sculpture and American Folk Art in the 1950s, Marisol left New York for Rome in 1957, where she stayed for more than a year.

She became world-famous in the mid-1960s, but lapsed into relative obscurity within a decade.

On her return, Marisol quickly became associated with the pop art movement as it emerged in the 1960s, enhancing her recognition and popularity.

She became a friend of Andy Warhol in the early 1960s; she made a sculptural portrait of him, and he invited her to appear in several of his early films, including The Kiss (1963) and 13 Most Beautiful Girls (1964).

During the Postwar period, there was a return of traditional values that reinstated social roles, conforming race and gender within the public sphere.

According to Holly Williams, Marisol's sculptural works toyed with the prescribed social roles and restraints faced by women during this period through her depiction of the complexities of femininity as a perceived truth.

Marisol's practice demonstrated a dynamic combination of folk art, dada, and surrealism – ultimately illustrating a keen psychological insight on contemporary life.

By displaying the essential aspects of femininity within an assemblage of makeshift construction, Marisol was able to comment on the social construct of "woman" as an unstable entity.

Using an assemblage of plaster casts, wooden blocks, woodcarving, drawings, photography, paint, and pieces of contemporary clothing, Marisol effectively recognized their physical discontinuities.

Through a crude combination of materials, Marisol symbolized the artist's denial of any consistent existence of "essential" femininity.

"Femininity" being defined as a fabricated identity made through representational parts.

An identity which was most commonly determined by the male onlooker, as either mother, seductress, or partner.

Using a feminist technique, Marisol disrupted the patriarchal values of society through forms of mimicry.

She imitated and exaggerated the behaviors of the popular public.

By 1961-62 she was concentrating her work on three-dimensional portraits and representations of society types, using inspiration "found in photographs or gleaned from personal memories".

Marisol took inspiration from found objects, such as a piece of wood that became her Mona Lisa sculpture, and an old couch that became The Visit.

She continued to create her artworks and returned to the limelight in the early 21st century, capped by a 2014 major retrospective show organized by the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.

The largest retrospective of Marisol's artwork, Marisol: A Retrospective has been organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and curated by Cathleen Chaffee for these museums: the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (October 7, 2023 – January 21, 2024), the Toledo Museum of Art (March–June 2024), the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (July 12, 2024 - January 6, 2025), and the Dallas Museum of Art (February 23–July 6, 2025).

Although it is supplemented by loans from international museums and private collections, the exhibition draws largely on artwork and archival material Marisol left to the Buffalo AKG Art Museum as a bequest upon her death.