Dread & Delight: Fairy Tales in an Anxious World by Emily Stamey (review)

When I go to a museum exhibit, I usually purchase the accompanying catalog, so I have become familiar with the peculiar genre of the exhibit catalog. Dread & Delight by Emily Stamey belongs to this genre, but, in several ways, it transcends it. Stamey is the curator of exhibitions at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, which is on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In the fall of 2018, she curated a major exhibition of original art by contemporary artists who respond to traditional fairy tales. The exhibit ran at the Weatherspoon Art Museum from August through the beginning of December 2018, after which it traveled to the Faulconer Gallery at Grinnell College in Iowa and then to the Akron Art Museum in Ohio. Like the authors of most art catalogs, Stamey provides key information about the artworks featured in the exhibit, photographs of the works, and biographical material pertaining to the artists. However, Stamey does not limit herself to the conventional material typically included in art catalogs. She also includes a thoughtful survey of how visual artists have responded to fairy tales over the past forty years, and she concludes the book with an original fairy tale by Kelly Link titled “The White Cat’s Divorce” (2018).

All of the art featured in the exhibit and the accompanying catalog relate to seven traditional fairy tales: “Hansel and Gretel,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Rapunzel,” “Cinderella,” “All Fur,” “Fitcher’s Bird,” and “Snow White.” Many of the artists whose works are represented are especially interested in the dark undertones that run though these fairy tales. Sculptor Tom Otterness explores the topics of imprisonment and child abuse in a pair of bronze castings titled Hansel and Gretel (2001, 2018). Both of the castings take the form of cagelike cubes. In one cube, two faceless children are entangled in the tight, confined space. The other cube is identical to the first one except that it is empty. In a sense, Otterness’s cubes can be seen as sequential art, but it is left to the viewer to fill in the story that bridges the two cubes. The viewer is left wondering if the children escaped or were eaten.

African American photographer Carrie Mae Weems explores the demeaning obsession with physical appearance that runs through “Snow White.” In the staged black-and-white photograph Mirror Mirror (1987), a young black woman looks into a framed mirror while an older white woman stares back at her with a disapproving look. The accompanying caption reads, “Looking into the mirror, the black woman asked, ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the finest of them all?’ The mirror says, ‘Snow White, you black bitch, and don’t you forget it!!!’”

Some of the artists represented emphasize the positive aspects of traditional fairy tales. MK Guth, an installation artist, focuses on the positive if misguided motivations of the witch from “Rapunzel.” In an expansive work titled Ties of Protection and Safekeeping (2008), Guth draws inspiration from the witch’s desire to protect young Rapunzel from the evils of the world. Guth asked hundreds of people across America to respond to the question “What is worth protecting?” Their responses were written on strips of red flannel. Guth then incorporated these strips of flannel into an extremely long plait of braided, blonde hair. The installation looks something like a surreal jungle of vines hanging in long droops from the ceiling and takes up most of a the high-ceilinged room. The catalog includes photographs of this installation piece, but the work cannot really be captured in photographs. It is an immersive work of art that transports the viewers into a fantasy world that is hauntingly beautiful.

In her commentary about the works in the exhibition, Stamey argues that the artists represented in the exhibition use the subject matter and narrative structures of traditional fairy tales to reflect on the anxieties associated with...