Joyce Cutler Shaw - Home
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  • | Writings
  • Public Projects
  • The Anatomy Lesson
  • Artists Books
  • Alphabet of Bones
  • Early Works
  • Exhibitions
  • Skeletons and Shadows, drawings, 1993.
  • Skeletons and Shadows, drawings, 1993.
  • Skeletons and Shadows, drawings, 1993.
  • Skeletons and Shadows, drawings, 1993.
  • Skeletons and Shadows, drawings, 1993.
  • Skeletons and Shadows, drawings, 1993.
  • Skeletons and Shadows with Mark-Elliott Lugo, 2015.

The Anatomy Lesson: Skeletons and Shadows

The skeleton and its shadows, the most durable and ephemeral traces of the human body, evoke the hidden and mysterious self. The skeleton is our primary human structure, our armature. Human evolution is written in the fossil traces of that skeletal structure. Cutler-Shaw has an extensive series of skeleton drawings, enlarged mylar wall works and dimensional wall collages including her Alphabet of Bones. As she has written in one of her poems, “In the anatomical poem, every bone has its own code.” Joyce Cutler-Shaw approaches the body as a matrix of the human condition and the study of its territory as a geography. Her themes are human identity and the evolution of life.

The Anatomy Lesson:

  • The Anatomy Lesson: Overview
  • The Anatomy Lesson: Skeletons and Shadows
  • The Sudden Death of Eddy
  • The Slow Death of Rose
  • Newborns
  • The Anatomy Lesson: The Dead
  • The Anatomy Lesson: Drawings From The Laboratory
  • The Anatomy Lesson: Memory Pictures
  • The Anatomy Lesson: Dimensional Drawings
  • Installations from UCSD School of Medicine
  • The Brain Project (movies 2, 6, and 8)
© 2021 Joyce Cutler Shaw