Ida Applebroog (1929–2023)

Artist Ida Applebroog, whose unsettling, uncompromising work investigated themes of power, violence, gender, and sexual identity, died on October 22 at the age of ninety-three. Her death was announced by Hauser & Wirth, which has represented her since 2009. Working in media including artist’s books, painting, drawing, sculpture, film, and installation, Applebroog during a career spanning six decades explored her fascination with “how power works—male over female, parents over children, governments over people, doctors over patients.” She often did this through work that was intensely personal, such as her group of 150 line drawings, completed in 1968, of her own vulva—a series that would not be shown publicly in its entirety until 2010, when it appeared in her solo show “Monalisa” at Hauser & Wirth’s New York outpost.

“For me, making this kind of art is crucial,” Applebroog wrote inArtforumin 2014. “My work is a microcosm of the world we live in.” Ida Applebroog was born Ida Applebaum in the Bronx in 1929 to ultra-Orthodox Jewish parents who had immigrated from Poland. Her mother was a dressmaker and her father, an overbearing authoritarian, was a furrier.

In 1948, she enrolled in the New York State Institute of Arts and Sciences, where she studied graphic design with an eye to supporting herself. On leaving the school in 1950, she took a job at an ad agency. The only woman at the company, she was subjected to endless sexual harassment, which she described as common at the time.

She left the agency after six months, working as a freelance illustrator of children’s books and greeting cards, and eventually landing at the New York Public Library, where she toiled in the art division by day and attended classes at the City College of New York at night. In the mid-1960s, by now married to childhood sweetheart Gideon Horowitz and the mother of four children, Applebroog moved with her family to Chicago, where she studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and, in the basement of her home, made jewelry that her husband and children would sell at art fairs. (“I never went,” she told theNew York Timesin 2010.

“For many years I just wasn’t capable of being in the world.”) In 1968, the family moved again, this time to San Diego, where Applebroog made the abovementioned series of drawings of her crotch, using India ink and a crow quill pen, and working in her bathtub. She characterized these works as exploratory rather than sexual in nature, the result of her search for parts of herself that were “hidden away.” In 1969, Applebroog was briefly hospitalized for depression; on her exit, she began making soft fabric sculptures that recalled those by Claes Oldenburg and Eva Hesse, showing them at her first exhibition, in 1971. (She would later destroy the sculptures, feeling that they were too evocative of Hesse’s work.) In 1972, she attended the Feminist Artists Conference at the California Institute of the Arts.

The experience was galvanizing for Applebroog, whose work thus far had already displayed a defiantly feminist bent. Applebroog moved back to New York in 1974, where she changed her last name from that of her husband back to her maiden name, switching “-baum” for “-broog.” Alongside artists and curators including Lucy Lippard, Joan Snyder, Pat Steir, and May Stevens, she joined the Heresies collective, contributing to the group’s journalHeresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics. Around this same time, she began making artist’s books featuring simple cartoon-styles stories, which she mailed to various art-world figures, many of whom she did not know personally.

“Trained in graphic design in the ’50s, I learned to get the message across fast,” she toldArtforum.“In the ’70s, my style came out of Minimalism, Conceptual art, book art, performance, activism, and feminism—movements that tried to make art ordinary.” Applebroog’s mature style evolved out of these books, with the artist frequently creating on Rhoplex-coated vellum storyboards that depict domestic and mundane scenes variously framed by curtains, windows, and screens. “I raise issues of politics and gender in a seemingly nonthreatening way, subverting traditional subject positions, she said. “For instance, I use generic faces, without linear narrative—there is no beginning or end.

A viewer enters in the middle. It’s a do-it-yourself Rorschach.” Beginning in 1981, Applebroog was represented by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts. She remained with the gallery for more than twenty-five years before decamping to Hauser & Wirth in 2009.

Among the many honors she received during her career are a lifetime achievement award from the College Art Association, an honorary doctorate from New York’s Parsons School of Design, and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. She was presented with a lifetime achievement award by the Women’s Caucus for Art in 2008; the  following year, she received the Anonymous Was a Woman Award. Applebroog’s work is held in the permanent collections of institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R.

Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, all in New York; and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. She is survived by her four children, filmmaker Beth B—who made the artist the subject of her 2016 documentaryCall Her Applebroog—Paul Horowitz, Ned Horowitz, and Debra Dodd, and their families..