Lott’s focus on gender inequality is not limited to the explicit physical violence that women experience far too often in this country; she is also interested in the more subtle ways that our culture diminishes and harms women. — Emily Goodman
Debra Lott: A Visual Language for Difficult Subjects
By Emily Goodman
For many educators, teaching is a calling and not simply a way to pay the bills. Given how little we compensate educators and the excessive harassment of teachers by so-called “culture warriors” at all levels, there must be more to being an educator than the mere prospect of economic stability. At its core, the desire to teach is a desire to share, to engage in a mutual exchange of ideas with different individuals in the hopes that everyone involved will grow and learn. A good teacher does not want their students to parrot back facts; they want their students to see the world and humanity with a critical eye, to develop solutions to complicated problems and to foster resilience and curiosity. When you look at Debra Lott’s work, it is immediately clear that she is an educator. Her art comes from a place of wanting to share her time, talents and ideas with others in the hope that they will learn and grow from these encounters.
Born in Florida in the 1950s, Lott’s path to becoming the artist she is today was complicated by the social expectations for women of her generation. As a child, she recalls, “You were taught you’ll grow up and be a homemaker and have children. So even though I had the opportunity to go to college, all I wanted to do was art, and that was never considered a career.” Despite those expectations, Lott pursued her passion from an early age. Growing up, she studied with EC Comics illustrator Graham Ingels, who lived in the next town. Ingels helped her develop her skills, especially as a portraitist, and encouraged her to support her art through teaching. She began initially offering private lessons, and then secured a full-time position as the art teacher at her children’s private school.
It was that experience that led her to realize that being an artist and an educator could be intertwined vocations, leading her to pursue her master’s degree in education and remain as a K-12 teacher for 26 years. “All of those years of teaching definitely increased my skills,” she said. “And being an introvert, I probably would have hidden in my studio my whole life, which I do now and I love it. But it made me get out among people, so I’m sure all of that had an effect on me.” As an introverted educator myself, the connections forged with students in a classroom have a tremendous impact on how I relate to my own work, and the same is obviously true for Lott.
In the classroom, teachers develop skills at translating challenging concepts into approachable material for students and helping them find their own way to relate to these ideas, and that skillset is on full display in Lott’s painting practice. And Lott has not shied away from difficult themes in her work, making projects that deal with domestic violence, sexual assault and reproductive freedom. Consistent in all of her work, though, is a desire to tell these stories with care and compassion and to do so in a way that will make these issues feel real to her audience, just as all serious educators hope to do in our teaching.
Lott’s more recent work centers around issues of gender inequality. For instance, in 2018, she created a series of paintings of survivors of sexual and domestic abuse, called #MeToo — From Silent to Resilient. These portraits feature residents of Louisville’s Family Scholar House, a non-profit center that provides residential and non-residential support for women and children survivors of domestic abuse and needed assistance to help ensure access to education and job training. In these works, Lott showcases these women with care and compassion, focusing on their beauty, their strength and their composure by rendering them in soft blues, greens, purples and yellows.
Lott refers to their experiences escaping their abusers through the threads and scarves wrapped around their hands and arms, but she does not render the violence that was inflicted in their bodies. Lott returned to these ideas in the subsequent series, #WomenStrongTogether, in which she focused on the strength of these women beyond and outside their survival of trauma, beautifully showcasing the multidimensionality of each sitter, showing them enacting gestures of care, reverie and healing. In both series, Lott highlights that survivors are not defined solely by the worst things that have happened in our lives, but we are full humans capable of loving and being loved.
Lott’s focus on gender inequality is not limited to the explicit physical violence that women experience far too often in this country; she is also interested in the more subtle ways that our culture diminishes and harms women. She has created several painting series that focus on the way that the media promotes harmful and impossible beauty standards that end up psychologically damaging women and girls of all ages. For instance, in 2016 Lott received a Kentucky Foundation for Women grant to develop her series Human Nature, which focused explicitly on the promotion of extreme thinness as the ideal female body type. In these works, Lott created pixelated and distorted paintings of women’s bodies to highlight how much digital manipulation goes into advertising and (social) media imagery.
She subsequently created a series of paintings around aging women and “how they’re marginalized because they’ve gotten older, and they don’t look like they did.” Through these works, Lott has illustrated that there is considerable beauty beyond the young, thin bodies that populate mass media.
More recently, Lott has been creating works focused on women with red hair, highlighting how even a slight variation from the ideal woman can lead to bullying and gender policing. After all, in order to transform into the paragon of femininity, Norma Jean Baker had to dye her red hair blonde to become Marilyn Monroe. In all of these works, Lott paints her figures beautifully, merging careful rendering of figures and form with more painterly strokes of vibrant color, and in so doing, highlights that the standards of beauty that insist upon a single ideal — young, white, thin, with blonde straight hair — diminish the beauty that exists in natural variation.
Lott’s most recent works, a series entitled Set Ablaze, seem to be marrying these two approaches to gender in her practice. Pieces like Throw Back 1864 and Back to the Future In Vitro are both careful critiques of gendered expectations and outright challenges to systemic legal inequality. Lott conceived of these two pieces after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos used in in vitro fertilization “should be considered children.” This decision used the precedence of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade and made abortion illegal or unobtainable in 22 states, including Kentucky. Frustrated by the seemingly endless encroachment of the government into reproductive medical care, Lott makes her critique of this legislation explicit, portraying a young woman holding an uncooked chicken egg on a petri dish. In so doing, the artist points out that calling embryos “human infants” for legal purposes makes about as much sense as calling chicken eggs “baby chicks.” Moreover, in this series, Lott has juxtaposed contemporary clothes and gestures with more antiquated ones in order to illustrate how the fights over gender equality today are sadly the same fights that women have made in the past.
Throughout all of her work, Lott is interested in teaching us to see women’s struggles in a new way. Her desire to educate and to inspire is visible in the ever present kindness she gives to her subjects and her continual investigation of both the overt and more subtle challenges facing women today.
Debra Lott's “Set Ablaze” series is currently on display through Sept. 29 at PYRO Gallery, 1006 E. Washington Street
Louisville, KY.
A footnote: Debra Lott is among a select group of artists whose works have been placed on the surface of the moon. Lott’s “Blue Heron Dreams” (below) was included in the Lunar Codex, a time capsule of paintings, drawings, sculpture, poetry, films and books aboard an unmanned lunar lander named Odysseus, which touched down near the moon’s South Pole.
Odysseus, built by Intuitive Machines, a Houston company, was sent up by SpaceX on February 15, 2024. Thanks to Samuel Peralta, a Canadian physicist, author, poet and artist who arranged for his time capsule to be filled with works by artists, authors, poets and filmmakers from more than 230 countries, including, perhaps most importantly, indigenous peoples. Peralta had the artworks miniaturized and digitized and then placed aboard a lunar payload in hopes of being discovered perhaps eons from now as a record of human creation in the 21st century.
According to Lott, “Blue Heron Dreams” is part of a series titled Dreams of My Daughter. “This painting depicts the dream world of a young woman responding to anxieties in her sleep, similar to those suffered during the Covid pandemic. In “Blue Heron Dreams,” subliminal illusions of five blue herons appear to fly and perch in the sheets and shadows surrounding the semi-conscious dreamer.” Lott notes that in North American Native tradition and symbolism, the blue heron brings messages of self-determination and self-reliance, and represents an ability to progress and evolve.