At New Editions: We Are Mona Lisa and She Is Us
A Review and Farewell

By KEVIN NANCE
Contributing Writer
Photos provided by New Editions Gallery

Artists responding to Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” — copying it, transforming it, parodying it — is almost as old as the painting itself. Raphael got the ball rolling in 1505, drawing this Italian Renaissance masterpiece from memory while the original was still in progress. Salaì, Leonardo’s studio assistant (who was likely his lover) and possibly his face model for the painting, created a nude version with perky breasts, probably from a charcoal sketch by Leonardo himself. “Mona Lisa Smoking a Pipe,” an illustration by Eugène Bataille from the late 1880s, shows the enigmatic, smiling noblewoman blowing smoke rings out of a pipe. After the “Mona Lisa” became the most famous painting in the world when it was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, avant-garde artists from Marcel Duchamp to Salvador Dalí to Andy Warhol began taking a crack at it, mocking, mimicking, piggybacking and projecting meanings onto it that Leonardo could not have fathomed.

Now it’s Kentucky’s turn. In “Mona Lisa,” the delightful new group show at New Editions Gallery (which is also the gallery’s swan song, about which more at the end of this review), 26 of the area’s most prominent artists have taken on the challenge of creating their own versions of the painting. 

As you might expect, the results run the gamut from respectful to riotous. Some of the images, such as those by James Shambhu and Rodney Hatfield (aka Art Snake), seem like sincere homages, aimed at capturing something like the essential mystery of Leonardo’s original: the slightly upturned corners of the mouth, the serene yet somehow intense gaze, the miraculously molded hands. Arturo Alonso Sandoval’s Mona Lisa floats in a decorative liminal space. Some of the artists here take their best shots at the difficult hands; others save themselves the trouble and preemptively crop them out. A few go a step further, à la Warhol, and incorporate reproductions of at least parts of the original painting. 

More often, the images here say more about the present-day artists — their preoccupations, their unique approaches and their senses of humor — than about their illustrious predecessor and his work from half a millennium ago. I laughed out loud at Steve Armstrong’s scabrously funny, exquisitely crafted wood relief Mona Lisa, whose face subtly morphs before our eyes into that of Donald Trump. In perhaps the show’s most provocative piece, Tresa Thompson O’Connor’s Mona Lisa wears the red costume associated with the sex slaves of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and its screen adaptations — presumably an expression of O’Connor’s feelings about the current state of reproductive rights for women in America. Marcia Cone and Carlos Gamez de Francisco reimagine the Mona Lisa as a mannequin for contemporary fashion accessories, which for Chris Segre-Lewis (who used his Gen A daughter as his model) includes a smartphone. Elsewhere, works by David Stenulson, Graham Pohl and Mary Dennis Kannapell seem to address the need for greater representation of people of color in art history. Perhaps the most disruptive representations of the source material are by Philip High, who shows just half of the Mona Lisa’s face, and Laurie Doctor, whose Mona Lisa turns her back to us to study a wall full of scrawled text — a radical departure from the original, whose eyes famously seem to follow viewers moving around her.