“People say my father’s a very unusual person,” Holly Greenberg muses. “He doesn’t have preconceptions about how somebody should behave. There were no gender-assigned tasks in my family: we had to go out and help my father put leaves and twigs in the mulcher or lay insulation in the attic.”
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So while Greenberg’s mother thought her three daughters would just be in the way in the kitchen, her father put them to work, teaching them “male” things.
Greenberg’s prints are collagraphic, which means she uses a cardboard rather than metal plate. She finds “something very powerful about the silhouette. It’s almost like a road sign,” she says, “like a universal symbol.” A purse becomes “less specific: if it were a patterned purse it would be somebody’s purse and I’m not talking about what brand blender or what brand lawn mower it is. I’m talking about the icon. People laugh when they see my prints, but what we’re really laughing at is ourselves–how we have gendered objects.”
