Angleryena series
acrylic
2019
Sizes vary. Most are 11” x 8.5”
The Angleryena series is about transforming toxic femininity (such as white feminism) into something stranger, wilder and more life-giving. I drew inspiration from anglerfish and hyenas— two creatures who, in some ways, have admirable gender role reversals. For both anglerfish and hyenas, the females are on top. Too often it feels like feminism, especially white feminism, is like that— women may be climbing, but that’s not feminism for me. Feminism shouldn’t be about getting to the top in a system that requires you to climb on top of people.
So my Angleryena series is about this. It’s about reckoning with this and facing who many of us have been. It’s about shape-shifting into something else, embodying another version of living that’s truly for everyone, that’s about healing and collective power and interconnectedness, that’s about strange, wild aliveness and about all the possibility contained in each moment for us to be different than we imagined.
—Meg Stein, 2019
Credit for photos: Derrick Beasley