Exhibition Preview<br>Ida Applebroog<i> Portraits</I>

05.11.26. 6–8pm. Free. Ida Applebroog (1929–2023) was one of the foremost feminist artists of her generation, describing herself as ‘a woman artist with feminist concerns’. She came to prominence in New York in the 1970s with a series of small self-published books that she sent in the mail and became known for both her instantly recognisable style of simplified human forms with bold outlines, and her focus on themes of violence and power, and on women in the domestic, social and sexual arenas. The exhibition at Fruitmarket opens with a selection of Applebroog’s Angry Birds of America, portraits of birds drawn from death, (as was the case for the great eighteenth and nineteenth century ornithologist illustrators, from John James Audubon to Alexander Wilson, both of whom Applebroog references). The birds were drawn in 2018, during Donald Trump’s first US Presidential term, and somehow encapsulate the distress and despair felt by many people at his policies then, and again now: ‘I start