March is National Women's History Month and the Women Center at Kutztown University organized various events on campus to support the idea that women can inspire hope. One of these events was the presentation "Unexpected Journey" by Janet Kaplan. The speech discussed women's involvement in the Surrealistic art movement.
             As a person who doesn't have an art education, it was extremely interesting and informative to learn about Surrealism. The first thing that I did before starting to analyze Kaplan's speech was to look at the dictionary and to see how it defines the word "surrealism." Surrealism is described as "A 20th-century literary and artistic movement that attempts to express the workings of the subconscious and is characterized by fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtaposition of subject matter." The fact is that very little is known about the women's involvement in Surrealism and furthermore, if you ask an art education major student to name some of the 20th-century women artists they will barely tell one or two names.
             In the beginning, women were important to the Surrealists not as artists but as muses and lovers. As sexual creatures that inspired creativity they were loved; as real women and mothers who would squelch men's freedom, they were feared. Though Surrealists paint from the subjective source of their own dreams and unconscious psyches, they aim for objective content in the works of art by revealing natural archetypes hidden behind the bourgeois emphasis on rational subjectivity. They try to give the impression of an absence of both civilized humanity and a progressively mechanized world. Common objects with than connection to humanity are combined and altered in such a way that they take on an unreal and inhuman quality, only to reveal aspects of human life that are not represented by logic and reason.
             Surrealists recognize that creativity is not bound to any one gender. Anyone can be creative. But it's imp...