Media and interviews
how to quiet your inner critic and follow the magic- with artist sarah levy (podcast interview)
‘Blood Coming Out of Her Whatever’: Sarah Levy’s Menstrual Portrait of Trump - with Dr Camilla Mørk Røstvik
In the middle of the 2015 battle for the US Presidential nomination, then-potential candidate Donald Trump remarked that Fox News anchor Meghan Kelly was untrustworthy as she had ‘blood coming out of her whatever’. This was supposed to connote that Kelly, and women more generally, are not reliable when menstruating. In response, artist Sarah Levy painted Trump with her own menstrual blood and created the portrait Bloody Trump (Whatever). This paper considers the background of the creation for this artwork, the technical and creative skills on display in the portrait, and the subsequent political, activist, and media interest in the work. Drawing on visual analysis, communication with the artist, and critical feminist theory, this paper argues that Bloody Trump (Whatever) is a key artwork from the Trump era.
Dr Camilla Mørk Røstvik is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Art History at the University of St Andrews, working on the project ‘The Painters Are In: A Visual History of Menstruation since 1970’. From 2019-2020 she was PI on the Wellcome Trust funded project ‘The UK Menstruation Research Network’. Her book, Cash Flow: The Business of Menstruation since 1970, is forthcoming with UCL Press in 2021. )
We Painted With Our Period Blood • Ladylike
Buzzfeed ladylike video from June 17, 2017