Peregrine Honig
Encyclopedia
Peregrine Honig is an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 artist whose work is concerned with the relationship between pop culture, sexual vulnerability, social anxieties
Social anxiety
Social anxiety is anxiety about social situations, interactions with others, and being evaluated or scrutinized by other people...

, the ethics of luxury and trends in consumerism
Consumerism
Consumerism is a social and economic order that is based on the systematic creation and fostering of a desire to purchase goods and services in ever greater amounts. The term is often associated with criticisms of consumption starting with Thorstein Veblen...

.

Work

Early sexual awakenings, the visual manifestation of disease, and the social anxieties of realized and fictional characters reveal themselves through Peregrine Honig’s delicately rendered drawing and painting.

Ovubet (26 Girls with Sweet Centers), 1999

Honig’s first series depicts a deceptively innocent alphabet game. Little girls are drawn onto doilies, each with their own rhyming couplets: “E is Emma secretly taped/ F is Fiona violently raped / N is for Nora who liked it on top / O is Olivia who begged him to stop.” This series marks the beginning of Honig’s observations into hypersexualization and voyeurism of young girls in American pop culture.

Pin Up Girls (2001–02)

Honig’s pin-up girls examine the objectification of commercialized female bodies. Addictions, delinquent motherhood, and word-play evolve in the pin-up drawings, providing commentary on idealized femininity and the physical manifestation of beauty. In this series, Honig alters the forms, inserting wasp-like waists into disproportionate limbs—a far cry from the idealized, perfectly proportioned beauties. In one drawing, Honig’s word play reads: "Ask this call girl where her money goes—milk and eggs and baby clothes.” Says Honig in her Pin Up Girls artist statement: “Stylized emotions and vintage iconography romanticize their self-destruction.” As such, Honig reads in the darker side of women’s sexual and professional lives. Audiences must look closer at figures that have been damaged, degraded and, ultimately, exploited by societal norms and constraints placed on women. In “Betty,” a fallen nurse lays passed out on her back, a pill bottle dropped next to her hand. She is accompanied by the text: “Don’t sample your wares, you silly nurse—they might get suspicious and check your purse!”

Mint Forest (2003-04)

In April 2001, the dismembered body of a three-year-old African-American girl was found in the woods of Kansas City, Missouri. The unidentified girl was called “Precious Doe
Precious Doe
Precious Doe was a pseudonym assigned to an unidentified female corpse discovered on April 28, 2001, in Kansas City, Missouri. The girl had been murdered and decapitated . The body was naked and the head was wrapped in a trash bag and dumped nearby...

,”. Precious Doe’s story served as a catalyst for Honig’s Mint Forest series. Documenting the weathering of Precious Doe’s forensic photograph, Honig observed altars composed of toys, stuffed animals, flowers and notes pop up throughout the Kansas City Metropolitan Area. The altars eventually crumbled, soaking up rain and paling in the sun. In 2005, four years after the story broke, the girl was identified as Erica Michelle Marie Green, and her mother and stepfather were convicted of the crime.

The Mint Forest series was born out of the fairytale the media spun of the Precious Doe story. Court cases imitate the darker Grimm’s fairy tales
Grimm's Fairy Tales
Children's and Household Tales is a collection of German origin fairy tales first published in 1812 by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the Brothers Grimm. The collection is commonly known today as Grimms' Fairy Tales .-Composition:...

, and the media pushes people into fantastical stories that instigate fear and hopelessness. The Mint Forest Series begins with identical lithographed backgrounds—a soft Bambi
Bambi
Bambi is a 1942 American animated film directed by David Hand , produced by Walt Disney and based on the book Bambi, A Life in the Woods by Austrian author Felix Salten...

 green print copied from a Japanese children’s book. Like the fawns and Precious Doe, the figures in the series were ironic, delicate, and tragic. Jon Benet Ramsey, the child beauty pageant star who was murdered in 1996 at age 6, is cast into the Mint Forest. Precious Doe appears perched between trees, her throat draped in poinsettias. In "Mouse Man" (2004), a castrated boy mouse stands in the forest, clutching his crotch. "Test Bunny" (2004) is an albino playboy bunny, her eyes sore like a test animal. Placed alongside each other, the Mint Forest takes on a storyboard; the forest becomes a backdrop for these twisted pop culture fairytale glamour shots. Abject spirits live in the Mint Forest, floating amongst the pale pastel trees.

Albocracy (2005)

Albocracy means to be ruled by white people—or a government of Albinos. Honig’s drawings have included victims of the exponentially expanding beauty industry, as she invents subtly outrageous figures that illustrate modern “illnesses” such as Silicomania and Tanorexia (both 2005).

This series of drawings investigates a culture of fantastical diseases and fears taken to extreme. Boys and girls with phobias, neuroses and antisocial behavior share the page with their Honigian diagnosis. In one, a young boy eats his right-hand as the text whiles away next to him: “‘Don’t bite your nails,’ his mother said, and so he ate himself instead.’” Honig illustrates fantastical “modern illnesses.” In "Tanorexic,” an extremely tanned anorexic girl reveals her bikini line; in “Opsomania,” a young nude girl covered in cupcake tops is diagnosed with an “obsession with sweets and delicacies.” Where does reality begin and fiction end in terms of modern-day phobias and diagnosis? Our consumer culture sees us as sick, and presents products that pretend to offer answers. Rather, we are sick in a different way: We play into the marketing-mediated narrative, constantly searching for a cure.

Father Gander (2005)

Honig’s collection of six lithographs in her series "Father Gander" portrays the way adults project their fears and shortcomings onto animals and small children, then attempt to blanket them in a shroud of morally perfect convictions. What if these children's stories were reinvented? What if the characters are even darker than they seemed? In Snow, Snow White is a coke addict. In Bear Back, the big, bad bear throws Goldilocks over his shoulder and marches into the woods.

Mary Kate and Ashley (2007)

Mary Kate and Ashley looks at the once-adorable twin toddlers of Full House. They grew up on camera, and became first-rate adolescent fashionistas. New fairytales are woven by pop culture’s sewing machine, blurring fiction and reality, myths and truths. Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen are fetishized, one dubbed the “sick twin,” the other the “healthy twin.” Together the twins came of age on television, became women, started their own fashion line. Then Mary-Kate went to rehab for anorexia. Honig’s Mary Kate and Ashley series illustrates America’s obsession with fame, fashion and disease.

V.I.P. (2008)

V.I.P delves into the fascination with the glimmer and sparkly façade of couture fashion’s allure. The women of VIP are adorned in couture fashion, but they do not wear it like models on the runway. In "Chanel Hoodie," a woman sits with her ankles and wrists strung together with the same string that’s attached to a black Chanel bag covering her head. In Chanel Masai, a dazed, bored vixen tilts her head and luscious rosebud lips just-so, hooks her finger in her thong strap (a familiar Peregrine touch), and has the Chanel logo, dripping blood, branded into her midriff. She wears two Masai neckpieces, one of which tightly inscribes her neck in a manner reminiscent of bondage imagery, while two sketchy cartoony airplanes carom from opposite directions, aiming bull’s eye, straight at her small, naked nipples. V.I.P. suggests the American dependence on consumption and brand names that are supposed to make one feel VIP. Surface beauty shines as the core rots.

Exposed (2009)

In Exposed, Honig takes fashion magazine gimmicks like “best/worst dressed,” “before/after” shots, and replaces the glossy celebrities with cuddly stuffed animals. An adorable donkey checks into rehab; an owl and a teddy bear model the season’s fashion do’s and don’ts. By anthropomorphosizing these animals in fashionista form, Honig illustrates the judgment we project onto celebrities—our modern-day princes and princesses, heroes and villains.

Pukers (2010)

Pukers looks at consumer culture excess. Each puker vomits up a little bit of an excessive feeling or occurrence, barfing over a new purse, too much of a color, too sweet of a smell, too much love, too much couture fashion. These nameless figures have reached a cultural, emotional, fashion-induced tipping point; they must purge, or else.

Anchor Babies (2010)

The Anchor Babies drawings call to mind the derogatory term “anchor babies,” used to describe a child born in the U.S. to illegal immigrants. Under the 1965 Immigration Act, these children act as an “anchor” that pulls a host of relatives into permanent residency. Here, Honig expounds upon the theme of babies born in abnormal conditions. In Foreign Birth, a pregnant Chinese woman stands in profile with the label “Made in China” slapped across her stomach. Porn Birth depicts a woman with perfectly rounded nipples and soft, succulent features giving birth to an angelic baby. And in Prom Birth, a stillborn baby tumbles out from underneath a sick-looking woman’s skirt. These are images of loss through the eyes of a stereotyped middle America, the same place where winning and success are birthed.

Beautiful Boys (2010)

The Beautiful Boys continue Honig's investigation into ideals of beauty. Using beeswax, Honig re-casts kitsch plastic mantelpiece objects, filling in their hollow heads to melting them into sweet innocence. They are at once young boys, lesbians, twin brothers, sisters and adolescent lovers. These works represent a constant cycle of loss through the ephemeral properties of fire and melting.

Twin Fawns (2000–current)

Muses since Honig first laid eyes upon them in a mom-and-pop toy and science shop in Kansas City, Missouri, the taxidermied unborn twin baby fawns rest peacefully in their uterine glass case. Freakishly beautiful, the Twin Fawns' exaggerated features and cartoon-like appearance often trick viewers into believing that they are breathing. The fawns sleep peacefully in an artificial glass womb-like case constructed by the artist.

Widow Magazine (2010)

Widow Magazine, Peregrine Honig’s 167-page one-time limited-edition faux fashion magazine, plays with the fashion magazine form. In jest, Honig names it after the one female archetype that has never had a magazine that caters to her “market”—the widow. Widow Magazine was published by Landfall Press in 2010.

Bravo’s Work of Art: The Next Great Artist (2010)

Honig appeared on the first-ever artist reality television show, Work of Art: The Next Great Artist
Work of Art: The Next Great Artist
Work of Art: The Next Great Artist is an American reality competition show that airs on the cable television network Bravo, in which up-and-coming artists compete for a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and a cash prize of $100,000. The show is produced by Pretty Matches Productions and...

. She advanced to the final round, where she took second place after winner Abdi Farah and second runner-up, Miles Mendenhall. On the show she wore fashion by Kansas City designers Ari Fish, a contestant on Project Runway
Project Runway
Project Runway is an American reality television series on Lifetime Television, previously on the Bravo network, which focuses on fashion design and is hosted by model Heidi Klum. The contestants compete with each other to create the best clothes and are restricted in time, materials and theme...

, and fashion designer, Peggy Noland
Peggy Noland
Peggy Noland is an American fashion designer in Kansas City, Missouri. She has been a teacher in the Fiber Department at the Kansas City Art Institute since 2008....

. "Art is too often exclusive and inaccessible," says Barb Shelly of KansasCity.com. "Honig and her Bravo competitors are making it interesting and understandable." Two months after her defeat, Honig comes to Santa Fe with Loser, a collection of work both from and in response to her reality-show experience.

Influences

Honig cites American pop culture, and artists Sally Mann
Sally Mann
Sally Mann is an American photographer, best known for her large black-and-white photographs—at first of her young children, then later of landscapes suggesting decay and death.-Early life and education:...

, Hans Belmer, Petah Coyne
Petah Coyne
Petah Coyne is a contemporary American sculptor and photographer. Some of her works are in the permanent collections of museums and galleries such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Corcoran Gallery of...

 and R. Crumb as her primary influences.

Pop Culture

The oeuvre of Peregrine Honig spans countless pop culture influences, including: vintage pin-up posters portraying sex-symbol celebrities; children’s fairytales and underlying adult narratives; sexism
Sexism
Sexism, also known as gender discrimination or sex discrimination, is the application of the belief or attitude that there are characteristics implicit to one's gender that indirectly affect one's abilities in unrelated areas...

 and racism
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...

 in marketing and advertising; the way America delivers femininity to the general public during wartimes; the shipping of fertility and iconic heterosexuality to soldiers; luxury during periods of intense poverty; the way underlying ideals of beauty found in fairytales are used to sell products and ideals to modern-day consumers, e.g. “Snow White skin,” “Ruby Red lips,” “Sleeping Beauty.” She is also influenced by fashion magazines, specifically the ways they deliver idealism through the image of perpetual youth/teenage beauty, and their indulgence in seasonal luxury. Taxidermy
Taxidermy
Taxidermy is the act of mounting or reproducing dead animals for display or for other sources of study. Taxidermy can be done on all vertebrate species of animals, including mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians...

 and hunting culture are also great influences on Honig’s work, specifically the beauty of preservation
Preservation
Preservation may refer to:* Heritage preservation:** Historic preservation, of buildings, monuments, etc.** Preservation , of books, recordings, etc.** Conservation , of the natural environment...

 and the voyeurism
Voyeurism
In clinical psychology, voyeurism is the sexual interest in or practice of spying on people engaged in intimate behaviors, such as undressing, sexual activity, or other activity usually considered to be of a private nature....

 of captured moments. Taxidermied animals are dreams stuck in time, exotic and erotic. Wealthy eccentrics own the furs of tigers, cheetahs, snow leopards and wear their pelts. Hunting culture carries with it a hypermasculinity
Hypermasculinity
Hypermasculinity is a psychological term for the exaggeration of male stereotypical behavior, such as an emphasis on physical strength, aggression, body hair, body odor, and virility. This term can be pejorative, though it is also used when examining the behavior dispassionately.One of the first...

—the bravado of capturing dangerous animals thus projecting sexuality onto the skins of high-class animal predators.

Artists

Sally Mann
Sally Mann
Sally Mann is an American photographer, best known for her large black-and-white photographs—at first of her young children, then later of landscapes suggesting decay and death.-Early life and education:...

’s photographs of her pre-pubescent children are at once tender, loving, sensitive and extremely vulnerable, documenting their transition from quiet, sensual beings to sexual beings.

Hans Belmer, a draftsman and sculptor, created bulbous life-size pubescent female dolls with off-kilter bodies, extraneous arms and legs, and missing limbs. He also created erotic drawings, etchings, sexually explicit photographs, paintings, and prints of pubescent girls. In 1954 he met Unica Zürn, a female writer and painter who became his muse. His sexual drawings and broken doll sculptures dealt with the destruction of Aryan female idealism.

Petah Coyne
Petah Coyne
Petah Coyne is a contemporary American sculptor and photographer. Some of her works are in the permanent collections of museums and galleries such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Corcoran Gallery of...

’s sculptures stand at over ten feet tall, and are encrusted with flowers, ribbons and birds, and dripping with wax. Referring to her sculptures as her “girls,” Coyne’s creations are at once abstract and sophisticated, exploring the proximity of beauty and decay. Honig is interested in Coyne’s use of wax, stating “wax is like lace in its transitional nature. Lace is symbolic of birth, christening to death veils, widows, caskets. Wax is the material of birthdays, religion, celebration, funerals.”

On R. Crumb as an influence, Honig states: “Crumb’s cartoons create a stranger narrative than the Sunday Cartoons- a return to Little Nemo and the Yellow Kid, Alice in Wonderland. Imagine my surprise when I saw Crumbs tool of choice was the same as mine- the ever clogging .30 Rapidiograph pen. I grew up around Crumb’s work—the posters, the comic books full of goofy sexual scenarios, he was my Mickey Mouse. And, like early Fleishman and Disney, there is a political edge to the goofiness.” His work was a fixture of 1970s pop culture, and was published in San Francisco where Honig came of age.

Career

Born in San Francisco and raised in The Castro and in Project Artaud, Honig moved to Kansas City, Missouri
Kansas City, Missouri
Kansas City, Missouri is the largest city in the U.S. state of Missouri and is the anchor city of the Kansas City Metropolitan Area, the second largest metropolitan area in Missouri. It encompasses in parts of Jackson, Clay, Cass, and Platte counties...

, at 17 to attend the Kansas City Art Institute
Kansas City Art Institute
The Kansas City Art Institute is a private, independent, four-year college of fine arts and design founded in 1885 in Kansas City, Missouri....

. At age 22, Honig was the youngest living artist to have work acquired by the Whitney Museum of Art’s permanent collection. Honig recently appeared on season one of BRAVO’s artist reality television show, Work of Art: The Next Great Artist
Work of Art: The Next Great Artist
Work of Art: The Next Great Artist is an American reality competition show that airs on the cable television network Bravo, in which up-and-coming artists compete for a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and a cash prize of $100,000. The show is produced by Pretty Matches Productions and...

, which aired from June 9–August 11, 2010.
Recent solo exhibitions include Loser at Dwight Hackett Projects in Santa Fe, New Mexico
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Santa Fe is the capital of the U.S. state of New Mexico. It is the fourth-largest city in the state and is the seat of . Santa Fe had a population of 67,947 in the 2010 census...

; Pretty Babies at Gescheidle Gallery in Chicago; and Albocracy at Jet Art Works in Washington DC. Significant recent group shows include Talk Dirty to Me at Larissa Goldston Gallery (2009), Transfigure at Kemper Museum, Kansas City, Missouri (2008), Diane and Sandy Besser Collection at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, California (2007). Her work has been show internationally with Gallery Akinci in Amsterdam and Gallery Arcaute in Monterey, Mexico.

Collections

Honig’s work is included in numerous private and public collections, including: The Art Institute of Chicago, Yale University Art Gallery
Yale University Art Gallery
The Yale University Art Gallery houses a significant and encyclopedic collection of art in several buildings on the campus of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Although it embraces all cultures and periods, the Gallery possesses especially renowned collections of early Italian painting,...

, The Fogg Art Museum
Fogg Art Museum
The Fogg Museum, opened to the public in 1896, is the oldest of Harvard University's art museums. The Fogg joins the Busch-Reisinger Museum and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum as part of the Harvard Art Museums....

, Milwaukee Art Museum
Milwaukee Art Museum
The Milwaukee Art Museum is located on Lake Michigan in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.Beginning around 1872, multiple organizations were founded in order to bring an art gallery to Milwaukee, as the city was still a growing port town with little or no facilities to hold major art exhibitions...

, Whitney Museum of American Art
Whitney Museum of American Art
The Whitney Museum of American Art, often referred to simply as "the Whitney", is an art museum with a focus on 20th- and 21st-century American art. Located at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street in New York City, the Whitney's permanent collection contains more than 18,000 works in a wide variety of...

, 21c Museum Hotel
21c Museum Hotel
21c Museum Hotel is a combination contemporary art museum and 90-room boutique hotel in Louisville, Kentucky. Five historic 19th century tobacco and bourbon warehouse buildings were renovated to house the museum, hotel, and its restaurant. The restaurant and bar is named Proof on Main, and is...

, [The Albright Knox Gallery], The Diane and Sandy Besser Collection, and Ball State University Museum of Art
Ball State University Museum of Art
The Ball State University Museum of Art is an art museum located in the Fine Arts building on the campus of Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana, USA....

.

Gallery Representation

Honig is represented by Dwight Hackett Projects in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and The Dolphin Gallery in Kansas City, Missouri.

Curatorial

Around 1997 Honig started Fahrenheit Gallery, an artist-run space in Kansas City's industrial West Bottoms, where she showed artists with national and international reputations and inspired other young Kansas City artists to do the same.

Entrepreneur

Honig also owns a lingerie and swimwear boutique, Birdies, which opened in 2003, and is located in the Crossroads Section of Kansas City, Missouri.

Appearances in Pop Culture


Essays


Publications

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