Profiles in Research: Daniel Belasco on Irene Peslikis

Post contributed by Daniel Belasco. Belasco is an art historian, the Executive Director of the Al Held Foundation, and the author of numerous essays and reviews on women artists and feminism, including the book Women Artists in Midcentury America: A History in Ten Exhibitions (Reaktion, 2024). Belasco received a 2025-2026 Mary Lily Research Travel Grant from the Sallie Bingham Center.

Artist, educator, and feminist organizer Irene Peslikis (1943 – 2002) is probably best known as the Marxist Girl depicted in Alice Neel’s 1972 oil painting of the same title. One arm raised, revealing her unshaved armpit, Peslikis sprawls on a purple upholstered chair, a moment of repose in her swirl of activity. Fortunately, the Rubenstein Library had the foresight and wherewithal to appreciate her significant, if largely unsung, contributions at the intersections of art and feminism in the late 1960s and 1970s.

I was keen to travel to Duke to delve deeply in her papers, chock full of notebooks, correspondence, ephemera, and documentation of her paintings, prints, and drawings, to support my research for my book on the emergence of the feminist art movement in the 1960s. I was especially eager to study manuscript versions of some of her political cartoons about abortion rights. What blew me away was a trove of other drawings and cartoons satirizing the intersections of culture, militarism, and masculinity. While most of these targeted the American war in Vietnam, one sketch caught my eye, and has stayed with me as a profound statement of the distortion of history and aesthetics to serve political opportunism and profiteering.

Irene Peslikis Papers, Box 32, folder “drawings pencil and pen”

The drawing begins on the left side as a basic geometric meander, much like the interlocking forms one sees on a classical Greek frieze or border décor. Then, in three steps, Peslikis subtly twists the lines and manipulates the angles so that the decorative beauty wraps around itself to form a swastika. As the daughter of Greek immigrants to the U.S., Peslikis read and wrote Greek and felt outrage at her homeland’s slippage into fascism after the military junta of 1967. The drawing is signed but not titled. Elsewhere in her archive, I found a slide of a more polished version of the drawing on plain, unlined paper. The title, “A Brief History of Modern Greece,” drives home the point, transforming the original sketched idea into an effective political cartoon. Though I am not aware of her publishing or otherwise circulating this image, it exemplifies the power of pictures that artists like Peslikis harnessed to advocate for women’s and worker’s rights in a public arena.

Irene Peslikis Papers, box 36, folder: slides 4

Peslikis, as a fervent participant in the women’s liberation movement, rejected the traditional values of her upbringing to embrace the bold new future of sex and race equality, abortion rights, and the elimination of male supremacy. The elegance and concision of her drawing reveals, to me, a clear mind freed from old habits and internalized oppression. Her use of graph paper, and numbered iterations of the image lends the work a didactic, instructional quality. Ultimately, Peslikis’s incisive drawing introduced me to her fascinating process of unlearning, as much a statement of political critique, an insight I only was able to make after spending time in her archive.

Art historian Daniel Belasco is the Executive Director of the Al Held Foundation and the author of numerous essays and reviews on women artists and feminism, including the book Women Artists in Midcentury America: A History in Ten Exhibitions (Reaktion, 2024). Belasco received a 2025-2026 Mary Lily Research Travel Grant from the Sallie Bingham Center.