Women, Trauma & Visual Expression

by Amy Stacey Curtis

WOMEN, TRAUMA & VISUAL EXPRESSION explores the hows and whys of women artists' visual expressions of personal, cultural, and collective trauma. Amy Stacey Curtis compares the lives and work of nine women artists (four from our past--Artemisia Gentileschi, Kaethe Kollwitz, Frida Kahlo, and Eva Hesse--and five contemporaries, including Curtis herself, from Chicago, Washington State, San Francisco, New Jersey, and Maine). Drawing from extensive research, ambitious surveys, interviews, and personal experience, Curtis discusses the anatomy of trauma, the history of women's trauma research, the artist's work process and connection to audience, trauma's content, symbols, patterns, and archetypes, the stigma of trauma and "trauma art," and the collective visual manifestation of coping mechanisms used to survive trauma.

256 pages, Paperback

First published February 28, 2005

About the author

Amy Stacey Curtis is a visual artist, author, and musician. Her latest book How My Brain Saved My Life Twice: A Memoir chronicles her life before and after a devastating brain injury caused by Lyme disease she didn't know she had, tracing the creativity, resilience, and remarkable inner resources that carried her through. Her previous titles include several chapbooks, 9 Walks (2013), Drawing Memory (2015), The Color Of Memory (2022), and The Forgiveness Project (Maine To California) (2023), as well as two full-length books, Women, Trauma & Visual Expression (2005 Independent Publishers Awards Non-Fiction Finalist) and 9 Solo Biennials (2020 Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance Excellence in Publishing Finalist). From 2015 to 2016, while writing a three-year weekly blog called The Artist Plan, Amy was paid to write 18 posts for Pyragraph, an online magazine for creatives worldwide.

The 2025 winner of Maine’s Got Talent, Amy learns five songs weekly on her ukulele, a self-prescribed music therapy helping her speech after a six-year progression from psychosis and wheelchair, to walker, to cane, back to her feet. Amy shares her story and cover songs on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, where one of her videos has over 600K views.

To access all of Amy’s publications, art, and music, please visit www.amystaceycurtis.com.