Listen to article \u2022\u00a00:00 min<\/p>\n
Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter was working at Mural Arts<\/a> in 2021, inside the former home of famed Philadelphia painter Thomas Eakins, when she came across an 1882 photograph by Eakins, posted online, that left her rattled. <\/p>\n Titled African American girl nude, reclining on couch, the sepia image focuses on a young child gazing directly at the camera, one small arm tucked awkwardly under her chin as she leans back on a patterned couch, her chest exposed. It was one of many graphic photographs that Eakins, a realist painter, took of nude subjects \u2014 children included \u2014 as references for his work. In this instance, he posed the child as an odalisque<\/a>, a figure in art history who\u2019s typically enslaved into sex work. <\/p>\n Seeing that small, unnamed girl alone and naked, at the whims of Eakins, repulsed and triggered Baxter, who described feeling like it \u201cshook the ground\u201d underneath her. <\/p>\n \u201cI was an artist also coming to terms with my own [experience of child] sexual abuse [as an adult] with an art therapist, and when you go through traumatic situations and sexual abuse as a child, you don\u2019t really have language. For me, to survive, my brain told me that I was in control \u2026 but it became crystal clear that there was no way that a child can give consent,\u201d said Baxter, 44, who now lives in South Philly, pursuing a masters in fine arts at Temple\u2019s Tyler School of Art and Architecture with a focus in sculpture. <\/p>\n It was a pivotal moment for Baxter, a multimedia artist and social justice activist from Francisville who first earned acclaim in 2018 when she rapped about her experience giving birth in incarceration while shackled to a hospital bed<\/a> in 2007. She was reunited with her son after serving a seven-month sentence after a conviction on drug and robbery charges. <\/p>\n In October 2021, she published an op-ed in The Inquirer<\/a> calling Eakins \u201cPhilly\u2019s most revered sexual predator\u201d and organized a petition to condemn Eakins and demand<\/a> that the city of Philadelphia remove his name from landmarks.<\/p>\n Eakins served as a director at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts before he was fired in 1886 for insisting on nude models in classrooms<\/a>, a radical viewpoint at the time. He died in 1916 and recent research has shed light on the artist\u2019s pattern of sexual harassment<\/a>, including allegations that he sexually molested his niece<\/a>. <\/p>\n Baxter\u2019s campaign also called on arts institutions like PAFA and the Philadelphia Museum of Art<\/a> to raise awareness of his behavior in their celebrations of his legacy. <\/p>\n \u201cNo one felt the need to remove these images from public access or have a deeper conversation around the impacts of these images and tell a fuller story about Eakins and his legacy,\u201d said Baxter. <\/p>\n