On August 20, 1920 the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified and gave women the right to vote. After a lengthy, nearly seventy year fight, the suffrage movement finally received what the women at the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention set out to accomplish. While there has been much progress towards gender equality in the past century there is still a lot of work to be done. Holly Ballard Martz’s exhibition, “Dirty Laundry & Domestic Bliss,” raises important questions about women’s rights, the patriarchy, and the role of women in society. Using mixed media artworks, Martz references or utilizes many common household objects to address these questions and provoke the viewer to think about a particular issue in a different way.
