Tonya Turner Carroll ’89 delivered a SEVEN Talk at the 2025 Alumni Forum in Chapel Hill on October 19. Tonya is the owner and curator of Turner Carroll Gallery and Art Advisory.
Tonya Turner Carroll ’89 delivered a SEVEN Talk at the 2025 Alumni Forum in Chapel Hill on October 19. Tonya is the owner and curator of Turner Carroll Gallery and Art Advisory.
About SEVEN Talks
Every class of Morehead-Cain Scholars connects with seven others: the three classes ahead, its own, and the three that follow. The idea of SEVEN is to strengthen connections across generations of Morehead-Cains.
The Alumni Forum embodies this spirit through SEVEN Talks—seven alumni and scholars on Saturday, and seven more on Sunday—each sharing seven minutes of wisdom with the Morehead-Cain community.
How to listen
On your mobile device, you can listen and subscribe to Catalyze on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. For any other podcast app, you can find the show using our RSS feed. You can let us know what you thought of the episode by finding us on social media @moreheadcain or you can email us at communications@moreheadcain.org.
In 2022, I walked up to the security guard at the National Gallery of Art and told him I wanted to report a crime.
In the European sculpture galleries, there were 19 sculptures on display by Auguste Rodin—but not a single sculpture by his female equivalent and assistant, Camille Claudel.
For context, I had been asked to place Claudel’s most significant autobiographical sculpture in a major U.S. collection. The sculpture was calledL’Implorante, and it showed Camille Claudel naked, pregnant, on her knees, begging Rodin to stay with her.
But he didn’t. He didn’t acknowledge the child as his own, and he never acknowledged her contributions to his most significant artworks.
So Claudel could not keep the baby. She aborted it. Her family was mortified and ashamed of her. They locked her away in a mental institution against her will. She stayed there for 30 years until she died and was buried in an unmarked grave.
I wanted to find a good place in the U.S. for this sculpture to be seen. There are only about 90 sculptures remaining by Claudel because, once she was locked away in the mental institution, she never created another piece.
I was able to get this sculpture highlighted as a centerpiece in the first major Claudel exhibition that toured the United States. It opened at the Art Institute of Chicago and then traveled to the Getty in Los Angeles.
By the time the sculpture was going to appear at the Getty, I had sold it to a private collector—and I knew that, once again, he would lock her away in a private collection, out of public view.
So I went to the Getty opening to say goodbye to my friendL’Implorante. I felt she had embodied so much of the plight of women artists throughout art history.
When I walked in, I saw a quotation by a 19th-century French art critic emblazoned upon the wall. It said,We are witnessing a revolt against nature: a woman genius.
That art critic certainly didn’t have a good grasp of his art history. Because I knew that our very earliest visual information shows that women were absolutely venerated for their connection with nature and their superpower of creating life—like nature did—I decided to undertake a research project that I will probably continue for the rest of my life.
What I want to do is trace the evolution of the depiction of women in visual imagery through history and the corresponding perception of women in society.
I started at the very tip of the heel of Italy, and I’m going to tell you about three sites that are part of my research.
The first one is called the Cave of the Mother. It’s a Paleolithic cave temple where the earliest datable female pregnant remains were found—dated to 26,000 BC.
Also in that cave were votive sculptures. Both the sculptures and the female burials had a special type of Paleolithic crown made of shells and deer canines covered with ochre pigment to signify how important they were.
I was fascinated to see Paleolithic graffiti that archaeologists believe was an early form of counting—used by women to keep track of their menstrual cycles and their months of pregnancy. Now, that’s pretty genius, I would say.
In that cave, it felt like I was standing in the womb of the earth. It was dark and damp, and there were paintings of women all over the walls. It was clear that women were venerated here—not only in the Paleolithic, but all the way through the worship of Demeter thousands of years later, up to the 16th century, when Christians built a cathedral there to honor Mary.
The second site I’m going to tell you about shows a little bit of an uncomfortable shift. It’s about three hours away, and it’s called the Crypt of the Crucifixion.
This area was settled in 400 BC, and the earliest worshippers had painted images of women all over the walls and ceiling of this cave. They had also carved an elaborate stone altar that they placed beneath the oldest image of the female.
But in the 17th century, a painting of the Crucifixion was added—and the altar was literally moved from under the image of the female to under the image of the Crucifixion.
It’s pretty blatant physical evidence that perceptions toward women were shifting.
But the clincher is the 13th-century Basilica di Santa Caterina d’Alessandria in a town called Galatina. It’s magnificent—floor-to-ceiling frescoes, lapis lazuli, gold leaf, biblical scenes narrated across the walls.
But one thing was particularly troubling: an image of the Garden of Eden with the snake having a female face and long blond hair.
Up to this time, the snake in Christian iconography had been depicted simply as a snake with a snake’s face. So seeing the snake as a woman was really jolting for me, and I wanted to find out why that happened—where that artist got that idea.
It turns out it was actually written by a 12th-century theologian named Peter Comestor, who said that the snake must certainly have been a maiden because Eve was a woman and therefore would have believed only another woman.
That careless statement had a seismic impact on the perception of women up to this present day. Artists really latched onto this sensationalized depiction of the snake as female. They used it everywhere, including in the Sistine Ceiling. Michelangelo painted the snake in the Sistine Ceiling with the torso and face of a woman.
A little bit later, women were being burned at the stake as witches. Many were locked away in mental institutions—like Camille Claudel, one of our artists.
Russian activist artist Nadya Tolokonnikova was thrown into a Siberian penal colony in her twenties after she created what is known as one of the most significant artworks of the 21st century:Punk Prayer.
She had a four-year-old daughter at home. She was forced to sew Russian police uniforms for 16 hours a day using a broken sewing machine so that her fingers would become bloody as the needles broke.
My work for the rest of my life is to break the genius of these women out of the visual prison it’s been locked in for centuries.
It’s an uphill battle because, like Claudel’sL’Implorante, they keep getting locked away again so no one gets to see them.
But we can do small things. We recreated Nadya Tolokonnikova’s prison cell in our gallery, and she occupied it during the opening of the exhibition as a way of reclaiming her life as a performative artwork of her own.
So my challenge to you—and to all of us—is to not believe the old cliché “seeing is believing,” because that can be incredibly dangerous. Visual imagery can be full of misinformation, and that can be insidious and have an impact you might not even think of.
So when you look, really try to see the truth.
Thank you.