Overview 

Mary Garrard, professor emerita of art history at American University, is known for her pioneering scholarship on Artemisia Gentileschi and other Renaissance women artists. After a long career of interpreting images, Garrard has turned to creating them.  

Her first iPhone and iPad drawings quickly acquired a plot. “The Adventures of a Miami Palm Tree” is a novel art form – a little like a graphic novel, a Japanese manga, or Goya’s Caprichos, but not exactly like any of them – an adventure story that unfolds through a series of images and their captions. A palm tree becomes dissatisfied with life on the beach and sets out to travel the world. When Palm’s identity doubles, Palmira and Palmono carry Palm’s ambitious quest to political heights and psychological depths as they move across the planet.

Garrard then took on a pre-existing story. “The Odyssey by Homer (So They Say)” is relatively faithful to the plot of the Odyssey as we know it, from the patriarchal-era epic that dates from the eighth or seventh century BC. But the story originated in a much earlier oral tradition. Garrard imagines the myth that predated the Homeric reshaping of the story. She shifts the focus on Odysseus as hero, the prevailing emphasis from antiquity to modern popular culture, to an emphasis more plausible in the late Bronze Age, in which the female characters are the more active protagonists.

The images in the two series stand as both independent paintings and episodes in the story. In this museum presentation, they are shown on two monitors, running sequentially as if the story were a film.