Post-Partum Document

Conceived as an installation in six consecutive sections, Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document has been widely exhibited and intensely debated since its first scandalous appearance in the 1970s. Now, more than twenty years later, the Document’s initial challenge to conceptual art and its impact on the emerging discourse of sexual difference have taken on a new significance. For many younger artists and critics, the republication of Kelly’s artwork in book form will provide the opportunity to engage directly with the visual and intertextual strategies that spawned a generation of “thinking bad girls.”