Artwork Description
Meridel Rubenstein – Fat Man with Edith and Tilano
Dimensions: 18 x 23″ paper
Year: 1993/2022
Medium: pigment inks on Canson Infinity Arches BFK Rives 100% cotton paper
Edition: ed. of 10
Meridel Rubenstein’s Fatman with Edith is included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Helen Kornblum, who collected this work, says “With this photograph she conflates war with the feminine. She has the inhumanly destructive warhead, the plutonium bomb, called Fatman, dropped on Nagasaki, juxtaposed with a portrait of a woman, Edith Warner, and a nurturing, warm cup of tea.”
Curator, Roxana Marcoci: “In the early 1940s Robert Oppenheimer, a physicist in charge of The Manhattan Project developed the first atomic bomb.This photograph belongs to a series that explores encounters in New Mexico between indigenous communities and the scientists who created the bomb. These two worlds collided in the home of Edith Warner, who ran a tearoom in Los Alamos.”