This study compared the effects of sexist labeling on the perceptions of visual artists by the community college and university students and determined their sex role orientation. The 370 students were shown five slides of an artist's works and were given six versions of an artist's biography. It contained embedded sexual labeling (woman, girl, person/ she, man, guy, person/he). The Artist Evaluation Questionnaire was administered to the female and male community college and university students that required the students to evaluate the female and male artists on several aspects of affective and cognitive measures. The questionnaire consisted of 9 items that had to be rated by the participants. In addition, the students filled out the Demographic Questionnaire and the BEM Sex Role Inventory, titled the Attitude Questionnaire. The Analysis of Variance testing procedures were administered to analyze the responses. The results disclosed gender differences in students' ratings. The female artist's work, when the artist was referred to by the neutral sexual label, "person", received significantly higher ratings from the female students. The male students gave the female artist her highest ratings when she was referred to by the low status sexual label, "girl". Both sexes did not express statistically significant preferences for any of the male sexual labels. Gender difference became apparent when it was found that female students rated both sexes equally, and their ratings were lower than those of the male students. The male students rated the female artist's work higher than the work of the male artist. The analysis of the sex role inventory questionnaire revealed the absence of the feminine (expressive) and masculine (instrumental) personalities among the students. The personalities of almost all the students were androgynous, with a few within the range of the near feminine, and a few within the range of the near masculine. The study reveals that there are differences in perception of sexual labels among the community college and university students.

The purpose of my graduate thesis creative project, Girl Is a Four-Letter Word: Gender Biased Imaqe and Language is to call attention to the subliminal messages about stereotypical female qualities and female role expectations transmitted through the use of our language. My focus is on classroom visuals and reading textbooks used in the 1950s and 1960s, which illustrate very separate paths of gender social development. I have created a series of twenty-two paintings, in which I have juxtaposed images inspired from old textbooks and mild four-letter words to illustrate double-entendre associations and implied sexual innuendoes in everyday language.The creative project began with extensive research to find examples of textbooks from the 1950s, to review the textbooks in the historical context of America's educational goals and to study artists who have investigated themes of language and meaning of images in their work. Specific artists researched who have explored these ideas historically include Rene Magritte, Jasper Johns and Barbara Kruger. The actual artworks of several abstract expressionists were examined closely because of a similarity in painting technique and style.The paintings produced for this thesis project were executed with oil paint on recycled stretched canvases. Thick paints were applied straight from the tube and layered in thick impasto. The composition of all paintings include a vignetted image or isolated object in the center of the canvas with a label placed below, similar to the format of flashcards used for learning to read. The image and words together create a relationship pointing out blatant gender-biased associations, displayed with tongue-in-cheek humor. / Department of Art