The Exhibitionists Take AWE

^{Image caption: Rebecca Draisey, Ode to Dance, acrylic on wood, 24 x 30 in. Image courtesy the artist.}

“Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into the Met. Museum?”

—The Guerilla Girls, 1989

The Exhibitionists is a fluidly organized collective of figurative woman artists. While individual exhibitionists move in and out of the group, their shared focus remains the same: how to authentically capture the contemporary experience of being a woman by disrupting and expanding the nude tradition.

Art Windsor Essex has a collection of roughly 4,000 works of art, but fewer than 20% of those works are made by women. The Exhibitionists, who mostly came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, are almost the same age as AWE, which began as the Willistead Art Gallery of Windsor in 1943. As the Exhibitionists studied art and began their careers, AWE’s holdings were growing alongside them. But here, as elsewhere, as these artists gained confidence and grew in their practices, AWE was still not seriously collecting women artists.

For The Exhibitionists, the female body is a contested site of power and celebration, of play and vulnerability. Chappus, Collins, Draisey and Renaud Fisher have selected work from AWE’s collection that reveals the institution’s strengths and gaps. They have placed their work and the work of other Exhibitionists alongside AWE’s collection to reveal what’s possible when we centre equity and bravery in our collecting choices.

We would like to acknowledge the valuable contributions of all Exhibitionists who have worked with The Exhibitionists since their inception in 2014.

—Emily McKibbon, Head, Exhibitions and Collection

The Exhibitionists are a group of figurative women artists who authentically explore contemporary experiences of being female. We paint and draw one another in costume, in imagined or real environments, often satirizing social constructs. Feminine nakedness is too often linked to seduction, sexuality, indecency, or powerlessness. Our work seeks to demystify the female form, celebrate beauty, and assert feminine power.

Some of us had parents who lived through wars, some the Great Depression. We grew up learning to fix, save, recycle, and reuse. Nothing went to waste. Our mothers laboured endlessly in cooking, cleaning, and caretaking, their lives narrowed by duty and expectation. As Alice Neel observed, these women were often judged as “ugly,” their bodies marked by hardship and relentless responsibility. ¹ They were not born that way; life etched itself into them.

Yet there was resilience, humour, ingenuity, and fierce love. Kitchens were loud with laughter. Clothes were mended with care. Beauty existed anyway.

We came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, riding the wave of activism and social change. Free speech, free love, access to birth control, and humanist principles surged forward. We moved into the sex, drugs, rock-and-roll angst of a post-industrial, pre-tech world—punk-laced, defiant, and soon shadowed by the AIDS crisis. Our resistance made a difference. We believed progress was permanent.

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We are not immune to the pressures shaping women’s lives—the demands to behave, to be pleasing, modest, and quiet. Equality and freedom, we learned, were never immovable constructs. That erosion now makes our work more compelling. Our opinions are weighted by decades of quietly imposed rules. We are committed to honestly sharing our real experience. We do not consider ourselves classic feminists. We are humanists. We wrestle with beauty, age, relevance, and the modesty code. Our work rejects exploitation and is grounded in respect—for ourselves, for one another, and for those who engage with it.

We persist in moving beyond inequality toward a world that honours complexity, difference, and dignity. We have not given up. We still believe in the ideals our progenitors fought for.

How do you lose a voice you were never meant to have? How do you carry truth when it is dismissed before it can take form?

Our bodies hold the record.
Our images break the quiet, fracture comfort, and refuse erasure.
This work fills the silence with presence. It exposes what power depends on, remaining unseen.

We dare to be seen.
We don’t get the accolades afforded some artists but what we do have is the autonomy to tell the truth.

—Judy Chappus, Sandie Collins, Rebecca Draisey and Linda Renaud

Curated by Judy Chappus, Sandie Collins, Rebecca Draisey and Linda Renaud Fisher, with assistance from Emily McKibbon.

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Judy Chappus

Judy is a Windsor based artist and uses photography, sculpture, video, painting and writing projects to share her life experiences. She is a founding member of the group, “The Exhibitionists”, and has been working with other woman and artists in the community since 2014 to create and exhibit figurative works with an emphasis on changing destructive cultural beliefs regarding woman, power and identity.

In 2020 she wrote an independent book of poetry titled, Chop Shop, a book of poems about the neighbors. This publication is now part of the rare books collection in The Leddy Library at The University of Windsor.

On Salt Spring Island in 2021-22 she photo-documented and produced drawings, prints and paintings for a poetry and art book searching for a process by which to best share her experience of that bio-eccentric landscape. “Unfolding the Trees” is a series of life size graphite drawings on stretched linen embracing the notion of eco psychology by bathing the viewer in the magnificence, magnitude and bio diverse universe of trees. These works are meant to remedy our ever-fading connection with the natural world. She was one of four artists selected for The 2021 Salt Spring Mural Project and in 2022 she was a self-appointed artist in residence on Salt Spring Island resulting in a solo exhibition at The Salt Spring Gallery and a book of poetry both titled, “Understory”.

“They held a hand over the cave wall and blew pigment around it wanting to connect to something larger than themselves, something beyond space and time, something elemental and eternal.”

Chappus has an Honors BA in Fine Art from the University of Windsor, ON and a Masters Degree from the University of California, Irvine.

Sandie Collins

I have been a devoted artist since childhood, learning through play and physical engagement with materials. I often struggled within the structure of school, my attention pulled toward an interior world shaped by looking, imagining, and making. That early way of learning—through curiosity rather than instruction—continues to guide my practice. It was in printmaking with John Pufahl that I discovered the medium I wanted to devote my life to, a practice that became both my language and my grounding force.

My work explores presence, memory, and the passage of time. Printmaking offers structure and repetition—a fixed pattern that allows for unexpected moments when ink meets paper. These moments of spontaneity, emergence, and surprise are central to my process. Life experience, including physical injury and illness, has also become part of this practice, transforming making into a space for reflection, healing, and growth. This engagement with impermanence informs not only what I make, but how I approach the act of making itself.

Over decades of studio practice, my work has been supported by Ontario Arts Council grants and exhibited in juried and invitational shows across Canada, the United States, and internationally. Selected exhibitions include the TOMPE publications and exhibitions (2020–2024), the 8th Biennial FootPrint International Exhibition, Norwalk, Connecticut, where I received Honourable Mention (2022), the Canada–Japan Interchange Print Exhibition, Chiba, Japan (1994), and the Print Exchange project, with works displayed in London, Ontario, and St. George, Barbados (2022). My work is represented in public and private collections in Canada and the United States.

Rebecca Draisey

Rebecca Draisey (b.1960, UK) is a visual artist who has spent most of her life based in Windsor, Ontario. She was primarily home-schooled until attending boarding school at age 11. Here she thrived in the new busy new environment. As her parents strongly encouraged her to enroll only in what we now call “STEM” courses, she would sneak into the nighttime art class and hide under a table. After being outed by claiming ownership of a series of silkscreen prints laying out to dry, she was told that as long as she sat at the table and not under it she would be forthwith allowed to remain unofficially in the class. This deal did nearly come to end when she painted the teacher’s favourite chair metallic purple.
A decade later, Rebecca returned to Windsor with a busy career, worked afternoon and night shifts in ER, and attended art classes in the day, obtaining her BFA (Painting and photography) in the mid 90s from the University of Windsor.

By the mid 2000s Draisey started showing locally in Windsor, with solo, dual and group shows locally, as well as Sault Ste Marie, Toronto, and Detroit, Michigan. She remains a colourist, procedurally influenced by her abstract expressionist training, yet over the years her interests remain with psychological portraiture and narrative of social interaction. She attempts to express with paint the depths that words cannot plumb. A decade ago, what began as chat, food from the garden at Chappus’ dining room table, a touch of yoga led by Collins, and informal sessions of classic (nude) figure drawing, quickly and organically became something much larger. The artists knew that they were not just drawing bodies, but they were drawing each other as human beings, and there was something inexorably powerful and redemptive in this process of ownership. The Exhibitionists were born, and others were invited to join and participate as artists, models, poets, musicians, photographers and audio specialists, with 3 discreet shows held in Windsor between 2017-2019.

Draisey’s work with the Exhibitionists does not shirk from portraying the anger and anxiety that comes from facing dishonesty and injustice in our world, however fundamentally she explores humanist views of female reality, fierce determination, the support of others and our deep need to care for each other.

She is not a shrinking violet in paint, or in real life, and nearly 40 years of gritty front line medical work has influenced her in ways that she has only just begun to reconcile within her art practice of the last decade.
As well as The Exhibitionists, in recent years Draisey has worked with The Control Group, showing at Common Ground and Leamington Art Centre (2024). She also has just come off the tail of a well received solo show ‘Always Looking’ at Villa 92 in Tecumseh (2025) with themes of quiet observer, nature, and water.

She wishes that you enjoy the show, and feel free to ask questions.

Linda Renaud Fisher

Renaud Fisher is a multidisciplinary artist who resides in Windsor, Ontario. She is motivated by the desire to explore various facets of community life, including the built, historical, natural and sociopolitical environments. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Arts (2018) from the University of Windsor and is the recipient of several grants from the Ontario Arts Council.

The first several years of her artistic practice explored the historic Old Sandwich Town community, resulting in several bodies of work including a few collaborations with members of the community.

In 2019 she joined onetenpark: a working space, during which time she co-founded Les jardinières urbaines with Susan Gold and Kewy Janisse. Their work is a reaction to environmental issues such as the degradation of biodiversity in the context of the urban centers.

Renaud Fisher more recently joined Judy Chappus, Sandie Collins and Rebecca Draisey as a member The Exhibitionists, initially out of her discomfort and concern with the way women have been historically depicted in the visual arts and various other media. As an Exhibitionist, her work explores the female figure by visually documenting and interpreting the time and intimate situations that she and her friends share while modeling with, and for each other. Her work is a response to contemporary culture’s unrealistic and unhealthy images of women with which we are constantly faced, and consequently the ongoing pressure to conform. Concerned with the negative impact on women, she searches for ways to promote self-acceptance and appreciation for the body.

As a multidisciplinary artist, she rejects any pressure to develop one particular visual language, considering herself visually multilingual. Renaud Fisher tends to paint ambiguously, often layering her work physically and conceptually.