Good Girls 1968, Sharon, Pennsylvania

Good Girl documents ceramic artist, Marilyn Lysohir’s, personal and collective exploration of relationship and history as she sculptures 162 busts of the girls in her high school class of 1968, in the process integrating memory, interviews and story telling.

2001. Chance occurrence? Random event? Marilyn Lysohir is in Sharon, the western Pennsylvania industrial town where she grew up, visiting her parents. Out for a drive she stops for gas. A woman also at the station looks up and there is a flash of recognition. "You're Marilyn Lysohir. I remember you. Oh, you were so great in High School ..." Slowly Marilyn also remembers. It's Mary Reynolds.

Some weeks later Marilyn is back in Idaho and digs through boxes and finds her yearbook. There is Mary, and the others. Two or three she still is in touch with. She counts the girls ... 162 graduated with her and are memorialized in grainy black and white photographs. Looking at the high school images brought back a flood of memories about that time, the friends she had and lost touch with. She was sparked with deep curiosity about who they had become.

The film documents Marilyn’s process of reflection and re-discovery as she sculpts each head from the woman’s image found in the 1968 yearbook. By creating these individual heads Marilyn is giving her girls-classmates a deserved recognition. The omission of their male counterparts sparks the wry controversy of what it means to be left out from an experience. “For girls it was three dribbles and you had to pass the ball”, Marilyn points out. The parallel process of documenting the molding and painting of the ceramic busts that brings them to life provides another window into a creative process of “becoming.” The viewer is informed about the technical aspects of creating this installation as she also reflects on her own lived installation that is her life.

Although the main focus of the documentary is the Good Girls Installation, I am documenting this installation in the broader context of Marilyn’s body of Art work and subsequently in the broader context of feminist art. Marilyn’s sources and inspiration for her art comes from memory. Her work documents working class people and their achievements: Dark Site of Dazzle, the stories of veterans, BAMS installation portraits Marilyn’s mother and other women Marines during WWII, Fourth Sister is an installation piece about Marilyn’s aunts.

Visit Marilyn Lysohir website to view her body of work.

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