Debo Mouloudji (b. 1990 Paris, France) is a figurative-narrative oil painter and mythologist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work centers around suppressed and forgotten histories of women and the Divine Feminine. Her background is in the atelier and she has studied drawing and painting at l’Académie de la Grande Chaumière, l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris, and the Art Students League of New York. She holds an MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute, has been published in New American Paintings, was an artist in residence at 77 Art and had a solo show at the 77 Gallery. Most recently she founded a feminist artist collective, Maenad Collective, with several of her Pratt Institute cohort.
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My narrative oil paintings are born out of a deep well of research into the suppressed and forgotten histories and myths of the Feminine Divine. Currently, my work focuses on the Great Goddess, the primordial deity, Her ever shifting identity and Her kinship with the serpent. in the Neolithic period, in Mesopotamia and in Southern Europe, the Indo-Europeans began overthrowing the many Goddess oriented civilizations, marrying their Gods to the local Goddesses, and demoting the Goddess to a secondary role. This was a kindness, compared to the nomadic Hebrew tribes of the first monotheistic religion who called the Goddess “the Abomination” and set out to ruthlessly kill and destroy any evidence of Her and Her peoples. Subsequently we can see how the monotheistic religions maintained a fear of the power of the Goddess, in their religious texts She and the woman are demonized, they are the cause of our exile from the Garden of Eden. Later we continue to see various stories relating to the evil serpent/dragon who imprisons a maiden and must be killed by a male hero. That narrative is propaganda against the Goddess and a warning of what should befall any who might still follow Her. As a student of art history, comparative mythology, and anthropology, it is natural to me to use my technical skills as a figurative painter to present alternative histories and myths in a medium and method which has so long been associated with “masculine genius.” My paintings challenge patriarchal monotheistic history by subverting accepted western religious iconography, revealing lesser known histories, renewing ancient knowledge, and proposing neo-mythologies.