Lynda Benglis "Ghost of Smile" Limited-Edition T-Shirt

This November marks 50 years since Lynda Benglis rocked the art establishment with the publication of her famed 1974 Artforum Advertisement. For this provocative work, she commandeered two pages in the front of the magazine with a glossy field of black space and an image of herself naked, wearing white sunglasses and holding a comically large double dildo between her thighs. Five of Artforum's editors denounced Benglis's artwork in the magazine's December 1974 issue. Two subsequently left the staff.  

Benglis has stated that her intention was to create a work "ambiguous enough that it couldn’t be said what it was." This embrace of open-endedness gave the work a life far beyond its original context.

To mark this milestone anniversary of the artwork, Pace has collaborated with Benglis to design a limited-edition t-shirt with a glow-in-the-dark image of Ghost of Smile, a sculpture which relates to the cast metal dildos, titled Smile, that the artist made shortly after the publication of her Artforum Advertisement. Nodding to the history of the iconic ad, this cast phosphorescent pigmented polyurethane sculpture reflects Benglis’s enduring practice of reimagining her work in different materials and scales over the years.