CORAL GABLES, FL.- Game Face, What Does a Female Athlete Look Like? on view at the Lowe Art Museum through September 10, 2006, celebrates the current popularity and success of women’s sports. The exhibition features 182 color and black and white photographs by some of America’s best photojournalists and fine-art photographers. Co-curated by reporter Jane Gottesman and photographer Geoffrey Biddle, and is sponsored by MassMutual Financial Group, Including OppenheimerFunds, Inc. The exhibition was organized by Game Face Productions to coincide with 30th anniversary in 2002 of Title IX, which mandated equality for women and girls in schools.

GAME FACE tells extraordinary stories about how sports have shaped the identities of women and girls. Gottesman searched for nearly a decade for images that span genres—documentary, conceptual, vernacular, sports action—as well as subject, time, place, age, and race. They depict women participating in every sport from ping-pong to pole-vaulting, from hunting to hardball. And they range in style and substance, from sepia-toned portraits of a corseted lady with a bicycle in the 1890s, to a full-color action shot of today’s muscle-rippling soccer star Brandi Chastain savoring, without inhibition, her team’s sudden-death World Cup victory.

The photographs in GAME FACE present celebrated sports stars such as Marion Jones, Chris Evert, Michelle Akers, Althea Gibson, Amelia Earhart, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Mary Lou Retton, Tara Lipinski, and Martina Navratilova, alongside dozens of anonymous amateurs. Each image offers a unique answer to the question at the heart of GAME FACE: What does a female athlete look like? That is, what do girls and women look like, freed from traditional feminine constraints, using their bodies in joyful and empowering ways?

The images assembled for GAME FACE comprise a tremendous mix of perspectives, creating a spirited and inclusive debate about the ways women play and compete. Included is work by Mary Ellen Mark, Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, Annie Leibovitz, Tina Barney, Lee Friedlander, Justine Kurland, Ruth Orkin, Eve Fowler, Andrea Modica, Charles Harbutt, Robert Mapplethorpe and Pulitzer Prize winners Annie Wells, April Saul, Melissa Farlow and Rick Rickman among many others. Together they highlight the photographer’s ability to wordlessly present the beauty and complexity of the women’s sports movement.

In 1972, Congress passed Title IX, a law that mandated equality for women and girls in schools. One of the law’s most radical effects was opening up the playing field to all. In 1971, 1-in-27 school age girls played sports; now, 1-in-2.6 participates. Over the same time period the ratio of school age boys playing sports remained the same, 1-in-2. Not only did more girls start playing sports as a result of Title IX, but these young athletes also redefined what is acceptable for girls, and by extension, for boys. Title IX was born of the optimism of the civil rights and women’s liberation movements, and it continues to have a profound influence on our culture.

A generation of women, including GAME FACE creator Gottesman, has come of age under Title IX. Old stereotypes about women and sports have fallen away, and today’s women embrace athletics with a passion that would have been unfathomable a quarter of a century ago. For many women today, sports are an _expression of personal freedom. Athletics encourages women to be strong, daring and resilient, necessary survival skills in an era when women are constantly bombarded by images of fashion models, self-improvement products and the diet culture. The influx of women into the athletic arena is forcing a redefinition of sports. More importantly, it is revising traditional notions of womanhood.

Provocative and intimate, the photographs in GAME FACE reveal women’s powerful and complex relationship to sports, as well as men’s support for the athletic females in their lives. They depict the many ways a woman can use athletics to describe her sense of self, her physicality, her aspirations and her involvement in the revision of beliefs about womanly and feminine behavior. In greater context, the exhibition speaks to women’s gains not just in sports, but in all aspects of society, addressing the power of sports to teach girls and women to explore their physical and mental abilities.

Using the arc of the athletic experience—getting ready, start, action, finish, aftermath—as its organizing principle, GAME FACE synthesizes photographs and personal reflections into an elegantly structured story with built-in dramatic movement. When considered in terms of life stages, the various phases of the athletic experience symbolize determination, effort, dedication, completion, satisfaction and reward. They represent the phases we all experience in big and small ways throughout our lives, and they parallel the stages women have had to pass through to get to the level of involvement in athletics we enjoy today.

MassMutual Financial Group, including OppenheimerFunds, in collaboration with Game Face Productions, also developed a free educational outreach program that uses the compelling Game Face photographs to spark classroom discussions on character education and to help students recognize their own athletic and personal accomplishments. To date, the curriculum has been used in more than 4,000 classrooms nationwide.

The presentation at the Lowe of this unique photographic celebration of sports and physical daring in the lives of girls and women is part of a five-year national tour.