Woman with the Good Meat Removed collects the erotic collage practice of Detroit-based artist Zoë Ligon, whose cut-paper reconstructions of vintage pornographic photography turn appropriated bodies into abstracted, self-possessed figures.
Published by Aint-Bad Editions (Savannah, GA) in 2016 with an introduction by Katy Ruth Ashcraft, the 96-page hardcover gathers collages Ligon built from vintage pin-up and pornographic magazines. She cuts each model's likeness into interlocking shapes of color and pattern, discards the surrounding studio context, and reassembles the fragments — often against invented natural backdrops — into compositions where her own framing replaces the original photographer's. The edition of 600 is signed, numbered, offset-printed in color, with sewn cloth binding.
Ligon (b. Detroit) began collaging as a teenager, later turning from her father's National Geographic archive to pin-up and adult magazines as source material. Her collage work has shown at Superchief Gallery, Brooklyn (2016), and been covered in Vice and Refinery29. She is also known publicly as a sex educator and founder of the online retailer Spectrum Boutique, a separate strand of her public profile from the studio practice gathered here.
Notes
No ISBN gap here, but this is a small self-distributed art-press book with several sourcing caveats: (1) authors[0].url left null — no dedicated official artist website was found. Older interviews (e.g. nakid.io, Dec 2023) link to zoolioncomplete.com as her site, but that domain now resolves to a parked/squatted page (fingerprinting redirect script, no content) — it is NOT used anywhere in this record. Her only current verified web presences are the Big Cartel shop, Instagram (@thongria), and the separate Spectrum Boutique commerce site. (2) Binding conflict: Printed Matter's catalog (detailed bibliographic listing) gives Cover=Hardback-Cloth, Binding=Sewn Bound, Process=Offset Printed/Color, confirmed by two independent web searches her own Big Cartel shop listing text said 'Perfect Bound', which is inconsistent with a cloth hardcover. Printed Matter's cataloging was treated as authoritative for physical construction. (3) Publisher URL: Aint-Bad's specific product page for this title (https://aint-bad.com/product/books/zoe-ligon/, found via a working link on nakid.io) now 404s live a June 2023 Wayback Machine snapshot confirms the URL existed and belonged to Aint-Bad, but the archived page is JS-rendered and did not yield extractable text — the book appears to be delisted/out of print from the publisher's own site. publisher.url is set to the live Aint-Bad root domain instead. (4) Cover image: no flat scan was found anywhere (publisher page dead, Amazon blocked scraping, OpenLibrary/Google Books had no cover for this ISBN) the only available image is Big Cartel's angled product photo on a red velvet backdrop. It was perspective-corrected (4-point quad transform in PIL) to a rectangular front-cover crop matching the book's true 8.25:10.25 aspect ratio before saving — image quality is limited by the low-resolution (800x533) source. (5) 'signed' is set true because Printed Matter lists the entire edition as signed and numbered as manufactured (not a copy-specific inscription) confirm against the library's physical copy if precision matters.
