Her activism in the community was not only limited to the works that she made, which are provocative and beautiful, but as a recruiter to the feminist art cause. In 1970, when she began teaching at the Fresno State College, she began a feminist art program where she gathered young women to the cause. In an art journal published in 1971, Judith Dancoff interviews Chicago about the selection process of women artists for the program. Chicago apparently asked the girls the question “who wants to be an artist?” Although the question seems simple enough, to Chicago it had much more implications when the question was posed to girls as it really begged the question if they “[…] were prepared and strong enough to relinquish make-up, relinquish being …show more content…
sexual objects, relinquish the privileges that a male society bestows on women. For me, the quickest way to alter values is for those people who are the strongest to get busy doing all the work as quickly as they can, to teach everybody who’s not as strong how to be stronger whatever way they can and I want to put out information about my experience as a woman through art,” (Chicago, A Feminist Art Program, 48). To Chicago, being an artist as a woman is not as simple as it is for men to be artists. She says that a lot of struggle comes from it and that a lot has to be sacrificed if any woman is going to make it. She also states in this exert from the interview the basic premise of feminism, that now has become a feminist fundamental, that stronger women need to take the leadership role and help those who are yet to be able to help themselves. Chicago herself is also an amazing artist in her own right producing several works of feminist art. In her rejection quintet she metaphorically rejects the roles that have been place on her due to the categories that she has been placed in by society. She uses colored pencil to create designs reminiscent of ancient Greek art depicts implied imagery of a vulvae.
The piece in this series that really caught my attention was the Female Rejection (Fig. 2) where she metaphorically rejects her role in femininity and celebrates herself as an assertive woman. The piece comes from the midst of Chicago’s use of what she calls the “central core” or blatant focal point of the work. In Female Rejection an objective vagina acts as the central core for this piece framed with (what seems to be) flower petals descending into the center, drawing and locking the eye onto the focal point of the vagina. The work not only celebrates the anatomy of a woman but masculinity that can be found in women rejecting the normative femininity that is inherently associated with women today. Judy Chicago is a wonderful female feminist artist who has begun to create a community of fellow feminist artists as to add members to the movement to strive for equality within the art world, as well as creating some pretty stellar pieces that have their own place in feminist art history. Judy Chicago is one woman to watch and it will be interesting as to how she incorporates her vaginal imagery into later works that have yet to …show more content…
come. Another Chicago feminist artist, who has come into contact with Judy Chicago more than once, to watch out for is Harmony Hammond.
She is the founder of A.I.R. Gallery, the first women’s cooperative art gallery, as well as last year cofounding the feminist magazine, The Heresies: A Feminist Publication of Art and Politics. The magazine documents the feminist artists’ voices, stories, and opinions about the state of the world. In the first volume of the magazine, Hammond actually wrote an article about retaking abstract art for feminist art regardless of what society thinks or implies with it. In the article section, Feminist Abstract Art - A Political Viewpoint, she talks about her work using sewing and knitting and how she received criticism for playing into gendered stereo types. In response she explains that, “ For women, the meaning of sewing and knotting is ‘connecting’—connecting the parts of one’s life, and connecting to other women—creating a sense of community and wholeness. Other women, drawing on women’s traditional arts, make specific painterly reference to decoration and craft,” (Hammond, Heresies Issue #1, 66). She is stating that even thought that there is a gender stereotype for women to knit and sew that there are larger implications rather than just stereotypes. Hammond states that sewing and knitting has been used to allow women get closer to each other and build strong communities which is what she wants to accomplish with bringing women together to fight
against systematic oppression that plagues women in today’s society. I think that is a really interesting approach, embracing one’s gender roles through a feminist perspective and not completely rejecting the traditions that have been upheld by women for centuries now. In her woven painting series she explores these themes of embracing one’s culture by knitting, weaving, and placing fabric over clay shards that she created. An example of one of the pieces is her Kypros Born pieces that is blue fabric woven over a rectangular shaped clay slab. Referencing the traditions of women of woven cloth, baskets, and clay slabs to create a narrative of women’s historical creativity and putting it back into the context painterly and sculptural work. Hammond’s full embrace of the female history and their practices is a different look at feminist art, as seen before hand in the paper, which completely rejects aspects of femininity. She adds a more diverse flavor and input into the movement. It will be interesting where she takes her voice and her works to the next level, seeing how they grow and change. Will she keep with the theme of woven works of art? Only she knows. Finally we are taking a look at the Philadelphia abstract lesbian feminist painter, Louise Fishman. Fishman has had a history of struggling to get into the scene of the art world as her previous minimalist grid like paintings in the 60’s were not sought after which caused her to rethink her approach to her work. Like Hammond, she began to explore femininity and all of its implications of menial labor such as knitting, piecing, sewing, etc. Although now that she is returning to her more masculine subject matter now her exploration of female’s traditional tasks earned her the recognition and the respect she deserves. More recently she has begun work on her “Angry Series” where she lists and identifies fellow feminist artists and their anger towards the oppression and suppression that women have faced.
During the 1940s and 1950s women artists were not always appreciated and seen as polished educated women artist. As an inspiring painter, printmaker and art teacher Florence McClung accomplished many awards in her life time, faced a difficult period of discrimination towards women artist, and faced exclusion by printmaker companies. On the other hand, McClung did not let anything impede her great achievements.
Georgia O’Keefe is a famous American painter who painted beautiful flowers and landscapes. But she painted these images in such a way that many people believed she was portraying sexual imagery. “O’Keefe’s depictions of flowers in strict frontality and enlarged to giant scale were entirely original in character . . . the view into the open blossoms evoked an image of the female psyche and invited erotic associations.” (Joachimides 47) O’Keefe denies these allegations and says that she “magnified the scale of the flower only to ensure people would notice them.” (Haskell 203) O’Keefe’s artwork was misinterpreted because of cultural prejudice, her non-traditional lifestyle, and gender bias art criticism. But despite these accusations, Georgia O’Keefe’s artwork was not based on sexuality.
Women have spent a large amount of time throughout the 20th century fighting for liberation from a patriarchal form that told them that they must be quiet and loyal to their husbands and fathers. For the duration of this essay, I will be discussing how the “Modern Woman” image that appeared through the Art Deco style — that emulated ideas such as the femme fatale and masqueraded woman, and presented new styles to enhance women’s comfortability and freedom — is still prevalent and has grown in contemporary art and design since. Overall I will describing to you how fashion, sexuality, and the newly emerged ‘female gaze’, and how these tie in together — in both periods of time — to produce what can be described as powerful femininity.
No other artist has ever made as extended or complex career of presenting herself to the camera as has Cindy Sherman. Yet, while all of her photographs are taken of Cindy Sherman, it is impossible to class call her works self-portraits. She has transformed and staged herself into as unnamed actresses in undefined B movies, make-believe television characters, pretend porn stars, undifferentiated young women in ambivalent emotional states, fashion mannequins, monsters form fairly tales and those which she has created, bodies with deformities, and numbers of grotesqueries. Her work as been praised and embraced by both feminist political groups and apolitical mainstream art. Essentially, Sherman’s photography is part of the culture and investigation of sexual and racial identity within the visual arts since the 1970’s. It has been said that, “The bulk of her work…has been constructed as a theater of femininity as it is formed and informed by mass culture…(her) pictures insist on the aporia of feminine identity tout court, represented in her pictures as a potentially limitless range of masquerades, roles, projections” (Sobieszek 229).
The sexually explicit, gestural, and raw scenes that the painter, Cecily Brown created was over-viewed. Moreover, the rise of Brown was constantly speculated as some felt it was due to the pure controversial aspect of her work, while some believed it was a result of nepotism. Whatever the case, she is still considered a trailblazer in the sense that she was one of the first female painters to dare to depict sexual and grotesque scenes in a way that was not completely overt. Unapologetic and raw, Jenny Saville painted the unconventional woman and challenged the normalized and expected ideals that surrounded a woman’s appearance. Brickey emphasizes that Saville was someone who truly challenged the definition of beauty and did so in portraying society’s view of a traditionally “ugly” and “disgusting” female. Lisa Yuskavage, a female artist with a soft porn aesthetic, was touched on. She was a painter who was constantly criticized as either a “dumb feminist or a brilliant, cynical misogynist”. Constantly depicting the nude female form in a controversial light, Brickey mentions how feminists spoke out against her and her art as they felt it was detrimental to their
Feminism and political issues have always been centered on in the art world and artists like to take these ideas and stretch them beyond their true meanings. Female artists such as Hannah Höch, who thrived during the Dada movement in the 1920s in Germany and Barbara Kruger who was most successful during the 1980s to 1990s in the United States, both take these issues and present them in a way that forces the public to think about what they truly mean. Many of Kruger’s works close in on issues such as the female identity and in relation to politics she focuses on consumerism and power. Höch, like Kruger, also focuses on female identity but from the 1920s when feminism was a fairly new concept and like Kruger focuses on politics but focuses more on the issues of her time such as World War I. With the technique of photomontage, these two artists take outside images and put them together in a way that displays their true views on feminism and politics even though both are from different times and parts of the world.
...intimate setting through the art form of their choice. To get an understanding of just how exceptional and different women can be depending on their life experiences, to support women no matter the culture, ethnicity, race or religious background for which they come from, to take notice of and observe women voicing their own thoughts, passions, skills and dreams.
In the section, Words of Honor: Contributions of a Feminist Art Critic, Arlene Raven outlines the events in her life that have led her to be an art critic for artists who were not as “bankable” as other artists. In this excerpt, she discusses how her experiences of being raped exposed her to a cruel reality about the oppression women faced despite equal education acquirement. Consequently, she increasingly got more involved in the feminist/political work, creating iconic associations like the Women’s Building. Motivated by the explosion of the feminist movement in America, she created this institution to encourage activities in creating expressive bodies of art. It also called for the protest against major institutions that tends to exclude
Kruger’s exploration of the role of women in society, and gender as a social construct with her aggressive and provocative images, places her in an important role in recent social and feminist movements. This, combined with her unique artistic techniques, has made her a very influential artist of postmodern times.
Doordan, Dennis P and Ellen Mazur Thompson. "Alms for Oblivion: The History of Women in Early American Graphic Design." Design History: An Anthology. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1995. 64. Print.
The piece from the article that I found most intriguing and inspiring has to be Chicago’s Menstruation Bathroom. Menstruation is seen as such a taboo thing in our society, we don’t openly talk about it. This piece is attempting to fight those taboos by bringing the imagery of Menstruation, the tampons, the pads, the blood, into the open as opposed to being hidden behind the stall doors. For me, this piece has even more meaning because in one of my other cultures classes we learned about women in Nepal who are sent to sleep in cow sheds during their periods because they are considered “impure” while menstruating. So art like this is important to help fight taboos and normalize this thing that is part of human life, and more specifically a woman’s
During the feminist movement women sought to gain gender equality and they turned to art to get their message out there. Feminist art set the bar higher for women so they can be seen more equal to men. It redefined the way women were seen and gained them a lot more power in the world. Women were able to use feminist art to be able to show the world that they were just as capable of being successful artists just like men were. Artist like Judy Chicago help set ideas of gender equality become a reality. “Inspired by the women 's movement and rebelling against the male-dominated art scene of the 1960s.” (the art story). Judy Chicago stood for women being equal to men and fought against how men were the ones in charge of the world. She used her art as a weapon to combat gender equality. Many other artists like Chicago used their art to fight gender equality. Feminist art helped explore ideas of gender equality and exchanged it around the world. Her art served as a way of breaking societal expectation by incorporating controversial
She describes a female finally connecting with her vagina, “My vagina is a shell, a tulip, and a destiny. I am arriving as I am beginning to leave. My vagina, my vagina, me” (50). Eve Ensler continues to describe another woman that started to embrace herself after years of hatred, “I began to swell, began to feel proud. Began to love my vagina” (57). While women despised themselves in the beginning due to the way society had shaped the idea of a vagina Eve Ensler destroys the hate that encompassed such ideas and sprouted new loving thoughts about vaginas to thousands of women. She was able to provide a platform with her play which helped thousands of women overcome the rejecting of their
In 'A Toxic Love Story' thus women pick's up trash and other materials. She makes art out of recycled trash and material's. The art shows how bad the people are ruining the world.
They come together to create art as a group so that they can interact with others and learn new things that could potentially help them with future careers or goals that they want to achieve. These women have created their own little community were they can come together as a group and help one another when they need it and to express their feelings through