Feminist art is a category of art associated with the feminist movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. Feminist art highlights the societal and political differences women experience in their lives. The goal of this art form is to bring a positive and understanding change to the world, leading to equality or liberation.[1] Media used range from traditional art forms, such as painting, to more unorthodox methods such as performance art, conceptual art, body art, craftivism, video, film, and fiber art. Feminist art has served as an innovative driving force toward expanding the definition of art by incorporating new media and a new perspective.[2][3]
Art historians have noted that there is no female Michelangelo or Da Vinci equivalent.[4][5] In Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists, Linda Nochlin wrote, "The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education."[4] Historically, women were thrust into caregiving roles, so most women could not devote time to creating art. In addition, women were rarely allowed entry into schools of art and almost never allowed into live nude drawing classes for fear of impropriety.[4] Women who were artists were likely either wealthy women with leisure time who were trained by their fathers or uncles and produced still lives, landscapes, or portrait work or became one of many assistants to other male artists. Examples include Anna Claypoole Peale and Mary Cassatt.
Feminist art often contains personal and political elements that are unique to each individual. There have been erroneous theories on the nature of feminist art.[6] Lucy R. Lippard stated in 1980 that feminist art was, "neither a style nor a movement but instead a value system, a revolutionary strategy, a way of life."[7] Emerging at the end of the 1960s, the feminist art movement was inspired by student activism, the civil rights movement, and Second-wave feminism. By critiquing institutions that promoted sexism and racism, people of color and women identified and attempted to fix inequity. Artists used their artwork, protests, collectives, and women's art registries to shed light on inequities in the art-world.
The first wave of feminist art was established in the mid-19th century. After women gained suffrage in the United States in the early 1920s, a wave of liberalization spread throughout the world, leading to gradual changes in feminist art. The slow and gradual change in feminist art started gaining momentum in 1960s.[8]
Before the 1960s, the majority of woman-made artwork did not portray feminist content that it either addressed or criticized the unique conditions faced by women. Women were more often the subject of art, rather than the artist. In the early 20th century, works that flaunted female sexuality – the pin-up girl being a prime example – began to be produced. By the late 1960s, there was a plethora of feminine artwork that broke away from the tradition of depicting women in an exclusively sexualized or objectified fashion.[9]
In order to gain recognition, many female artists struggled to "de-gender" their work in order to compete in a dominantly male art world. If a work did not "look" like it was made by a woman, then the stigma associated with women would not cling to the work itself, thus giving the work its own integrity. In 1963, Yayoi Kusama created Oven-Pan[10] – part of a larger collection of works she referred to as the aggregation sculptures. As with other works from that collection, Oven-Pan takes an object associated with women's work – in this case, a metal pan – and completely covers it with bulbous lumps of the same material. This is an early feminist example of female artists finding ways to break from the traditional role of women in society. Having the lumps made from the same color and material as the metal pan completely takes away the pan's functionality, and – in a metaphorical sense – its association with women.[according to whom?] The protrusions remove the item's gender by not only removing its function of being a metal pan women would use in the kitchen, but by also making it ugly. Before this era, common female work consisted of pretty and decorative things like landscapes and quilts, Christa Dowling attempts to explain this theory by stating arguing that 'women are more sensitive by nature than man...'.[11] Whereas more contemporary artwork by women was becoming bold or even rebellious, for example Suzanne Valadon.[12]
Towards the end of the decade, progressive ideas criticizing social values began to appear in which the mainstream ideology that had come to be accepted was denounced as not being neutral. It was also suggested, that the art world as a whole had managed to institutionalize within itself the notion of sexism.[13] During this time there was a rebirth of various media that had been placed at the bottom of the aesthetic hierarchy by art history, such as quilting.[14] To put it simply, this rebellion against the socially constructed ideology of a woman's role in art sparked the birth of a new standard of the female subject. Where once the female body was seen as an object for the male gaze, it then became regarded as a weapon against socially constructed ideologies of gender.
With Yoko Ono's 1964 work, Cut Piece, performance art began to gain popularity in feminist artwork as a form of critical analysis on societal values on gender. In this work, Yoko Ono is seen kneeling on the ground with a pair of scissors in front of her. One by one, she invited the audience to cut a piece of her clothing off until she was eventually left kneeling in the tattered remains of her clothing and her underwear. This intimate relationship created between the subject (Ono) and the audience addressed the notion of gender in the sense that Ono has become the sexual object. By remaining motionless as more and more pieces of her clothing are cut away, she reveals a woman's social standing where she is regarded as an object as the audience escalates to the point where her bra is being cut away.
During the 1970s, feminist art continued to provide a means of challenging women's position in the social hierarchy. The aim was for women to reach a state of equilibrium with their male counterparts. Judy Chicago's work, The Dinner Party (1979), widely regarded as the first epic feminist artwork, emphasizes this idea of newfound female empowerment through the use of turning a dinner table – an association to the traditional female role – into an equilateral triangle. Each side has an equal number of plate settings dedicated to a specific woman in history. Each plate contains a dish. This served as a way of breaking the idea of women being subjugated by society. Looking at the historical context, the 1960s and 1970s served as a prominent era where women began to celebrate new forms of freedom. More women joining the workforce, legalization of birth control, fight towards equal pay, civil rights, and the Roe v. Wade (1973) decision to legalize abortion, were reflected in the artwork. Such freedoms, however, were not limited to politics.[15]
Traditionally, being able to expertly capture the nude on canvas or in a sculpture reflected a high level of achievement in the arts. In order to reach that level, access to nude models was required. While male artists were given this privilege, it was considered improper for a woman to see a naked body. As a result, women were forced to focus their attention to the less professionally acclaimed "decorative" art. With the 1970s, however, the fight towards equality extended to the arts. Eventually, more and more women began to enroll in art academies. For most of these artists, the goal was not to paint like the traditional male masters, but instead to learn their techniques and manipulate them in a way that challenged traditional views of women.[16]
Mary Beth Edelson's Some Living American Women Artists / Last Supper (1972) appropriated Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, with the heads of notable women artists collaged over the heads of Christ and his apostles. This image, addressing the role of religious and art historical iconography in the subordination of women, became "one of the most iconic images of the feminist art movement."[17][18]
Photography became a common medium used by feminist artists. It was used, in many ways, to show the "real" woman. For instance, in 1979 Judith Black took a self-portrait depicting her body in such a light. It showed the artist's ageing body and all her flaws in an attempt to portray herself as a human being rather than an idealized sex symbol. Hannah Wilke also used photography as her way of expressing a non-traditional representation of the female body. In her 1974 collection called S.O.S - Stratification Object Series, Wilke used herself as the subject. She portrayed herself topless with various pieces of chewed gum in the shape of vulvas arranged throughout her body, metaphorically demonstrating how women in society are chewed up and then spit out. In 1975 in Hungary, Budapest Orshi Drozdik under her birth name Drozdik Orsolya as a student at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, was examining the historic 19th and early 20th-century academic document photos of nude model-settings in the academy's library. She rephotographed them and exhibited the photos as her own work. Later that year she projected the images of nude-model-settings, to her own naked body, photographed them and made performances titled NudeModel in which she exhibited herself as a woman artist drawing a female nude model.
At this time, there was a large focus on rebelling against the "traditional woman". With this came the backlash of both men and women who felt their tradition was being threatened. To go from showing women as glamorous icons to showing the disturbing silhouettes of women (an artistic demonstration of the 'imprint' left behind by the victims of rape) in the case of Ana Mendieta, underscored certain forms of degradation that popular culture failed to fully acknowledge.
While Ana Mendieta's work focused on a serious issue, other artists, like Lynda Benglis, took a more satirical stance in the fight towards equality. In one of her photographs published in Artforum, she is depicted naked with a short haircut, sunglasses, and a dildo positioned in her pubic region. Some saw this radical photo as "vulgar" and "disturbing". Others, however, saw an expression of the uneven balance between the genders in the sense that her photo was critiqued more harshly than a male counterpart, Robert Morris, who posed shirtless with chains around his neck as a sign of submission. At this time, the depiction of a dominant woman was highly criticized and in some cases, any female art depicting sexuality was perceived as pornographic.[19]
Unlike Benglis' depiction of dominance to expose inequality in gender, Marina Abramović used subjugation as a form of exposing the position of women in a society that horrified rather than disturbed the audience. In her performance work Rhythm 0 (1974), Abramovic pushes not only her limits but her audience's limits as well, by presenting the public with 72 different objects ranging from feathers and perfume to a rifle and a bullet. Her instructions are simple; She is the object and the audience may do whatever they want with her body for the next six hours. Her audience has complete control while she lays motionless. Eventually, they become wilder and begin violating her body – at one point a man threatens her with a rifle – yet when the piece ends the audience gets into a frenzy and run away in fear as if they cannot come to terms with what just happened. In this emotional performance piece, Abramovic depicts the powerful message of the objectification of the female body while at the same time unravelling the complexity of human nature.[20]
In 1975, Barbara Deming founded The Money for Women Fund to support the work of feminist artists. Deming helped administer the Fund, with support from artist Mary Meigs. After Deming's death in 1984, the organization was renamed as The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.[21] Today, the foundation is the "oldest ongoing feminist granting agency" which "gives encouragement and grants to individual feminists in the arts (writers, and visual artists)".[22][23]
Although feminist art is fundamentally any field that strives towards equality among the genders, it is not static. It is a constantly changing project that "is itself constantly shaped and remodeled in relation to the living processes of women's struggles". It is not a platform but rather a "dynamic and self-critical response".[24] The feminist spark from the 1960s and 1970s helped to carve a path for the activist and identity art of the 1980s. In fact, The meaning of feminist art evolved so quickly that by 1980 Lucy Lippard curated a show where "all the participants exhibited work that belonged to 'the full panorama of social-change art,' though in a variety of ways that undercut any sense that 'feminism' meant either a single political message or a single kind of artwork. This openness was a key element to the future creative social development of feminism as a political and cultural intervention."[25]
In 1985, the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened a gallery that claimed to exhibit the most-renowned works of contemporary art of the time. Of the 169 artists chosen, only 13 were women. As a result of this, an anonymous group of women investigated the most influential museums of art only to find out that they barely exhibited women's art. With that came the birth of the Guerrilla Girls who devoted their time to fighting sexism and racism in the art world through the use of protest, posters, artwork and public speaking. Unlike the feminist art prior to the 1980s, the Guerrilla Girls introduced a bolder more in-your-face identity and both captured attention and exposed sexism. Their posters aim to strip the role that women played in the art world prior to the feminist movement. In one case, the painting La Grande Odalisque by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was used in one of their posters where the female nude portrayed was given a gorilla mask. Beside it was written "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female". By taking a famous work and remodelling it to remove its intended purpose for the male gaze, the female nude is seen as something other than a desirable object.[26][27]
The critique of the male gaze and the objectification of women can also be seen in Barbara Kruger's Your gaze Hits the side of my face. In this work, we see a marble bust of a woman turned to its side. The lighting is harsh, creating sharp edges and shadows to emphasize the words "your gaze hits the side of my face" written in bold letters of black red and white down the left side of the work. In that one sentence, Kruger is able to communicate her protest on gender, society, and culture through language designed in a way that can be associated with a contemporary magazine, thus capturing the viewer's attention.[28]
These are other works of the 1990s have been discussed alongside cyberfeminism and cyberfeminist collectives such as VNS Matrix, OBN/Old Boys Network, and subRosa.[29] Building on earlier examples of feminist art that had incorporated technologies such as video and digital photography, feminist artists in the 1990s experimented with digital media, such as the World Wide Web, hypertext and coding, interactive art, and streaming media. Artist and feminist theorist Bracha L. Ettinger developed the idea of the Matrixial Gaze.[30][31] Some works, such as Olia Lialina's My Boyfriend Came Back From The War (1996), utilized hypertext and digital images to create a non-linear narrative experience about gender, war, and trauma.[32] Other works, such as Prema Murthy's Bindigirl (1999), combined performance art with streaming video, live chat, and a website to interrogate gender, colonialism, and online consumerism.[33] Works such as Victoria Vesna's Bodies© INCorporated (1997) used virtual reality media such as 3D modeling and VRML to satirize the commodification of the body in digital culture.[34]
In the 1970s, society started to become open to change and people started to realize that there was a problem with the stereotypes of each gender. Feminist art became a popular way of addressing the social concerns of feminism that surfaced in the late 1960s to 1970s. In order to try and put and end to sexism, women artists used many different art styles to make themselves known and express their worth. A couple of these different outlets include crafts, paintings and even performing arts. Over fifty years ago, “the first feminist challenge was levied at the history of art with the publication in 1971 of Linda Nochlin’s essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”[35] Nochlin chaired the College Art Association session in 1972 entitled “Eroticism and the Image of Women in Nineteenth Century”, a great space where feminist language and thinking influenced concepts of art history. The session discussed the ways in which “raw sexism in the creation and use of female imagery was so memorably exposed,”[35] which called for the need of decolonization within art history with regards to systemic beliefs and practices regarding the image of women or a woman.
The creation and publication of the first feminist magazine were published in 1972. Ms Magazine was the first national magazine to make feminist voices prominent, make feminist ideas and beliefs available to the public, and support the works of feminist artists. Like the art world, the magazine used the media to spread the messages of feminism and draw attention to the lack of total gender equality in society. The co-founder of the magazine, Gloria Steinem, coined the famous quote, "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle", which demonstrates the power of independent women; this slogan was frequently used by activists.[7]
Lucy R. Lippard argued in 1980 that feminist art was "neither a style nor a movement but instead a value system, a revolutionary strategy, a way of life." This quote supports that feminist art affected all aspects of life. The women of the nation were determined to have their voices heard above the din of discontent, and equality would enable them to obtain jobs equal to men and gain rights and agency to their own bodies.[36] Art was a form of media that was used to get the message across; this was their platform. Feminist art supports this claim because the art began to challenge previously conceived notions of the roles of women. The message of gender equality in feminist artworks resonates with the viewers because the challenging of the social norms made people question, should it be socially acceptable for women to wear men's clothing?[36]
The magazine and the rise of feminism occurred during the same time feminist artists became more popular, and an example of a feminist artist is Judy Dater. Starting her artistic career in San Francisco, a cultural hub of different kinds of art and creative works, Dater displayed feminist photographs in museums and gained a fair amount of publicity for her work.[36] Dater displayed art that focused on women challenging stereotypical gender roles, such as the expected way women would dress or pose for a photograph. To see a woman dressed in men's clothing was rare and made the statement of supporting the feminist movement, and many people knew of Dater's passionate belief of equal rights. Dater also photographed nude women, which was intended to show women's bodies as strong, powerful, and as a celebration. The photographs grabbed the viewers attention because of the unusualness and never-before-seen images that do not necessarily fit into society.[37]
Sylvia Sleigh, Philip Golub Reclining (1971)
Sylvia Sleigh deals with this trope of challenging, gendered spaces, specifically dealing with gendered art in art history. She was a traditional painter, who painted with oil paint on canvas, she idealized the male nude.
Her painting, Philip Golub Reclining, takes on the same form that Velasquez did in his famous nude painting, The Rokeby Venus. The male in Sleigh's painting holds the same reclining pose with his arm up as he regards himself and his beauty in a mirror. Additionally, just as Velasquez would often paint himself in the background of his paintings, Sleigh painted herself in the mirror of Philip Golub Reclining. In this regard, it becomes an image of beauty, but it also becomes an image of vanity because the goddess sees her beauty in the mirror. This representation becomes inverted and an example of male vanity. This portrayal is not an accidental choice at all. She is reflecting this same objectification onto men to highlight the biased way we objectify women. It shows the arbitrary way we view women's bodies, yet these bodies are in the same pose. Her paintings are beautiful and sincerely respectful of the male figure.
Sylvia Sleigh, The Turkish Bath (1973)
The painting The Turkish Bath (1973), is a gender-reversed version of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres's painting of the same name.
The Turkish bath was the subject explored by the French painter Ingres, and one can see this circular work where women are in a variety of poses and it is this composite imagined image of women bathing. Their bodies are intertwined while listening to music, lack agency within the composition, and objectify the female form. Therefore, the male viewer enjoys it.
About 100 years later, Sylvia Sleigh, is playing on that idea. In the foreground, we see her husband Lawrence Alloway, an art curator and critic in the foreground, gazing at her in this traditional female supine nude pose. He reclines and looks towards her. She also included other male figures who were her close friends and intellectually inspired her. There is also a strong naturalism in this painting. She is not shying away from tan lines and body hair the same way that we often see in Old Master paintings, where there are no signs of tan lines or body hair. Thus, there is a certain realism here that Sylvia Sleigh is engaging with. It is an obvious subversion of the traditional way women are objectified, but she is not necessarily objectifying these men. These were men who inspired her; she is celebrating these men and their culture of the Turkish bath while referencing images of the past.
Ana Mendieta, The Tree of Life (1976)
Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, Ana Mendieta brought an intimate, distinctly feminist approach to land art.
Mendieta was originally from Cuba and lived her life in exile. She used her body in her performative works and she would often recreate crime, rape and assault scenes to comment on domestic and sexual assault. On September 8, 1985, she was said to have fallen out of the window. However, there are still speculations that her husband pushed her out the window.
In her piece, The Tree of Life, one sees she is exploring this particular pose with her arms raised making her connect with the earth and the heavens and associates that with the female role. This piece, like most of Mendieta's work, is phenomenal land art where she is part of the earth by bringing a mother goddess to the form.
Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party (1974–1979)
Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party made in the 1970s. This mixed media work uses a variety of materials including gold chalices and utensils, embroidered runners and china-painted porcelain plates that is all made up like a dinner party.
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There are 13 elaborate place settings on each side, making up 39 place settings. Also included are the names of 999 women inscribed on the heritage tile floor at the center. Each of these women are influential and important figures in the world. The idea of the dinner party relates to the history of women and domesticity, with traditionally women serving the home, Chicago is playing with gender roles. The way this piece is being presented evokes ideas of an altar, and brings on themes of sacrifice. In addition, there is no one seat that is at the center, and many people have said the idea of 13 on each side is very similar to the Last Supper, because there is Christ at the center with his 12 apostles. But in this case, there is no central figure. She is playing on the idea of the Last Supper, which is a male-dominated image and space.
Judy Chicago was very interested in the idea of flower symbolism and also a kind of female genitalia as a symbol representing the woman. So if one looks at these individual plates, not always but very frequently, they seem to allude to the idea of a flower and also symbolically to female genitalia. Some women responded negatively to the idea that women are not just female genitalia, that they are more than that. But Judy Chicago and other artists that saw this as the symbol of women's life-giving abilities, the idea that this is a symbol of femininity, this is kind of the ultimate symbol of femininity. And so that is why she chose it for this particular series. It was made by many people, she was very good at getting lots of individuals together to work on large projects. And this includes painted porcelain needlework.
It was a big project that involved many women who assisted her and men. This artwork is very large–measuring 48 feet on each side–and for a long time, it had no place to go, so it was put on as a temporary exhibit in a number of museums, and then it was going to be put into a university, but there were government officials that objected to it because they saw it as pornography. Eventually, however, it was put on display in a Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum and that is where it lives today. This piece is a great way to learn about these different female figures.
![Suzanne Lacy, Between the Door and the Street, 2013, Creative Time and the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art[nb 1]](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d0/Between_the_Door_and_the_Street,_Suzanne_Lacy,_Installation_at_the_Brooklyn_Museum.jpg/1280px-Between_the_Door_and_the_Street,_Suzanne_Lacy,_Installation_at_the_Brooklyn_Museum.jpg)
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