Table of Contents |
You’ll be looking at artwork from between 1972 and 1989 today.
This is a photograph from a larger collection that parodies clichéd depictions of women:
1979
Photograph
Cindy Sherman’s work, and the other artists’ work you’ll look at today, shares inspiration and influences that can be linked to the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s. It began in the 1960s, around the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan's book titled The Feminine Mystique.
This work challenged the contemporary notion of the female’s role in a male-centric society. The civil rights movement and second-wave feminism of the 1960s informed the feminist art movement of the 1970s.
The feminist art movement was also strongly influenced by Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”, which helped raise the question of the exclusion of women from exhibitions and from the art world in general.
Feminist art transcends a specific style. It represents the empowerment of women in bringing attention to important feminine issues through art. It could fall within any stylistic genre.
Barbara Kruger took a rather unique approach to her form of conceptual art, using bold colors and short messages to grab the viewer’s attention and deliver the message with as much impact as possible. She’s essentially taken the mass media approach of advertising, but translated it to fine art.
1989
Silkscreen on vinyl
Judy Chicago is a well-known artist within the feminist movement. She actually coined the term “feminist art” during the 1970s. She was born in Chicago, but she changed her last name from “Cohen” to “Chicago” as a personal display of female independence. Then, she moved to California, where she first taught at Fresno State before moving onto CalArts, located north of Los Angeles. Here she co-founded a project called “Womanhouse.”
“Womanhouse” was a large installation project where numerous women from the community contributed works of art that function as props within the home. It was a house essentially built by and for women with no male influence, and a concept that challenged traditional gender roles.
However, her masterpiece is the work titled “The Dinner Party,” pictured below. It is a large installment piece on permanent exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.
1979
Mixed media
As the name suggests, it’s set up as a large table setting for a dinner party, alluding to the fact that throughout history, women have been omitted from the historical record. The open triangle is symbolic of equality, and it’s populated with place settings and objects created by dozens of people that Chicago hired to embroider the tablecloth and placemats, cast the plates, and paint them.
There’s an emphasis on crafts, such as embroidery and China painting, which are typically female-centric categories of art. These types of art fell outside of the male focus and historically weren't considered forms of high art, at least from the male perspective. There’s also the use of central core imagery in the butterfly and flower imagery on the dinner plates, which represent the female vulva.
It’s a monumental form of conceptual art, with each of the place settings representing 39 important women from history, and an additional 999 names of women inscribed on the Heritage Floor, as it’s called, where the table is located.
Betye Saar’s assemblage work of art, “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima,” explores feminist issues in relation to race. The trademark of Aunt Jemima goes back to 1893, when the racist stereotypes of the late 1800s and early 1900s, such as the mammy, the pickaninny, and the Little Black Sambo, were prevalent. These stereotypes were still commonplace in American popular culture at the time that this work was created in 1972.
The reclamation and parody of the imagery seems to function as a form of artistic catharsis, marginalizing an antiquated and derogatory depiction that was emotionally challenging and harmful for African Americans, particularly during a time when these images were really the predominant ones in the media.
The work of the Guerrilla Girls includes posters and interventions that point out continued bias and sexism in the art world. It began in the mid-1980s and continues to exist with anonymous female artists and feminists who assume the names of dead female artists.
1989
Poster
Protests and the aforementioned advertisements, such as the one pictured above, function as a form of social awareness of how females are depicted unfairly in the art world internationally.
This particular image from 1989 poses a question about the catalog of the Metropolitan Museum in New York by creating a poster of a reclining nude with their trademark gorilla mask based upon the “Odalisque” painting by Jean Ingres. It is a painting whose subject matter concerns a fascination with sexual subjugation of women.
Guerrilla Girls poster with original “Odalisque”:
Source: This work is adapted from Sophia author Ian McConnell
