Summary of Feminist Art
The Feminist Art movement in the West emerged in the late 1960s amidst the fervor of American anti-war demonstrations and burgeoning gender, civil, and queer rights movements around the world. Harkening back to the utopian ideals of early-20th-century modernist movements, Feminist artists sought to rewrite a falsely male-dominated art history, change the contemporary world around them through their art, intervene in the established art world, and challenge the existing art canon. Feminist Art created opportunities and spaces that previously did not exist for women and minority artists, as well as paved the path for the Identity and Activist Art genres of the 1980s. However, the contributions and influences of women artists from a number of countries should not be overlooked, such as German Dadaist Hannah Höch and Mexican Surrealist Frida Kahlo, whose powerful works have served as a source of inspiration for Feminist artists around the world since the early twentieth century.
Key Ideas & Accomplishments
- Feminist artists sought to create a dialogue between the viewer and the artwork through the inclusion of women's perspective. Art was not merely an object for aesthetic admiration, but could also incite the viewer to question the social and political landscape, and through this questioning, possibly affect the world and bring change toward equality. As artist Suzanne Lacy declared, the goal of Feminist Art was to "influence cultural attitudes and transform stereotypes."
- Before feminism, the majority of women artists were invisible to the public eye. They were oftentimes denied exhibitions and gallery representation based on the sole fact of their gender. The art world was largely known, or promoted as, a boy's club, of which sects like the hard drinking, womanizing members of Abstract Expressionism were glamorized. To combat this, Feminist artists created alternative venues as well as worked to change established institutions' policies to promote women artists' visibility within the market.
- Feminist artists often embraced alternative materials that were connected to the female gender to create their work, such as textiles, or other media previously little used by men such as performance and video, which did not have the same historically male-dominated precedent that painting and sculpture carried. By expressing themselves through these non-traditional means, women sought to expand the definition of fine art, and to incorporate a wider variety of artistic perspectives.
- Feminist Art does not geographically discriminate but rather connects female voices worldwide. Notable Feminist artists over the movement’s decades-long lifespan have spanned the globe representing a diverse array of countries including America, Britain, Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and more as women continue to fight for equal rights and visibility within their distinct cultural landscapes.
- Since the 1990s, Feminist Art and discourse has taken on an “intersectional” approach, as many Feminist artists explore not only their gender identity through their art, but also their racial, queer, (dis)-abled, and other aspects of identity that inform who they are in the world.
Overview of Feminist Art
In 1971 at the California Institute of the Arts, Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro founded the first Feminist Art program. Chicago said she was "scared to death of what I'd unleashed," but, at the same time, "I had watched a lot of young women come up with me through graduate school only to disappear, and I wanted to do something about it." They did do something: she and Schapiro founded Womanhouse, a space for collaborative Feminist Art projects, that became a foundational model for the movement.
