Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon Spring 2024: Scholarly Resources

Transnational Perspecives on Feminism and Art, 1960-1985 is a collection of essential essays that bring transnational feminist praxis into conversation with histories of feminist art in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. The artistic practices and processes examined within these pages all centre on gender and sexual politics as they variously intersect with race, class, sovereignty, Indigeneity, citizenship, and migration at particular historical moments and within specific geopolitical contexts. The book's central premise is that reconsidering this period from transnational feminist perspectives will enable new thinking about the critical commonalities and differences across heterogeneous and geographically dispersed practices that have contributed to the complex and multifaceted relationship between feminism and art today. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, cultural studies, visual culture, material culture, and gender studies.

An accessible introduction to the life of the seventeenth-century's most celebrated women artists, now in paperback. Artemisia Gentileschi is by far the most famous woman artist of the premodern era. Her art addressed issues that resonate today, such as sexual violence and women's problematic relationship to political power. Her powerful paintings with vigorous female protagonists chime with modern audiences, and she is celebrated by feminist critics and scholars.   This book breaks new ground by placing Gentileschi in the context of women's political history. Mary D. Garrard, noted Gentileschi scholar, shows that the artist most likely knew or knew about contemporary writers such as the Venetian feminists Lucrezia Marinella and Arcangela Tarabotti. She discusses recently discovered paintings, offers fresh perspectives on known works, and examines the artist anew in the context of feminist history. This beautifully illustrated book gives for the first time a full portrait of a strong woman artist who fought back through her art.

This pioneering book explores the notion of 'radical decadence' as concept, aesthetic and lived experience, and as an analytical framework for the study of contemporary feminist textile art. Gendered discourses of decadence that perpetuate anxieties about women's power, consumption and pleasure are deconstructed through images of drug use, female sexuality and 'excessive' living, in artworks by several contemporary textile artists including Orly Cogan, Tracey Emin, Allyson Mitchell, and Rozanne Hawksley.Perceptions of decadence are invariably bound to the negative connotations of decay and degradation, particularly with regard to the transgression of social norms related to femininity and the female body. Excessive consumption by women has historically been represented as grotesque, and until now, women's pleasure in relation to drug and alcohol use has largely gone unexamined in feminist art history and craft studies. Here, representations of female consumption, from cupcakes to alcohol and cocaine, are opened up for critical discussion. Drawing on feminist and queer theories, Julia Skelly considers portrayals of 'bad girls' in artworks that explore female sexuality - performative pieces designed to subvert and exceed feminine roles. In this provocative book, decadence is understood not as a destructive force but as a liberating aesthetic.

What makes art 'feminist art'? Although feminist artists do have a unique aesthetic, there can be no essential feminist aesthetic, argues Kathy Battista in this exciting new art history. Domesticity, the body, its traces and sexuality have become prominent themes in contemporary feminist practice but where did these preoccupations begin and how did they come to signify a particular type of art? Kathy Battista's (re-)engagement with the founding generation of female practitioners centres on 1970s London as the cultural hub from which a new art practice arose. Emphasising the importance of artists including Bobby Baker, Anne Bean, Catherine Elwes, Rose English, Alexis Hunter, Tina Keane, Hannah O'Shea, Kate Walker and Silvia Ziranek and examining works such as Mary Kelly's Post-Partum Document, Judy Clark's 1973 exhibition Issues, Carolee Schneemann's Meat Joy and Cosey Fanni Tutti's Prostitution, shown in 1976, Kathy Battista investigates some of the most controversial and provocative art from the era.This book not only deals with the 'famous' art events but includes analysis of lesser-known exhibitions and performances and explains why so much feminist art has been both marginalised in art history and grossly under-represented in institutional archives and collections. Through considering British feminist art practice in relation to the other significant artistic movements of the 1970s - conceptual, performance and installation art - Kathy Battista positions feminist art as a disparate and complex entity, one that overlaps several art historical groupings and one which has evolved since its initial activities. As connections between 1970s artists and contemporary female practitioners are not usually consciously acknowledged, one of the central aims of this book is to reconnect current art practice with earlier, groundbreaking works. Primarily concerned with the feminist body as a site for making and exhibiting works, this book examines themes that look at the body as material, the body and performance, as well as the alternative creative platforms in 1970s feminist art.Drawing on original material - never-before-seen images from artists' personal collections and commissioned interviews with prominent artists from the period - the book is an invaluable resource for artists, researchers, curators and students interested in recovering this period from the margins of art history.

In Black Gathering Sarah Jane Cervenak engages with Black artists and writers who create alternative spaces for Black people to gather free from interruption or regulation. Drawing together Black feminist theory, critical theories of ecology and ecoaesthetics, and Black aesthetics, Cervenak shows how novelists, poets, and visual artists such as Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Clementine Hunter, Samiya Bashir, and Leonardo Drew advance an ecological imagination that unsettles Western philosophical ideas of the earth as given to humans. In their aestheticization and conceptualization of gathering, these artists investigate the relationships among art, the environment, home, and forms of Black togetherness. Cervenak argues that by offering a formal and conceptual praxis of gathering, Black artists imagine liberation and alternative ways of being in the world that exist beyond those Enlightenment philosophies that presume Black people and earth as given to enclosure and ownership.

In this book, contributors identify and explore a range of iconic works - "Mistress-Pieces" - that have been made by feminists and gender activists since the 1970s. The first volume for which the defining of iconic feminist art is the raison d'être, its contributors interpret a "Mistress-Piece" as a work that has proved influential in a particular context because of its distinctiveness and relevance. Reinterpreting iconic art by Alice Neel, Hannah Wilke and Ana Mendieta, the authors also offer important insights about works that may be less well known - those by Natalia LL, Tanja Ostojić, Swoon, Clara Menéres, Diane Victor, Usha Seejarim, Ilse Fusková, Phaptawan Suwannakudt and Tracey Moffatt, among others. While in some instances revealing cross influences between artists working in different frameworks, the publication simultaneously makes evident how social and political factors specific to particular countries had significant impact on the making and reception of art focused on gender. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies and gender studies.

Nicole Erin Morse examines how trans women feminine artists use selfies and self-representational art to explore how selfies produce politically meaningful encounters between creators and viewers in ways that envision trans feminist futures.

This important new book examines contemporary art while foregrounding the key role feminism has played in enabling current modes of artmaking, spectatorship and theoretical discourse. Contemporary Art and Feminism carefully outlines the links between feminist theory and practice of the past four decades of contemporary art and offers a radical re-reading of the contemporary movement. Rather than focus on filling in the gaps of accepted histories by 'adding' the 'missing' female, queer, First Nations and women artists of colour, the authors seek to revise broader understandings of contemporary practice by providing case studies contextualised in a robust art historical and theoretical basis.

This book explores how feminist artists continued to engage with kitchen culture and food practices in their work as women's art moved from the margins to the mainstream. In particular, this book examines the use of food in the art practices of six women artists and collectives working in Southern California--a hotbed of feminist art in the 1970s--in conjunction with the Women's Art Movement and broader feminist groups during the era of the Second Wave. Focused around particular articulations of food in culture, this book considers how feminist artists engage with issues of gender, labor, class, consumption, (re)production, domesticity, and sexuality in order to advocate for equality and social change. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, food studies, and gender and women's studies.