Ann Fessler is an author, filmmaker, video-installation artist, and a professor emerita at the Rhode Island School of Design. [1] Her work reconciles the division between lived history and recorded history from a feminist perspective. She is especially known for her work dealing with adoption before legalized abortion and the experiences of women who surrendered children in the 1950s and 60s; particularly women who were seen as unfit mothers due to being a single parent. [2]
Fessler graduated with an MFA from the School of Art's Photography division of the University of Arizona, where she received the Harold Jones Distinguished Alumni Award in 2007. [3]
Ann Fessler's work utilizes the stories of women and focuses on how myths, stereotypes, and mass media images, can impact women's lives and their intimate relationships. [4] Fessler's first installation project was her 1984 installation created for the Washington Project of the Arts on the subject of rape and violence against women. [5] The installation appropriated images of French painter Nicolas Poussin's famous 17th-century painting, The Rape of the Sabine Women, to show how art history itself has become a silent conspirator in the subjugation of women and the equation of female gender with passive victimhood. [5]
Fessler was 56 years old when she first met her biological mother. Using her personal adoption story as the basis of The girls who went away, she tells the story of over a hundred women who surrendered children for adoption prior to legalized abortion. [6] In 2012 her documentary film, A Girl Like Her was released.
Fessler is the recipient of visual art and film grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the LEF Foundation, the Rhode Island Foundation, Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, Art Matters, N]; Maryland State Arts Council and the Rhode Island State Arts Council. [7]
Multiple bodies of her work have been widely exhibited in galleries, museums, and film festivals since the 1980s. Her work is included in the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. [1]
Dame Maria Paula Figueiroa Rego was a Portuguese-British visual artist known particularly for her paintings and prints based on storybooks. Rego's style evolved from abstract towards representational, and she favoured pastels over oils for much of her career. Her work often reflects feminism, coloured by folk-themes from her native Portugal.
Barbara Kruger is an American conceptual artist and collagist associated with the Pictures Generation. She is most known for her collage style that consists of black-and-white photographs, overlaid with declarative captions, stated in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed text. The phrases in her works often include pronouns such as "you", "your", "I", "we", and "they", addressing cultural constructions of power, identity, consumerism, and sexuality. Kruger's artistic mediums include photography, sculpture, graphic design, architecture, as well as video and audio installations.
Ann Hamilton is a visual artist who emerged in the early 1980s known for her large-scale multimedia installations. After receiving her BFA in textile design from the University of Kansas in 1979, she lived in Banff, Alberta, and Montreal, Quebec, Canada before deciding to pursue an MFA in sculpture at Yale in 1983. From 1985 to 1991, she taught on the faculty of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Since 2001, Hamilton has served on the faculty of the Department of Art at the Ohio State University. She was appointed a Distinguished University Professor in 2011.
Monica Rich Kosann is a fine art black-and-white photographer, who is also the founder of the Monica Rich Kosann a, jewelry, home decor and accessory company. Her company produces several different collections: jewelry, image cases, frames and evening bags.
Feminist art is a category of art associated with the late 1960s and 1970s feminist movement. Feminist art highlights the societal and political differences women experience in their lives. The hopeful gain from this form of art is to bring a positive and understanding change to the world, in hope to lead to equality or liberation. 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 towards expanding the definition of art through the incorporation of new media and a new perspective.
The Baby Scoop Era was a period in anglosphere history starting after the end of World War II and ending in the early 1970s, characterized by an increasing rate of pre-marital pregnancies over the preceding period, along with a higher rate of newborn adoption.
Susan Hiller was a US-born, British conceptual artist who lived in London, United Kingdom. Her practice spanned a broad range of media including installation, video, photography, painting, sculpture, performance, artist's books and writing. A key figure in British art across four decades, she was best known for her innovative large-scale multimedia installations, and for works that took as their subject matter aspects of culture that were overlooked, marginalised, or disregarded, including paranormal beliefs – an approach which she referred to as 'paraconceptualism'.
The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade is a 2006 book by Ann Fessler which describes and recounts the experiences of women in the United States who relinquished babies for adoption between 1950 and the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973.
Rosanne Somerson is an American-born woodworker, furniture designer/maker, educator, and former President of Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). An artist connected with the early years of the Studio Furniture, her work and career have been influential to the field.
Susanna Paine, also known as Susannah and Susan, was an American portrait artist in New England in the 19th century. She published poetry, a Christmas hymn, a novel, and an autobiography entitled Roses and Thorns, or Recollections of an Artist.
Pregnancy is a potential result of rape. It has been studied in the context of war, particularly as a tool for genocide, as well as in other unrelated contexts, such as rape by a stranger, statutory rape, incest, and underage pregnancy. The current scientific consensus is that rape is at least as likely to lead to pregnancy as consensual sexual intercourse, with some studies suggesting rape may actually result in higher rates of pregnancy than consensual intercourse.
Geoffrey Lancelot Rutter Davis (1933-2008) was an Australian medical doctor, who rose to prominence in Sydney in the 1970s as a leading provider of contraception and abortion services. He was also the owner for nearly 50 years of The Abbey, a 50-room mansion in the Sydney inner suburb of Annandale.
Concerned United Birthparents, Inc. (CUB), a non-profit organization established in 1976, is one of two primary nationwide organizations offering support to the biological parents of adopted people in the United States. The organization is credited with the creation of the term "birthparent."
Ann Agee is an American visual artist whose practice centers on ceramic figurines, objects and installations, hand-painted wallpaper drawings, and sprawling exhibitions that merge installation art, domestic environment and showroom. Her art celebrates everyday objects and experiences, decorative and utilitarian arts, and the dignity of work and craftsmanship, engaging issues involving gender, labor and fine art with a subversive, feminist stance. Agee's work fits within a multi-decade shift in American art in which ceramics and considerations of craft and domestic life rose from relegation to second-class status to recognition as "serious" art. She first received critical attention in the influential and divisive "Bad Girls" exhibition, curated by Marcia Tucker at the New Museum in 1994, where she installed a functional, handmade ceramic bathroom, rendered in the classic blue-and-white style of Delftware. Art in America critic Lilly Wei describes Agee's later work as "the mischievous, wonderfully misbegotten offspring of sculpture, painting, objet d'art, and kitschy souvenir."
Andrea Bowers is a Los Angeles-based American artist working in a variety of media including video, drawing, and installation. Her work has been exhibited around the world, including museums and galleries in Germany, Greece, and Tokyo. Her work was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and 2008 California Biennial. She is on the graduate faculty at Otis College of Art and Design.
Cynthia Schira is an American textile artist and former university professor. Her work is represented in the collections of many major public museums.
A Girl Like Her is a 2012 American documentary film by Ann Fessler about women who lost children to adoption in the United States between the end of World War II and the early 1970s due to the social pressures of the time, in a period now known as the Baby Scoop Era. Fessler combines the voices of the women with footage from educational films and newsreels about dating, sex, “illegitimate” pregnancy and adoption. The women's stories unfold over footage of life in post-World War II America. Educational films offer guidance about dating and sex, and scripted newsreels shed light on adoption in an era when secrecy prevailed and adoptable babies were thought to be “unwanted” by their mothers. As the footage illuminates the past, the women's stories form a collective narrative as they recount their experiences of dating, pregnancy, family reaction, banishment, and the long-term impact of surrender and silence on their lives.
Nade Haley was an American visual artist whose work has been exhibited at numerous museums and galleries, and is held in public and private collections. After relocating from Washington DC, Haley lived and kept studios in New York City and in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.
Melissa Ann Pinney is an American photographer best known for her closely observed studies of the social lives and emerging identities of American girls and women. Pinney's photographs have won the photographer numerous fellowships and awards, including Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, and found their way into the collections of the major museums in the US and abroad.
Deborah Bright is a 20th-century American photographer and artist, writer, and educator. She is particularly noted for her imagery and scholarship on queer desire and politics, as well as on the ideologies of American landscape photography. Her work is in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Fogg Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Bright's photographic projects have been exhibited internationally.