Anonymous Was A Woman Award | |
---|---|
Website | www |
The Anonymous Was A Woman Award is a grant program for women artists who are over 40 years of age, in part to counter sexism in the art world. [1] [2] It began in 1996 in direct response to the National Endowment for the Arts' decision to stop funding individual artists. [2]
The award comes with a grant of $25,000 and is designed to enable exceptional woman artists to further develop their work. Awardees are chosen on the basis of their past accomplishments, their originality and artistic growth, and the quality of their work. [1] Since 1996, some 220 women have received the award and approximately 5.5 million USD has been awarded in total. [1] [3]
The award was founded by a New York artist who originally chose to remain anonymous. [2] She named the award in reference to a line from the Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own [1] and in recognition of all the women artists through the ages who have remained anonymous for various reasons. [2] Nominators, who include art writers, curators, art historians, and previous winners, are likewise unnamed. [1]
In July 2018, the artist Susan Unterberg was revealed as both the founder and funder of the award. [4] Before 2018, she had remained anonymous so that her artwork would be evaluated in its own context, without being influenced by her contributions. [3] [5] In an interview, she described her reasons for coming forward, stating "It’s a great time for women to speak up. I feel I can be a better advocate having my own voice," and that she can now work openly to further the organization's cause and to encourage philanthropists and women artists. [3] On top of the awarded grants, Unterberg is considering other forms of programs, possibly seminars, to complement the grants. [5]
Listed below are the winners of the award. [6]
The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University is the art school of Tufts University, a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. It offers undergraduate and graduate degrees dedicated to the visual arts.
Nancy Spero was an American visual artist known for her political and feminist paintings and hand pulled prints.
The Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (RCA) is a Canadian arts-related organization that was founded in 1880.
Hannah Wilke (born Arlene Hannah Butter; was an American painter, sculptor, photographer, video artist and performance artist. Her work is known for exploring issues of feminism, sexuality and femininity.
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. 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.
Judy Pfaff is an American artist known mainly for installation art and sculptures, though she also produces paintings and prints. Pfaff has received numerous awards for her work, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2004 and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1983) and the National Endowment for the Arts. Major exhibitions of her work have been held at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Denver Art Museum and Saint Louis Art Museum. In 2013 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Video interviews can be found on Art 21, Miles McEnery Gallery, MoMa, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and other sources.
Nancy Davidson is an American artist best known for large-scale inflatable sculptures regarded as hyper-feminized abstractions of the human female form. Bulbous and flesh-like, the sculptures resemble buttocks and breasts and employ erotic cultural signifiers in their shape and decoration. Davidson's work spans art media but centers around sculpture. It is largely post-minimal in character and described by commentators as providing a feminist counterpoint to the male-dominated, minimalist sculpture of the 1960s, as well as to cultural tropes involving bodies that the works themselves invoke. Of particular note are Davidson's use of humor and a sense of absurdity to seemingly both celebrate and subvert these tropes, inviting their investigation but without the seriousness and moralism that often accompany critical works. Sculpture Magazine critic Robert Raczka wrote that "The confectionary color and oversize scale" of Davidson's sculpture creates a "playfully upbeat mood that allows feminist and gender issues to rise to the surface at irregular intervals, without didacticism." The New Art Examiner's Susan Canning described it as establishing "a context where all can revel in the transgressive and liberating power of the grotesque."
The feminist art movement refers to the efforts and accomplishments of feminists internationally to produce art that reflects women's lives and experiences, as well as to change the foundation for the production and perception of contemporary art. It also seeks to bring more visibility to women within art history and art practice. The movement challenges the traditional hierarchy of arts over crafts, which views hard sculpture and painting as superior to the narrowly perceived 'women's work' of arts and crafts such as weaving, sewing, quilting and ceramics. Women artists have overturned the traditional view by, for example, using unconventional materials in soft sculptures, new techniques such as stuffing, hanging and draping, and for new purposes such as telling stories of their own life experiences. The objectives of the feminist art movement are thus to deconstruct the traditional hierarchies, represent women more fairly and to give more meaning to art. It helps construct a role for those who wish to challenge the mainstream narrative of the art world. Corresponding with general developments within feminism, and often including such self-organizing tactics as the consciousness-raising group, the movement began in the 1960s and flourished throughout the 1970s as an outgrowth of the so-called second wave of feminism. It has been called "the most influential international movement of any during the postwar period."
WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution was an exhibition of international women's art presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles from March 4–July 16, 2007. It later traveled to the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the PS1 Contemporary Art Center, where it was on view February 17–May 12, 2008. The exhibition featured works from 120 artists and artists' groups from around the world.
Kathe Burkhart is an American interdisciplinary artist, painter, writer and art critic. Described as both a conceptual artist and an installation artist, she uses various media in her work, combining collage, digital media, drawing, fiction, installation, nonfiction, painting, photography video, poetry, and sculpture. The content is feminist; the radical female is the subject. The Liz Taylor painting series, which she began painting in 1982, have been exhibited at the MoMA PS1, the Stedelijk Museum, and the Venice Biennale. Burkhart is also the author of literary fiction and poetry.
Nancy Youdelman is a mixed media sculptor who lives and works in Clovis, California. She also taught art at California State University, Fresno from 1999 until her retirement in 2013. "Since the early 1970s Youdelman has been transforming clothing into sculpture, combining women's and girl's dresses, hats, gloves, shoes, and undergarments with a variety of organic materials and common household objects.
Beverly Fishman is an American painter and sculptor whose work explores science, medicine, and the body. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a National Academy of Design Academician, an Anonymous Was a Woman awardee, and was Artist-in-Residence at Cranbrook Academy of Art between 1992 and 2019, where she was Head of the Painting Department. Although best known for her painted reliefs based on the forms of drugs and pharmaceuticals, Fishman has consistently worked in multiple media, such as cast-resin and glass sculpture, as well as silkscreen painting on metal, large-scale wall painting, and outdoor murals. While Fishman's artworks often look abstract, they are based on appropriated shapes, patterns, and images drawn from the pharmaceutical and illicit drug industries as well as multiple forms of scientific and medical imaging. As she noted in 2017, "Although they look abstract, my paintings are tied to problems like attention-deficit disorder, opioid addiction, anxiety, and depression. Their forms connect them to the social problems of today."
Susan Unterberg is an American contemporary photographer and philanthropist. Her work often focuses on themes of familial relationships and nature, and it is included in several permanent collections of major museums across the United States. In 2018, she stepped forward as the founder and funder of the Anonymous Was A Woman Award.
Barbara Noah is an artist who currently works with digital prints and mixed media, with past work in public art, photography, painting, print, and sculpture.