Diana Chire is a Los Angeles-based Somali artist and director who first received national attention when she presented herself nude in her exhibit at the 2015 Frieze Art Fair in London. [1] [2] [3] [4] Her art themes feature gender, sexuality and the nature of racial identity. [5]
Chire was born in Somalia, and moved to London, England, when she was five. [6] [7] She studied at Westminster University. [1] She is the editor and publisher of arts newspaper She-Zine. [8]
Chire is known for her performance artworks that focus on black female identity, exposing the gender imbalances in the art world, [9] and for using her own body as a medium. [1] [3] [6] [10] She shaved her head in 2016, explaining that as she became more comfortable with using her body as a medium, she felt she no longer needed to wear weaves or straighten her hair to be beautiful. [7] She stitched her weave onto pillowcases. [11]
Hannah Höch was a German Dada artist. She is best known for her work of the Weimar period, when she was one of the originators of photomontage. Photomontage, or fotomontage, is a type of collage in which the pasted items are actual photographs, or photographic reproductions pulled from the press and other widely produced media.
Fiber art refers to fine art whose material consists of natural or synthetic fiber and other components, such as fabric or yarn. It focuses on the materials and on the manual labor on the part of the artist as part of the works' significance, and prioritizes aesthetic value over utility.
Jennifer Anne Saville is a contemporary British painter and an original member of the Young British Artists. Saville works and lives in Oxford, England and she is known for her large-scale painted depictions of nude women. Saville has been credited with originating a new and challenging method of painting the female nude and reinventing figure painting for contemporary art. Some paintings are of small dimensions, while other are of much larger scale. Monumental subjects come from pathology textbooks that she has studied that informed her on injury to bruise, burns, and deformity. John Gray commented: "As I see it, Jenny Saville's work expresses a parallel project of reclaiming the body from personality. Saville worked with many models who under went cosmetic surgery to reshape a portion of their body. In doing that, she captures "marks of personality for the flesh" and together embraces how we can be the writers of our own lives."
Mary "May" Morris was an English artisan, embroidery designer, jeweller, socialist, and editor. She was the younger daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite artist and designer William Morris and his wife and artists' model, Jane Morris.
Ghada Amer is a contemporary artist, much of her work deals with issues of gender and sexuality. Her most notable body of work involves highly layered embroidered paintings of women's bodies referencing pornographic imagery.
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.
Lynda Benglis is an American sculptor and visual artist known especially for her wax paintings and poured latex sculptures. She maintains residences in New York City, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Kastellorizo, Greece, and Ahmedabad, India.
Arline Fisch is an American artist and educator. She is known for her work as a metalsmith and jeweler, pioneering the use of textile processes from crochet, knitting, plaiting, and weaving in her work in metal. She developed groundbreaking techniques for incorporating metal wire and other materials into her jewelry.
Bharti Kher is a contemporary artist. In a career spanning nearly three decades, she has worked across painting, sculpture and installation. Throughout her practice she has displayed an unwavering relationship with the body, its narratives, and the nature of things. Inspired by a wide range of sources and making practices, she employs the readymade in wide arc of meaning and transformation. Kher's works thus appear to move through time, using reference as a counterpoint and contradiction as a visual tool.
Collier Schorr is an American artist and fashion photographer best known for adolescent portraits that blend photographic realism with elements of fiction and youthful fantasy.
Nancy Grossman is an American artist. Grossman is best known for her wood and leather sculptures of heads.
Anne Collier is an American visual artist working with appropriated photographic images. Describing Collier's work in Frieze art magazine, writer Brian Dillon said, "Collier uncouples the machinery of appropriation so that her found images seem weightless, holding their obvious meaning in abeyance."
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."
Regina Pilawuk Wilson is an Australian Aboriginal artist known for her paintings, printmaking and woven fiber-artworks. She paints syaws, warrgarri, and message sticks. Her work has been shown in many Australian and international museums, collections and galleries. She has won the General Painting category of the Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Awards in 2003 for a syaw painting. Wilson has been a finalist for the Kate Challis RAKA Award, the Togart Award, and the Wynne Prize.
Rosana Paulino is a Brazilian contemporary artist, curator, and researcher. Paulino holds a doctorate in Visual Arts from the University of São Paulo, School of Communications and Arts and a specialization in printmaking from London Print Studio. She was awarded the Mercosur Konex Award from Argentina in 2022. Paulino engages with mediums including drawing, embroidery, engraving, printmaking, collage, and sculpture, often to engage with archetypes, memory, familial legacies, histories of racial violence and slavery in Brazil and to explore, what she describes as, Black female psychology. Her works have been displayed in several shows in the UK, France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Cape Verde, Puerto Rico, USA, Mexico, and Brazil. She has had solo exhibitions in Belgium, Germany, and Brazil.
Diana Guerrero-Maciá is an American studio-based artist who has produced paintings, works on paper, prints and sculpture. She is known for her hybrid or "unpainted paintings"—works constructed with fabric cutwork, collage, stitching and dye that collapse boundaries between the fields of painting, fiber and design and challenge distinctions between "high" art and craft. Her largely abstract work samples and revises multiple materials, symbols and typography, and graphic elements such as grids, stripes and archetypal shapes to engage with color, iconography and diverse cultural movements and conventions.
Sarah Naqvi is an Indian contemporary textile artist, enrolled at the De Ateliers residency program in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Their works have received international recognition, have been described as subversive, and are noted to cover topics such as gender, sexuality, race, religion, etc., while advocating for various social and feminist causes including that of body positivity and opposition to menstruation stigma.
Audrey Walker was an accomplished textile artist, embroiderer and teacher, who was active from the 1970s and 1990s in United Kingdom. Walker became known for developing an innovative style of embroidery based on fine threads applied by machine and by hand, to create striking figurative wall-hung works of art. Walker described her work as evolving from fairly fluid ideas, and the process as being akin to drawing with fabrics.
Jess de Wahls is an East German-born textile and embroidery artist based in South London. She received media attention in 2021 when the Royal Academy announced it would be removing her work following complaints of alleged transphobia, then days later apologised and retracted. Her work focuses on what she terms 'Retex sculpting', her art concerning itself with gender equality, as well as recycling.
Monika Correa is an Indian textile artist known for her experimental weaves. She is largely a self-taught weaver which has allowed her to break free from the inhibitions of an academically trained artist and explore the possibility of textile as a medium of art.