The Feminist Art Coalition (FAC) is a collaboration of over 100 art museums and nonprofit institutions from across the United States. The organizations are collectively creating a series of programming and exhibitions centered around feminist thought to be held beginning in the fall of 2020, during the run-up of the presidential election. The project was initially planned to occur from September through November 2020, but has been extended through the end of 2021 due to changes in exhibition schedules resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.
A feminist art initiative was conceived by Apsara DiQuinzio in early 2017 in response to the 2016 presidential election and the grassroots organization of the Women's March in Washington, D.C., that followed. [1] DiQuinzio, a curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, in the lead up to the 2020 presidential election, planned a series of arts programming centering on feminist ideas. The concept for the FAC was largely inspired by the model of Getty's Pacific Standard Time . The Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts awarded a $50,000 curatorial grant to the Feminist Art Coalition in 2017, which provided the necessary funding to the working group to plan and shape the project together and the development of the website. [2]
In spring 2018, the working group of curators convened in Berkeley and a roundtable titled Feminist Curatorial Practices was held on campus, hosted by Julia Bryan-Wilson and the Arts Research Center; attendants of a colloquium in Berkeley included Adrienne Edwards, Rita Gonzalez, and Henriette Huldisch. [1]
The organizers of the Feminist Art Coalition have emphasized that the initiative is gender-inclusive and recognizes a plurality of different feminisms. [3]
The events scheduled to take place as part of the Feminist Art Coalition include exhibitions, symposiums, surveys, and performances that span from fall 2020 through the end of 2021. [3]
Retrospective exhibitions are being held by several institutions, such as Joan Mitchell: Fierce Beauty co-presented by the Baltimore Museum of Art and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Andrea Bowers at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
Group exhibitions centering themes relevant to feminisms, such as voting rights, activism, domesticity, labor, and the body will also be presented at many institutions. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Hammer Museum are hosting the exhibition Witch Hunt, which examines sociopolitical constructs through a feminist lens. The exhibition includes 15 international artists and was curated by Anne Ellegood and Connie Butler. [4]
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) will present New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century, a major survey exploring recent feminist practices in contemporary art. The exhibition will illuminate a diverse range of art across all mediums by artists of all genders who are integrating feminist thought into innovative artistic approaches across a wide array of themes.
In addition to group exhibitions, a number of solo exhibitions are being held as a part of the coalition. Solo exhibitors include Howardena Pindell at The Shed, Fernanda Laguna at The Drawing Center and the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Lynn Hershman Leeson at the New Museum, and Genesis Belanger at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. [1]
GYOPO, a coalition of diasporic Korean artists, curators, writers, cultural producers, and art professionals, will present a Los Angeles marathon reading of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s seminal Dictee in conjunction with the University of Southern California.
Also in Los Angeles, LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division) presents Gatherings, an exhibition of public sculptures, performances, and programs that reimagine public sculpture as conduits for nurturing artistic and contemplative practices.
EMPAC at Rensselaer will premiere Dicen que cabalga sobre un tigre (They say she rides a tiger) by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz. The film entwines the linguistic structure of Monique Wittig’s 1969 feminist novel Les Guérillères with the material and conceptual ground of the Caribbean.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will present No Day of Rest! Screenings of Many, Many Women, foregrounding the resistance by women in art, film, and music. Included are films by Sini Anderson, Jeanne C. Finley, Eve Fowler, Kelly Gallagher, Delphine Seyrig, as well as Cauleen Smith.
LAXART, Los Angeles will present Life on Earth: An Ecofeminist Art Symposium in advance of the group exhibition Life on Earth: Ecofeminist Art since 1979. The Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA) will host the Women Photographers International Congress in November 2021.
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) is a contemporary art museum with two locations in greater Los Angeles, California. The main branch is located on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, near the Walt Disney Concert Hall. MOCA's original space, initially intended as a temporary exhibit space while the main facility was built, is now known as the Geffen Contemporary and located in the Little Tokyo district of downtown Los Angeles. Between 2000 and 2019, it operated a satellite facility at the Pacific Design Center facility in West Hollywood.
Guerrilla Girls is an anonymous group of feminist, female artists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world. The group formed in New York City in 1985, born out of a picket against the Museum of Modern Art the previous year. The core of the group's work is bringing gender and racial inequality into focus within the greater arts community and society at large. The Guerrilla Girls employ culture jamming in the form of posters, books, billboards, lectures, interviews, public appearances and internet interventions to expose disparities, discrimination, and corruption. They also often use humor in their work to make their serious messages engaging. The Guerrilla Girls are known for their "guerrilla" tactics, hence their name, such as hanging up posters or staging surprise exhibitions. To remain anonymous, members don gorilla masks. To permit individual identities in interviews, they use pseudonyms that refer to deceased female artists such as Frida Kahlo, Käthe Kollwitz, and Alice Neel, as well as writers and activists, such as Gertrude Stein and Harriet Tubman. According to GG1, identities are concealed because issues matter more than individual identities, "Mainly, we wanted the focus to be on the issues, not on our personalities or our own work."
Eleanor Antin is an American performance artist, film-maker, installation artist, conceptual artist, feminist artist, and university professor.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was an American novelist, producer, director, and artist of South Korean origin, best known for her 1982 novel, Dictée. Considered an avant-garde artist, Cha was fluent in Korean, English, and French. The main body of Cha's work is "looking for the roots of language before it is born on the tip of the tongue." Cha's practice experiments with language through repetition, manipulation, reduction, and isolation, exploring the ways in which language marks one's identity, in unstable and multiple expressions. Cha's interdisciplinary background was clearly evident in Dictée, which experiments with juxtaposition and hypertext of both print and visual media. Cha's Dictée is frequently taught in contemporary literature classes including women's literature.
The Woman's Building was a non-profit arts and education center located in Los Angeles, California. The Woman's Building focused on feminist art and served as a venue for the women's movement and was spearheaded by artist Judy Chicago, graphic designer Sheila Levrant de Bretteville and art historian Arlene Raven. The center was open from 1973 until 1991. During its existence, the Los Angeles Times called the Woman's Building a "feminist mecca."
Lucy Rowland Lippard is an American writer, art critic, activist, and curator. Lippard was among the first writers to argue for the "dematerialization" at work in conceptual art and was an early champion of feminist art. She is the author of 26 books on contemporary art and has received numerous awards and accolades from literary critics and art associations.
The feminist art movement in the United States began in the early 1970s and sought to promote the study, creation, understanding and promotion of women's art. First-generation feminist artists include Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, Suzanne Lacy, Judith Bernstein, Sheila de Bretteville, Mary Beth Edelson, Carolee Schneeman, Rachel Rosenthal, and many other women. They were part of the Feminist art movement in the United States in the early 1970s to develop feminist writing and art. The movement spread quickly through museum protests in both New York and Los Angeles, via an early network called W.E.B. that disseminated news of feminist art activities from 1971 to 1973 in a nationally circulated newsletter, and at conferences such as the West Coast Women's Artists Conference held at California Institute of the Arts and the Conference of Women in the Visual Arts, at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C..
Peggy Ahwesh is an American experimental filmmaker and video artist. She received her B.F.A. at Antioch College. A bricoleur who has created both narrative works and documentaries, some projects are scripted and others incorporate improvised performance. She makes use of sync sound, found footage, digital animation, and Pixelvision video. Her work is primarily an investigation of cultural identity and the role of the subject in various genres. Her interests include genre; women, sexuality and feminism; reenactment; and artists' books. Her works have been shown worldwide, including in San Francisco, New York, Barcelona, London, Toronto, Rotterdam, and Créteil, France. Starting in 1990, she has taught at Bard College as a Professor of Film and Electronic Arts. Her teaching interests include: experimental media, history of the non-fiction film, and women in film.
Martha Wilson is an American feminist performance artist and the founding director of Franklin Furnace Archive art organization. Over the past four decades she has developed and "created innovative photographic and video works that explore her female subjectivity through role-playing, costume transformation, and 'invasions' of other peoples personas". She is a recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and an Obie Award and a Bessie Award for commitment to artists’ freedom of expression. She is represented by P.P.O.W. Gallery in New York City.
Gilah Yelin Hirsch is a multidisciplinary artist who works as a painter, writer, curator, and filmmaker. Her work explores the connections between science, art, and spirituality. She has been a leader in the International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine (ISSSEEM). Hirsch was a founding member of one of the earliest women art organizations, the Los Angeles Council of Women in the Arts (LACWA) and was active in the feminist art movement in Southern California. She was a professor of art at California State University, Dominguez Hills in Los Angeles since 1973 and became Professor Emerita in 2020. Presently, Hirsch continues painting, writing, theorizing, and filmmaking, and is often invited to present her work in conferences and webinars world-wide.
Cornelia H. "Connie" Butler is an American museum curator, author, and art historian. Since 2023, Butler is the Director of MoMA PS1. From 2013 to 2023, she was the Chief Curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945–1980 was a scholarly initiative funded by the J. Paul Getty Trust to historicize the contributions to contemporary art history of artists, curators, critics, and others based in Los Angeles. Planned for nearly a decade, PST, as it was called, granted nearly 60 organizations throughout Southern California a total of $10 million to produce exhibitions that explored the years between 1945 and 1980. Underscoring the significance of this project, art critic Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times:
Before [PST], we knew a lot [about the history of contemporary art], and that lot tended to greatly favor New York. A few Los Angeles artists were highly visible and unanimously revered, namely Ed Ruscha and other denizens of the Ferus Gallery, that supercool locus of the Los Angeles art scene in the 1960s, plus Bruce Nauman and Chris Burden, but that was about it. After, we know a whole lot more, and the balance is much more even. One of the many messages delivered by this profusion of what will eventually be nearly 70 museum exhibitions is that New York did not act alone in the postwar era. And neither did those fabulous Ferus boys.
Nancy Buchanan is an American visual artist, known for her work in installation, performance, and video art. She played a central role in the feminist art movement in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Her work has been exhibited widely and is collected by major museums including the Museum of Modern Art and the Centre Pompidou. She is Los Angeles-based.
Feminist art criticism emerged in the 1970s from the wider feminist movement as the critical examination of both visual representations of women in art and art produced by women. It continues to be a major field of art criticism.
This is a timeline of the feminist art movement in New Zealand. It lists important figures, collectives, publications, exhibitions and moments that have contributed to discussion and development of the movement. For the indigenous Māori population, the emergence of the feminist art movement broadly coincided with the emergence of Māori Renaissance.
Kathy Rae Huffman is an American curator, writer, producer, researcher, lecturer and expert for video and media art. Since the early 1980s, Huffman is said to have helped establish video and new media art, online and interactive art, installation and performance art in the visual arts world. She has curated, written about, and coordinated events for numerous international art institutes, consulted and juried for festivals and alternative arts organisations. Huffman not only introduced video and digital computer art to museum exhibitions, she also pioneered tirelessly to bring television channels and video artists together, in order to show video artworks on TV. From the early 1990s until 2014, Huffman was based in Europe, and embraced early net art and interactive online environments, a curatorial practice that continues. In 1997, she co-founded the Faces mailing list and online community for women working with art, gender and technology. Till today, Huffman is working in the US, in Canada and in Europe.
Eve Fowler is an American Artist based in Los Angeles.
Marilena Preda Sânc is a Romanian visual artist, art educator (current position – professor at National University of Arts, Bucharest, and author of feminism and Public Art writings. She is known for being one of the most active feminist artists in the country. She uses a multidisciplinary approach by employing various media such as drawing, painting, mural art, book-objects, video, performance, photography, and installation; her work has been shown in museums, galleries, conferences, symposium, and broadcast venues around the world.
Global Feminisms was a feminist art exhibition that originally premiered at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, New York City, United States, in March 2007. The exhibition was co-curated by Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin and consists of work by 88 women artists from 62 countries. Global Feminisms showcased art across many mediums, all trying to answer the question "what is feminist art?". The show was visually anchored by the installation of Judy Chicago's Dinner Party.
Susanna Gyulamiryan, Armenian curator, art critic and feminist scholar. She is the appointed curator of the Pavilion of the Republic of Armenia at 58th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia (2019). Gyulamiryan is co-founder and the president of the non-governmental organization “Art and Cultural Studies Laboratory” (ACSL), and artistic director of the “Art Commune” International Artist-in-Residence Program. The “Art Commune” is a general member of the Res Artis worldwide network of artist residencies (resartis.org). Gyulamiryan is a (board) member of AICA-Armenia. She has led courses in Gender Studies and Feminist Art [Theory and Practice] at the Department of Fine Arts, Armenian Open University, and has also carried out MA course in Gender Studies at Yerevan State University, Department of Cultural Studies. She worked as a contributing editor and leader of the monthly columns “The Name of Art” and “Art Situations” at “CinemArt” –the journal on cinematography and contemporary art. The circle of Gyulamiryan's professional interests and studies embraced feminist art, participatory /community art and art of social and political engagement in conjunction with civil and political activism.