Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a public in a fine art context in an interdisciplinary mode. Also known as artistic action, it has been developed through the years as a genre of its own in which art is presented live. It had an important and fundamental role in 20th century avant-garde art.
The United Service Organizations Inc. (USO) is an American nonprofit-charitable corporation that provides live entertainment, such as comedians, actors and musicians, social facilities, and other programs to members of the United States Armed Forces and their families. Since 1941, it has worked in partnership with the Department of War, and later with the Department of Defense (DoD), relying heavily on private contributions and on funds, goods, and services from various corporate and individual donors. Although it is congressionally chartered, it is not a government agency.
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."
V, formerly Eve Ensler, is an American playwright, author, performer, feminist, and activist. V is best known for her play The Vagina Monologues. In 2006 Charles Isherwood of The New York Times called The Vagina Monologues "probably the most important piece of political theater of the last decade."
Kurdish women have traditionally played important roles in Kurdish society and politics. In general, Kurdish women's rights and equality have improved dramatically in the 21st century due to progressive movements within Kurdish society. However, despite the progress, Kurdish and international women's rights organizations still report problems related to gender inequality, forced marriages, honor killings, and in Iraqi Kurdistan, female genital mutilation (FGM).
The Global Fund for Women is a non-profit foundation funding women's human rights initiatives. It was founded in 1987 by New Zealander Anne Firth Murray, and co-founded by Frances Kissling and Laura Lederer to fund women's initiatives around the world. It is headquartered in San Francisco, California. Since 1988, the foundation has awarded over $100 million in grants to over 4,000 organizations supporting progressive women's rights in over 170 countries. Ms. Magazine has called the Global Fund for Women "one of the leading global feminist funds."
Video Data Bank (VDB) is an international video art distribution organization and resource in the United States for videos by and about contemporary artists. Located in Chicago, Illinois, VDB was founded at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1976 at the inception of the media arts movement.
Lierre Keith is an American writer, radical feminist, food activist, and radical environmentalist.
Awatef Rasheed is an Iraqi Canadian writer, secular women's rights activist, and the first Iraqi female recipient of Femmy Award. She is a recipient of the Iraqi Women's Initiative Award from the Iraqi Women's Network in 2010. Awatef Rasheed is currently a Regional Adviser for the, Urgent Action Fund for Women's Rights in USA. She served as a board member for the Canadian Research Institute for Advancement of Women (CRIAW) from 2009- 2012 and previously served on the steering committee for Feminists for Just and Equitable Public Policy (FemJEPP). She has also been a member of the Canadian Federation of University Women, and a representative for the Iraqi Al-Amal Association,
The Waitresses were a collaborative feminist performance art group that formed in 1977. The group consisted of artists that also worked as waitresses in Los Angeles, California. The group was active from their inception until 1985.
Riot grrrl is an underground feminist punk movement that began during the early 1990s within the United States in Olympia, Washington and the greater Pacific Northwest and has expanded to at least 26 other countries. Riot grrrl is a subcultural movement that combines feminism, punk music, and politics. It is often associated with third-wave feminism, which is sometimes seen as having grown out of the riot grrrl movement and has recently been seen in fourth-wave feminist punk music that rose in the 2010s. The genre has also been described as coming out of indie rock, with the punk scene serving as an inspiration for a movement in which women could express anger, rage, and frustration, emotions considered socially acceptable for male songwriters but less common for women.
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 sought to bring more visibility to women within art history and art practice. By the way it is expressed to visualize the inner thoughts and objectives of the feminist movement to show to everyone and give meaning in the art. It helps construct the role to those who continue to undermine 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."
Shekinah Jacob (Auckland) is a playwright based in New Zealand who trained with the Royal Court Theatre, London. Her plays include Ali.J, The Long Way Home produced by Evam Entertainment, the musical Queen of Hearts that toured India and the Middle East, and a monologue titled We are Water on BBC radio. Ali.J, which opened at the Fringe festival in Edinburgh received a four-star review from The Scotsman. Her latest play Kitchdi Tales was developed in Melbourne and was shortlisted for the Auckland Arts Festival. Jacob holds a Masters in Writing for Performance from the University of London as a Charles Wallace scholar, and a PhD in theatre from the University of Victoria.
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.
Multiracial feminist theory is a feminist theory promoted by feminist women of color, including Black, Latina, Asian, Native American, and anti-racist white women. In 1996, Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill wrote “Theorizing Difference from Multiracial Feminism," a piece emphasizing intersectionality and the application of intersectional analysis in feminist discourse.
Pig Girl, first produced in November 2013 and then published in November 2015, is a play by Colleen Murphy that draws upon the events of the 2007 Pickton case surrounding the murders of Indigenous women by Port Coquitlam pig farmer Robert Pickton. The play tells the stories of the fictionalized characters Dying Girl, Killer, Sister, and Police Officer in order to illuminate the Canadian issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Pig Girl was awarded both a Carol Bolt Award and a Governor General's Award.
Ash (Ashley) Marinaccio is a documentarian, artistic director, theatre director, photographer, filmmaker, performer, and playwright. She works across disciplines and mediums in nonfiction storytelling.
According to scholar Virginia Mackenny, performance art is a great tool to mold and remold gender because performance art, in most instances, includes a direct subversion to everyday conventions. MacKenny also writes that feminist performance Art had a large presence "in the late '60s and early '70s in America when, in the climate of protest constituted by the civil rights movement and second wave feminism." There are several movements that fall under the category of feminist performance art, including Feminist Postmodernism, which took place during 1960-1970 and focused on the exploitation of women's bodies as a means for profit. Similarly, the Chicanx movement emerged in East Los Angeles during the 1970s, and focused on the Vietnam war, which was considered a post-apartheid movement.
Jill Susan Dolan is an American educator, author, blogger and feminist. She writes on theatre, sexuality studies, and feminist theory. Since July 2015, Dolan has been the Dean of the College at Princeton University, where she is also the Annan Professor in English and a professor of theatre studies in the Lewis Center for the Arts. Prior to Princeton, Dolan served as the Department Head of Theater and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin, and as Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dolan's notable works include her blog The Feminist Spectator, for which she received the 2011 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, and Theater and Sexuality. Dolan also edited Menopausal Gentlemen: Plays and Performances of Peggy Shaw which won the Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBT Drama.
Sands of Silence: Waves of Courage is a 2016 documentary film that addresses the spectrum of sexual violence, from child sexual abuse and clergy abuse to rape and sex trafficking. It was directed, written and produced by filmmaker Chelo Alvarez-Stehle.
