Judy Chicago is an American feminist artist, art educator, and writer known for her large collaborative art installation pieces about birth and creation images, which examine the role of women in history and culture. During the 1970s, Chicago founded the first feminist art program in the United States at California State University, Fresno which acted as a catalyst for feminist art and art education during the 1970s. Her inclusion in hundreds of publications in various areas of the world showcases her influence in the worldwide art community. Additionally, many of her books have been published in other countries, making her work more accessible to international readers. Chicago's work incorporates a variety of artistic skills, such as needlework, counterbalanced with skills such as welding and pyrotechnics. Chicago's most well known work is The Dinner Party, which is permanently installed in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. The Dinner Party celebrates the accomplishments of women throughout history and is widely regarded as the first epic feminist artwork. Other notable art projects by Chicago include International Honor Quilt, Birth Project, Powerplay, and The Holocaust Project. She is represented by Jessica Silverman gallery.
Hapa is a Hawaiian word for someone of multiracial ancestry. In Hawaii, the word refers to any person of mixed ethnic heritage, regardless of the specific mixture. The term is used for any multiracial person of partial East Asian, Southeast Asian, or Pacific Islander mixture in California. In what can be characterized as trans-cultural diffusion or the wave model, this latter usage has also spread to Massachusetts, Ohio, and Oregon.
Casta is a term meaning lineage or race in Spanish and Portuguese. The term has historically been used as a racial and social identifier for mixed-race offspring in the colonial Spanish Empire in the Americas. The Spanish crown created a basic legal division between Hispanic society and Indigenous peoples. Mixed-race castas were part of the Spanish sector. Many scholars have examined whether there was a rigid, racially-based, social hierarchy in Spanish America, Although a strict racial hierarchy is depicted in 18th century "casta paintings," done by Spanish American and Iberian painters, with fixed categories in rank order, extensive archival research does not support the artists' imagined fixity and rigidity of a highly ordered racial system. With the encounter in the New World between European Spaniards, enslaved Africans forcibly brought by Spaniards, and indigenous people, sexual unions produced offspring that colonial officials classified in newly created legal racial categories. Mixed-race categories that appeared in official Spanish documentation were mestizo, generally offspring of a Spanish man and an Indigenous woman; and mulatto, offspring of a Spanish man and an African woman. Many other terms are found casta paintings, for people with variously mixed Spanish, Indigenous, and African ancestry; however, except for official categories of mestizo and mulatto, the plethora of other terms are not known to have been widely used officially or unofficially in the Spanish Empire.
Lawrence Keith "Kip" Fulbeck is an American artist, spoken word performer, filmmaker and author. Fulbeck's work explores identity politics.
Amelia Jones, originally from Durham, North Carolina, is an American art historian, art theorist, art critic, author, professor and curator. Her research specialisms include feminist art, body art, performance art, video art, identity politics, and New York Dada. Jones's earliest work established her as a feminist scholar and curator, including through a pioneering exhibition and publication concerning the art of Judy Chicago; later, she broadened her focus on other social activist topics including race, class and identity politics. Jones has contributed significantly to the study of art and performance as a teacher, researcher, and activist.
Lorna Simpson is an American photographer and multimedia artist whose works have been exhibited both nationally and internationally. In 1990, she became one of the first African-American woman to exhibit at the Venice Biennale. She came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s with photo-text installations such as Guarded Conditions and Square Deal that questioned the nature of identity, gender, race, history and representation. Simpson continues to explore these themes in relation to memory and history using photography, film, video, painting, drawing, audio, and sculpture.
Archibald John Motley, Jr., was an American visual artist. Motley is most famous for his colorful chronicling of the African-American experience in Chicago during the 1920s and 1930s, and is considered one of the major contributors to the Harlem Renaissance, or the New Negro Movement, a time in which African-American art reached new heights not just in New York but across America—its local expression is referred to as the Chicago Black Renaissance. He studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago during the 1910s, graduating in 1918.
Deborah Kass is an American artist whose work explores the intersection of pop culture, art history, and the construction of self. Deborah Kass works in mixed media, and is most recognized for her paintings, prints, photography, sculptures and neon lighting installations. Kass's early work mimics and reworks signature styles of iconic male artists of the 20th century including Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, and Ed Ruscha. Kass's technique of appropriation is a critical commentary on the intersection of social power relations, identity politics, and the historically dominant position of male artists in the art world.
The Hapa Project is a multiracial identity art project created by American artist Kip Fulbeck. The project embodies a range of media, including a published book, traveling photographic exhibition, satellite community presentations, and online communities.
Laura Aguilar was an American photographer. She was born with auditory dyslexia and attributed her start in photography to her brother, who showed her how to develop in dark rooms. She was mostly self-taught, although she took some photography courses at East Los Angeles College, where her second solo exhibition, Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell, was held. Aguilar used visual art to bring forth marginalized identities, especially within the LA Queer scene and Latinx communities. Before the term Intersectionality was used commonly, Aguilar captured the largely invisible identities of large bodied, queer, working-class, brown people in the form of portraits. Often using her naked body as a subject, she used photography to empower herself and her inner struggles to reclaim her own identity as “Laura”- a lesbian, fat, disabled, and brown person. Although work on Chicana/os is limited, Aguilar has become an essential figure in Chicano art history and is often regarded as an early "pioneer of intersectional feminism” for her outright and uncensored work. Some of her most well-known works are Three Eagles Flying, The Plush Pony Series, and Nature Self Portraits. Aguilar has been noted for her collaboration with cultural scholars such as Yvonne Yarbo-Berjano and receiving inspiration from other artists like Judy Dater. She was well known for her portraits, mostly of herself, and also focused upon people in marginalized communities, including LGBT and Latino subjects, self-love, and social stigma of obesity.
Siona Benjamin is an Indian-American artist originally from Mumbai, India and now residing in the New York City area.
Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) Association is a collective of scholars, artists, community activists, clinicians, and students whose work analyzes and critiques social, cultural, and political institutions based on dominant conceptions of race. CMRS emphasizes the fluidity of race and other intersecting identities to critique processes of racialization and social stratification. CMRS works to undo local and global systemic injustice rooted in systems of racism and white supremacy through scholarship, teaching, advocacy, the arts, activism and other forms of social justice work. The biannual Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) Conference is organized by faculty members of various universities. It was originally hosted by DePaul University’s Global Asian Studies and Latin American and Latino Studies programs. Its accompanying academic Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies was founded by G. Reginald Daniel, Wei Ming Dariotis, Laura Kina, Maria P.P. Root and Paul Spickard founded in 2011 through UC Santa Barbara. CMRS symposiums have been held both in the U.S. and abroad, with hundreds of academics citing it as a research interest.
Mira Schendel was a Brazilian contemporary artist of the 20th century. She made numerous drawings on rice paper, but was also active as a painter, a poet, and a sculptor. Her work drew upon the art of language and poetry, and what appears to have driven her was the ability to reinvent it.
Joan Semmel is an American feminist painter, professor, and writer. She is best known for her large-scale naturalistic nude self portraits as seen from her perspective looking down.
Mequitta Ahuja is a contemporary American feminist painter of African American and South Asian descent who lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Ahuja creates works of self-portraiture that combine themes of myth and legend with personal identity.
Denise Uyehara is an American performance artist, director and writer. Her interdisciplinary and solo performances and installations examine and explore memory, time-travel, immigration, race, sexuality, and gender. She is the founding member of the performance group Sacred Naked Nature Girls, a group of four women of different ethnicities and sexual orientation, who use their bodies as a means to construct identities and inspire dialogue. Her work is internationally recognized and has been featured in exhibitions in Los Angeles, Helsinki, London, Tokyo, and Vancouver. She is also the author of two full-length plays, Hobbies and Hiro. Uyehara is a fellow of the Asian Cultural Council.
Laylah Ali (born 1968) is a contemporary visual artist known for paintings in which ambiguous race relations are depicted with a graphic clarity and cartoon strip format.
Kim Anno is a Japanese-American artist and educator. She is known for her work as an abstract painter, photographer, and filmmaker. Anno has served as a professor, and as the chair of the painting department at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
Anida Yoeu Ali is a Cambodian-American artist. Her works include span performance, art installation, videos, and images. Installation art is an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that often are site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space.
Debra Yepa-Pappan is an artist in digital multimedia, focusing heavily on photography and digital collaging. Most influenced by her multicultural upbringing, with a South Korean mother and a Native American father, her work reflects the struggle of identity, modernity, and stereotypes revolving around Native American culture.
