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.
Louise Joséphine Bourgeois was a French-American artist. Although she is best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker. She explored a variety of themes over the course of her long career including domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the unconscious. These themes connect to events from her childhood which she considered to be a therapeutic process. Although Bourgeois exhibited with the abstract expressionists and her work has much in common with Surrealism and feminist art, she was not formally affiliated with a particular artistic movement.
Ana Mendieta was a Cuban-American performance artist, sculptor, painter, and video artist who is best known for her "earth-body" artwork. She is considered one of the most influential Cuban-American artists of the post–World War II era. Born in Havana, Cuba, Mendieta left for the United States in 1961.
Shigeko Kubota was a Japanese video artist, sculptor and avant-garde performance artist, who mostly lived in New York City. She was one of the first artists to adopt the portable video camera Sony Portapak in 1970, likening it to a "new paintbrush." Kubota is known for constructing sculptural installations with a strong DIY aesthetic, which include sculptures with embedded monitors playing her original videos. She was a key member and influence on Fluxus, the international group of avant-garde artists centered on George Maciunas, having been involved with the group since witnessing John Cage perform in Tokyo in 1962 and subsequently moving to New York in 1964. She was closely associated with George Brecht, Jackson Mac Low, John Cage, Joe Jones, Nam June Paik, and Ay-O, among other members of Fluxus. Kubota was deemed "Vice Chairman" of the Fluxus Organization by Maciunas.
The absence of women from the canon of Western art has been a subject of inquiry and reconsideration since the early 1970s. Linda Nochlin's influential 1971 essay, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?", examined the social and institutional barriers that blocked most women from entering artistic professions throughout history, prompted a new focus on women artists, their art and experiences, and contributed inspiration to the Feminist art movement. Although women artists have been involved in the making of art throughout history, their work, when compared to that of their male counterparts, has been often obfuscated, overlooked and undervalued. The Western canon has historically valued men's work over women's and attached gendered stereotypes to certain media, such as textile or fiber arts, to be primarily associated with women.
Kiki Smith is a German-born American artist whose work has addressed the themes of sex, birth and regeneration. Her figurative work of the late 1980s and early 1990s confronted subjects such as AIDS, feminism, and gender, while recent works have depicted the human condition in relationship to nature. Smith lives and works in the Lower East Side, New York City, and the Hudson Valley, New York State.
Hannah Wilke (born Arlene Hannah Butter; was an American painter, sculptor, photographer, video artist and performance artist. Wilke's work is known for exploring issues of feminism, sexuality and femininity.
Alison Saar is a Los Angeles, California based sculptor, mixed-media, and installation artist. Her artwork focuses on the African diaspora and black female identity and is influenced by African, Caribbean, and Latin American folk art and spirituality. Saar is well known for "transforming found objects to reflect themes of cultural and social identity, history, and religion."
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.
The nude, as a form of visual art that focuses on the unclothed human figure, is an enduring tradition in Western art. It was a preoccupation of Ancient Greek art, and after a semi-dormant period in the Middle Ages returned to a central position with the Renaissance. Unclothed figures often also play a part in other types of art, such as history painting, including allegorical and religious art, portraiture, or the decorative arts. From prehistory to the earliest civilizations, nude female figures were generally understood to be symbols of fertility or well-being.
Susan Silas is a visual artist working primarily in video, sculpture and photography. Her work, through self-portraiture, examines the meaning of embodiment, the index in representation, and the evolution of our understanding of the self. She is interested in the aging body, gender roles, the fragility of sentient being and the potential outcome of the creation of idealized selves through bio-technology and artificial intelligence.
Muriel Nezhnie Helfman, known professionally as Nezhnie, was an American artist, primarily weaving large tapestries throughout 1956–1992. She gained international attention in the late 1980s with a series of six tapestries, Images of the Holocaust, completed between 1979 and 1989. They were first exhibited as a series at the "Sazama-Brauer Gallery" in Chicago in 1988. Their imagery and texts are based on historical photographs of victims of Nazi persecution, such as ones by Mendel Grossman, and other materials that Nezhnie collected from the Library of Congress, National Archives, The Pentagon and the Yad Vashem Archives in Israel.
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."
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.
Kirsten Justesen is a Danish artist living and working in Copenhagen and New York City. She has been part of the feminist art movement.
Narcissister is an American, Brooklyn-based, feminist performance artist, born of Moroccan Jewish and African-American descent. Narcissister's work tends to focus on race, gender, and sexuality, using her slight anonymity to explore such topics controversially. In February 2013, she headlined her first solo gallery. She was a contestant on America's Got Talent. The Huffington Post declared her the "topless feminist superhero of New York". She prefers her identity remain secret.
Portrayal of female bodies in Chinese contemporary art has become a lot more diverse as women artists start to rise in China. Many contemporary Chinese women artists have employed the use of female bodies as the subject of their artworks. From the ancient and imperial period of China until early the 19th century, women's body images in Chinese art were predominantly portrayed through male artists' lenses. As a result, female bodies were often misrepresented. With the arrival of modernism in Chinese contemporary art, women now have more influences in the field of visual arts. Chinese women artists employ unconventional artistic expressions in order to speak about their experiences of being a female and an artist in a patriarchal society. Although the Chinese visual art field has been more inclusive in the recent decades, women artists’ representation in major art exhibitions is still significantly less than male artists. Therefore, artists and curators have made a joint effort to devote certain art exhibitions to just Chinese women artists.
Elżbieta Jabłońska is a Polish contemporary visual artist, and professor. She has served as the Chair of Drawing and has taught art at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń since 1996. Jablonska is known for photography, film, installation art, and performance art. Her artwork engages with Polish stereotypes and myths of women, mothers, and the Catholicism. She lives in Bydgoszcz in northern Poland, in a farming cooperative.
