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.
Nancy Spero was an American visual artist. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Spero lived for much of her life in New York City. She married and collaborated with artist Leon Golub. As both artist and activist, Nancy Spero had a career that spanned fifty years. She is known for her continuous engagement with contemporary political, social, and cultural concerns. Spero chronicled wars and apocalyptic violence as well as articulating visions of ecstatic rebirth and the celebratory cycles of life. Her complex network of collective and individual voices was a catalyst for the creation of her figurative lexicon representing women from prehistory to the present in such epic-scale paintings and collage on paper as Torture of Women (1976), Notes in Time on Women (1979) and The First Language (1981). In 2010, Notes in Time was posthumously reanimated as a digital scroll in the online magazine Triple Canopy. Spero has had a number of retrospective exhibitions at major museums.
Janine Antoni is a Bahamian–born American artist, who creates contemporary work in performance art, sculpture, and photography. Antoni's work focuses on process and the transitions between the making and finished product, often portraying feminist ideals. She emphasizes the human body in her pieces, such as her mouth, hair, eyelashes, and, through technological scanning, brain, using it as a tool of creation or as the subject of her pieces, exploring intimacy between the spectator and the artist. Her work blurs the distinction between performance art and sculpture.
Wangechi Mutu is a Kenyan-born American visual artist, known primarily for her painting, sculpture, film, and performance work. Born in Kenya, she has lived and established her career in New York City for more than twenty years. Mutu's work has directed the female body as subject through collage painting, immersive installation, and live and video performance while exploring questions of self-image, gender constructs, cultural trauma, and environmental destruction and notions of beauty and power.
Hannah Wilke was an American painter, sculptor, photographer, video artist and performance artist. Wilke's work is known for exploring issues of feminism, sexuality and femininity.
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.
Elizabeth Murray was an American painter, printmaker and draughtsman. Her works are in many major public collections, including those of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Wadsworth Atheneum. Murray was known for her use of shaped canvases.
Andrea Zittel is an American artist based in Joshua Tree, CA whose practice encompasses spaces, objects and modes of living in an ongoing investigation that explores the questions "How to live?" and "What gives life meaning?"
Judy Pfaff is an American artist known mainly for installation art and sculptures, though she also produces paintings and prints. Pfaff has received numerous awards for her work, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2004 and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1983) and the National Endowment for the Arts. Major exhibitions of her work have been held at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Denver Art Museum and Saint Louis Art Museum. In 2013 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Video interviews can be found on Art 21, Miles McEnery Gallery, MoMa, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and other sources.
Robin Rhode is a South African artist based in Berlin. He has made wall drawings, photographs and sculptures.
Mel Kendrick is an American visual artist and sculptor known primarily for his abstract, three-dimensional forms derived from sliced and reconstituted wooden blocks. Kendrick's work is understood to reflect a deep fascination with process, space, geometry, and natural forms and materials.
Liza Lou is an American visual artist. She is best known for producing large scale sculpture using glass beads. Lou ran a studio in Durban, South Africa from 2005 to 2014. She currently has a nomadic practice, working mostly outdoors in the Mojave Desert in southern California. Lou's work is grounded in domestic craft and intersects with the larger social economy.
R. H. Quaytman is an American contemporary artist, best known for paintings on wood panels, using abstract and photographic elements in site-specific "Chapters", now numbering 35. Each chapter is guided by architectural, historical and social characteristics of the original site. Since 2008, her work has been collected by a number of modern art museums. She is also an educator and author based in Connecticut.
Joyce Kozloff is an American artist known for her paintings, murals, and public art installations. She was one of the original members of the Pattern and Decoration movement and an early artist in the 1970s feminist art movement, including as a founding member of the Heresies collective.
Rona Pondick is an American sculptor. She lives and works in New York City. Using the language of the body in her sculpture, in both a literal and a metaphorical sense, has been of interest to Pondick since the beginnings of her career in 1977. An abiding concern of hers has been the exploration of the use of different materials, a consistent motif that runs throughout her work from its beginnings to the present day.
Teresa Margolles is a conceptual artist, photographer, videographer, and performance artist. As an artist she researches the social causes and consequences of death.
Annette Lemieux is an American artist who emerged in the early 1980s along with the "picture theory" artists. Lemieux brought to the studio a discipline equally based on introspection, and the manifestations of an ideological minimalism. Process is a key component in the execution of her works over the past three decades, creating the lure to the confrontation of issues of social and historical urgency. Lemieux has been the recipient of awards from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Keiser Wilhelm Museum, Germany and an honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from Montserrat College of Art. Presently, in addition to her studio and exhibition schedule, she is a senior lecturer at Harvard University in the area of visual and environmental studies.
Donald Jay Saff is an artist, art historian, educator, and lecturer, specializing in the fields of contemporary art in addition to American and English horology.
Heide Fasnacht is a New York City-based artist who works in sculpture, drawing, painting and installation art. Her work explores states of flux, instability and transformation caused by human action and natural events. Since the mid-1990s, she has been known for sculptures and drawings that recreate momentary phenomena such as sneezes, geysers and demolitions—in sometimes abstract or cartoony form—that are temporally and spatially "frozen" for consideration of their aesthetic, perceptual, social or sensate qualities. In the late 2010s, she has expanded these themes in paintings that examine lost and neglected childhood sites, such as playgrounds and amusement parks. ARTnews critic Ken Shulman has described her work as "chart[ing] the fluid dialogue between second and third dimensions, motion and inertia, creation and ruin."
Elise Siegel is an American sculptor and installation artist based in New York City. She is known for several bodies of figurative work that use subtle and ambiguous gesture and facial expression to evoke psychic and emotional states. In the 1990s, she first gained recognition for garment-like constructions that blurred boundaries between clothing, skin and body, critiquing the roles fashion and plastic surgery play in the construction of sexual and cultural identity; writer Mira Schor included Siegel among the cohort of artists she dubbed "Generation 2.5" and credited for developing the tropes of feminist art. After shifting to clay as her primary material, Siegel was one of a number of artists in the 2000s whose work spurred a rebirth in figurative ceramics emphasizing emotional expression, social conditions, identity and narrative. Her ceramic work—which ranges from roughly modeled portrait busts to highly charged, theatrical installations—is said to capture fleeting moments of internal struggle, conflict and vulnerability, creating a psychological tension with the viewer.
