Georgia Totto O'Keeffe was an American modernist painter and draftswoman whose career spanned seven decades and whose work remained largely independent of major art movements. Called the "Mother of American modernism", O'Keeffe gained international recognition for her meticulous paintings of natural forms, particularly flowers and desert-inspired landscapes, which were often drawn from and related to places and environments in which she lived.
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..
Mierle Laderman Ukeles is a New York City-based artist known for her feminist and service-oriented artworks, which relate the idea of process in conceptual art to domestic and civic "maintenance". She has been the Artist-in-Residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation. Her art brings to life the very essence of any urban center: waste flows, recycling, sustainability, environment, people, and ecology.
May Stevens was an American feminist artist, political activist, educator, and writer.
Harmony Hammond is an American artist, activist, curator, and writer. She was a prominent figure in the founding of the feminist art movement in 1970s New York.
Nancy J. Azara is an American sculptor. Her work involves sculpture using carved, assembled and highly painted wood with gold and silver leaf and encaustic. The wood, the paint and the layers that make up the sculpture record a journey of memory, images and ideas. Azara's other art pieces involve collages, banners, prints where she continuously reshapes the elements and materials. Azara has worked and carved in wood for many years because of the presence and symbolism inherent in trees and because the metaphor of the tree is a “stand-in” for herself. This statement and representation of tree as “self” and woman is timely in a world which is losing touch with its primal essence.
"Where We At" Black Women Artists, Inc. (WWA) was a collective of Black women artists affiliated with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. It included artists such as Dindga McCannon, Kay Brown, Faith Ringgold, Carol Blank, Jerri Crooks, Charlotte Kâ (Richardson), and Gylbert Coker. Where We At was formed in the spring of 1971, in the wake of an exhibition of the same name organized by 14 Black women artists at the Acts of Art Gallery in Greenwich Village. Themes such as the unity of the Black family, Black female independence and embodiment, Black male-female relationships, contemporary social conditions, and African traditions were central to the work of the WWA artists. The group was intended to serve as a source of empowerment for African-American women, providing a means for them to control their self-representation and to explore issues of Black women's sensibility and aesthetics. Like AfriCobra, a Chicago-based Black Arts group, the WWA was active in fostering art within the African-American community and used it as a tool of awareness and liberation. The group organized workshops in schools, jails and prisons, hospitals, and cultural centers, as well as art classes for youth in their communities.
HERESIES: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics was a feminist journal that was produced from 1977 to 1993 by the New York–based Heresies Collective.
Mary Beth Edelson was an American artist and pioneer of the feminist art movement, deemed one of the notable "first-generation feminist artists". Edelson was a printmaker, book artist, collage artist, painter, photographer, performance artist, and author. Her works have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
The Heresies Collective was founded in 1976 in New York City, by a group of feminist political artists. The group sought to, among other goals, examine art from a feminist and political perspective. In addition to a variety of actions and cultural output, the collective was responsible for the overseeing the publication of the journal Heresies: A feminist publication on art and politics, which was published from 1977 until 1993.
Vivian E. Browne was an American artist. Born in Laurel, Florida, Browne was mostly known for her painting series called Little Men and her Africa series. She is also known for linking abstraction to nature in her tree paintings and in a series of abstract works made with layers of silk that were influenced by her travels to China. She was an activist, professor, and has received multiple awards for her work. According to her mother, Browne died at age 64 from bladder cancer.
Eunice Golden is an American feminist painter from New York City, known for exploring sexuality using the male nude. Her work has been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Westbeth Gallery, and SOHO20 Gallery.
Christy Rupp is an American artist and activist.
Janet Henry is a visual artist based in New York City.
The Women's Artists Visibility Event (W.A.V.E.) also known as Let MOMA Know, was a demonstration held on June 14, 1984, to protest the lack of women artists represented in The Museum of Modern Art's re-opening exhibition "An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture." The exhibition, which included 165 artists, had 14 women among them.
Anne Laura Healy is an American artist who was a founding member of AIR Gallery. She worked as a professor at the University of California Berkeley and has work in the permanent collection of several museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Merle Temkin is a New York City-based painter, sculptor and installation artist, known for vibrant, abstracted paintings based on her own enlarged fingerprint, and earlier site-specific, mirrored installations of the 1980s. Her work has often involved knitting-like processes of assemblage and re-assemblage, visual fragmentation and dislocation, and explorations of identity, the hand and body, and gender. In addition, critics have remarked on the play in her work between systematic experimentation and intuitive exploration. Her painted and sewn "Fingerprints" body of work has been noted for its "handmade" quality and "sheer formal beauty" in the Chicago Sun-Times and described elsewhere as an "intensely focused," obsessive joining of thread and paint with "the directness and desperation of marks on cave walls." Critic Dominique Nahas wrote "Temkin's labor-intensive cartography sutures the map of autobiography onto that of the universal in sharply revelatory ways." Her public sculptures have been recognized for their unexpected perceptual effects and encouragement of viewer participation. Temkin's work has been featured in publications including the New York Times, Artforum, ARTnews, New York Magazine, and the Washington Post. Her work belongs to the permanent collections of the Racine Art Museum, Museum of Arts and Design in New York, and Israel Museum, among others.
Margaret Rose Vendryes was a visual artist, curator, and art historian based in New York.
Inverna Lockpez is a Cuban American painter, sculptor, and activist, that participated in the second wave of America's feminist movement. She is known for her graphic novel Cuba: My Revolution, a fictionalized memoir of her life prior to coming to the United States.
Pura Cruz is a Puerto Rican feminist artist most famous for her artworks in her Adam–1999 series and her Broken Guitar series. Cruz currently creates art in Long Island after living and moving from New York.
