Thalia Gouma-Peterson | |
|---|---|
 Thalia Gouma-Peterson April 1999 | |
| Born | November 20, 1933 |
| Died | June 20, 2001 |
| Education | BA Mills College MA Mills College PhD University of Wisconsin, Madison |
| Spouse | Carl Peterson |
| Awards | Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award 2001 |
Thalia Gouma-Peterson (1933-2001) was Professor Emerita of Art History and museum curator at the College of Wooster in Ohio. Born in Athens, Greece she came to the U.S. as a Fulbright student in 1952.
She earned her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in Art History at Mills College and her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
From 1960-1968 she was a lecturer in art at Oberlin College. In 1968 she joined the art faculty at the College of Wooster where she was tenured as a full professor in 1976. She chaired Wooster's Art Department for several terms and was director of Wooster's art museum for a number of years. [1]
Her research and writing were concentrated in two distinct fields: Byzantine icons and frescoes (she was trained as a medievalist), and contemporary feminist art. She published in Art Bulletin , Gesta , and Dumbarton Oaks Papers , and organized exhibitions of the work of Miriam Schapiro, Audrey Flack, Faith Ringgold, and Emma Amos. She retired in 1999. In early 2000, Gouma-Peterson published two books that epitomize the primary areas of her research and teaching interests. The first, Miriam Schapiro: Shaping the Fragments of Art and Life , is a full-scale critical and biographical study of the New York artist Miriam Schapiro, best known as one of the founders of the feminist art movement of the late 1970s and 80s. [2] The other, Anna Komnene and Her Times , constituted the culmination of her lifelong interest in Byzantine art and culture, and is a collection of original essays by international scholars on the Byzantine princess Anna Kommene. [3] Gouma-Peterson conceived the idea for the collection, contributed an essay of her own to it, and steered it through a complex editorial process. The volume is one in the Gale series of medieval studies of which Marcia Colish, F.B. Artz Professor of History, was co-editor. A board member of the College Art Association and Women's Caucus for Art, the last trip she embarked on from her home in Oberlin, Ohio was to Chicago in February 2001, to receive a Lifetime Achievement award from the Women's Caucus. The exhibition materials for Impact! The Legacy of the Women’s Caucus for Art called her “a pioneer and inquisitive explorer" and "a powerful model...through example to generations of students.”[ citation needed ]
Gouma-Peterson’s books include Miriam Schapiro: Shaping the Fragments of Art and Life on the work and life of feminist artist Miriam Schapiro; Breaking the Rules: Audrey Flack A Retrospective 1950 - 1990 and Anna Komnene and Her Times (2000), on the Byzantine princess, scholar, physician, and historian co-edited by Marcia Colish. [4] She and Patricia Mathews co-authored The Feminist Critique of Art History for The Art Bulletin Journal. [5] Her other publications included articles on the artists Elizabeth Catlett, Joyce Kozloff, Faith Ringgold, Athena Tacha, and Ruth Weisberg, among others.
In 2001, Gouma-Peterson was honored with a Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award. [6]
Anna Komnene, commonly Latinized as Anna Comnena, was a Byzantine Greek princess and historian. She is the author of the Alexiad, an account of the reign of her father, Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos. Her work constitutes the most important primary source of Byzantine history of the late 11th and early 12th centuries, as well as of the early Crusades. Although she is best known as the author of the Alexiad, Anna played an important part in the politics of the time and attempted to depose her brother, John II Komnenos, as emperor in favour of her husband, Nikephoros.
The Alexiad is a medieval historical and biographical text written around the year 1148, by the Byzantine princess Anna Komnene, daughter of Emperor Alexios I Komnenos. It was written in a form of artificial Attic Greek. Anna described the political and military history of the Byzantine Empire during the reign of her father, thus providing a significant account on the Byzantium of the High Middle Ages. Among other topics, the Alexiad documents the Byzantine Empire's interaction with the Crusades and highlights the conflicting perceptions of the East and West in the early 12th century. It does not mention the schism of 1054 – a topic which is very common in contemporary writing. It documents firsthand the decline of Byzantine cultural influence in eastern and western Europe, particularly in the West's increasing involvement in its geographic sphere. The Alexiad was paraphrased in vernacular medieval Greek in mid-14th century to increase its readability, which testifies to the lasting interest in the work.
Womanhouse was a feminist art installation and performance space organized by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, co-founders of the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) Feminist Art Program and was the first public exhibition of art centered upon female empowerment. Chicago, Schapiro, their students, and women artists from the local community, including Faith Wilding, participated. Chicago and Schapiro encouraged their students to use consciousness-raising techniques to generate the content of the exhibition. Together, the students and professors worked to build an environment where women's conventional social roles could be shown, exaggerated, and subverted.
Irene Doukaina or Ducaena was a Byzantine empress by marriage to the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos. She was the mother of Emperor John II Komnenos and the historian Anna Komnene. She was initially heavily overshadowed and humiliated in influence and power by her mother-in-law Anna Dalassene, but after her retirement and death, Irene was able to exert increasing influence over her husband Alexios I Komnenos, and became powerful towards the end of his reign. But even so, she could not arrange his successor according to her wishes, which favoured her daughter Anna Komnene over her son John II Komnenos.
Michele Faith Wallace is a black feminist author, cultural critic, and daughter of artist Faith Ringgold. She is best known for her 1979 book Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. Wallace's writings on literature, art, film, and popular culture have been widely published and have made her a leader of African-American intellectuals. She is a Professor of English at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY).
Audrey Lenora Flack was an American visual artist. Her work pioneered the art genre of photorealism and encompasses painting, printmaking, sculpture, and photography.
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.
Sylvia Sleigh was a Welsh-born naturalised American realist painter who lived and worked in New York City. She is known for her role in the feminist art movement and especially for reversing traditional gender roles in her paintings of nude men, often using conventional female poses from historical paintings by male artists like Diego Vélazquez, Titian, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Her most well-known subjects were art critics, feminist artists, and her husband, Lawrence Alloway.
Miriam Schapiro was a Canadian-born artist based in the United States. She was a painter, sculptor, printmaker, and a pioneer of feminist art. She was also considered a leader of the Pattern and Decoration art movement. Schapiro's artwork blurs the line between fine art and craft. She incorporated craft elements into her paintings due to their association with women and femininity. Schapiro's work touches on the issue of feminism and art: especially in the aspect of feminism in relation to abstract art. Schapiro honed in her domesticated craft work and was able to create work that stood amongst the rest of the high art. These works represent Schapiro's identity as an artist working in the center of contemporary abstraction and simultaneously as a feminist being challenged to represent women's "consciousness" through imagery. She often used icons that are associated with women, such as hearts, floral decorations, geometric patterns, and the color pink. In the 1970s she made the hand fan, a typically small woman's object, heroic by painting it six feet by twelve feet. "The fan-shaped canvas, a powerful icon, gave Schapiro the opportunity to experiment … Out of this emerged a surface of textured coloristic complexity and opulence that formed the basis of her new personal style. The kimono, fans, houses, and hearts were the form into which she repeatedly poured her feelings and desires, her anxieties, and hopes".
Athena Tacha, is a multimedia visual artist. She is best known for her work in the fields of environmental public sculpture and conceptual art. She also worked in a wide array of materials including stone, brick, steel, water, plants, and L.E.D. lighting. photography, film, and artists’ books. Tacha's work focused on personal narratives, and often plays with geometry and form.
The Women's Caucus for Art (WCA), founded in 1972, is a non-profit organization based in New York City, which supports women artists, art historians, students, educators, and museum professionals. The WCA holds exhibitions and conferences to promote women artists and their works and recognizes the talents of artists through their annual Lifetime Achievement Award. Since 1975 it has been a United Nations-affiliated non-governmental organization (NGO), which has broadened its influence beyond the United States. Within the WCA are several special interest causes including the Women of Color caucus, Eco-Art Caucus, Jewish Women Artist Network, International Caucus and the Young Women's Caucus. The founding of the WCA is seen as a "great stride" in the feminist art movement.
Joan Semmel is an American feminist painter and professor emeritus in painting. She is best known for her large-scale naturalistic nude self portraits as seen from her perspective looking down.
The Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award was established under the presidency of Lee Ann Miller (1978–80). Joan Mondale, artist and wife of vice-president Walter Mondale, helped to secure approval for a national award honoring women's achievements in the arts, and Jimmy Carter presided over the first Women's Caucus for Art award ceremony in the Oval Office in 1979. The WCA Honor Awards Ceremony has occurred annually most years since then.
The Feminist Art Program (FAP) was a college-level art program for women developed in 1970 by artist Judy Chicago and continued by artists Rita Yokoi, Miriam Schapiro, and others. The FAP began at Fresno State College, as a way to address gender inequities in art education, and the art world in general. In 1971, Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro brought the FAP to the newly formed California Institute of the Arts, leaving Rita Yokoi to run the Fresno FAP until her retirement in 1992. The FAP at California Institute of the Arts was active until 1976. The students in the Feminist Art Program read women writers, studied women artists, and made art about being a woman based on group consciousness-raising sessions. Often, the program was separate from the rest of the art school to allow the women to develop in a greenhouse-like environment and away from discerning critiques. While the separatist ideology has been critiqued as reinforcing gender, the FAP has made a lasting impression on feminist art which can be seen in retrospectives, group exhibitions, and creative re-workings of the original projects.
Mary DuBose Garrard is an American art historian and emerita professor at American University. She is recognized as "one of the founders of feminist art theory" and is particularly known for her work on the Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi.
Moira Roth was an English-born American art historian, feminist art critic, and educator. She was a Trefethen Professor of Art History at Mills College in Oakland, California from 1985 to 2017. She taught at the University of California, San Diego from 1974 to 1985.
Joanna Frueh (1948–2020) was an American artist, writer, and feminist scholar.
Ferris Olin is an American feminist, scholar, art historian, curator, educator and librarian, who founded and directed The Margery Somers Foster Center, part of the Rutgers University Libraries located at the Mabel Smith Douglass Library (MSDL). She is best known for co-founding the Institute for Women and Art, the Miriam Schapiro Archives on Women Artists, The Feminist Art Project, and the Women Artists Archive National Directory with Judith K. Brodsky.
Women Artists News was a feminist magazine produced between 1975 and 1992 in New York City.
Sherry Brody was an American artist and pioneering member of the feminist art movement. Brody is known for her work on the Womanhouse project. Her sculpture, The Dollhouse, is in the Smithsonian Museum of American Art collection.
