Editor | Cindy Nemser |
---|---|
Categories | Feminist art |
Frequency | Quarterly |
Format | |
Circulation | 8,000 |
Publisher | Feminist Art Journal, Inc. |
Founder | Cindy Nemser |
Founded | April 1972 |
Final issue | 1977 |
Country | United States |
Based in | Brooklyn, New York |
Language | English |
ISSN | 0300-7014 |
OCLC | 474102725 |
The Feminist Art Journal was an American magazine, published quarterly from 1972 to 1977. It was the first stable, widely read journal covering feminist art. [1] By the time the final publication was produced, The Feminist Art Journal had a circulation of eight thousand copies, and ten thousand copies of the last edition were printed. [2]
Cindy Nemser, Patricia Mainardi, and Irene Moss, the three founding members of the Feminist Art Journal all formerly staffed the magazine Women and Art, a publication funded by the Redstocking Artists. That magazine had originally intended to cover topics surrounding the American feminist art movement, but only one issue was ever published due to internal discord. [3] [4] That magazine's successor was The Feminist Art Journal, which was founded in Brooklyn in 1972. [4]
The journal had a three-part mission:
1) To be the voice of women artists in the art world;
2) To improve the status of all women artists; and
3) To expose sexist exploitation and discrimination. [5]
In the same year the magazine was founded, Cindy Nemser became the sole editor of the journal, and, in 1975, her husband joined her as a co-editor. [6] The majority of the articles written in The Feminist Art Journal were all authored by women, however. Some of the prominent contributors included Faith Ringgold, Marcia Tucker, Howardena Pindell, and Faith Bromberg. [2] [7]
In its five-year run, The Feminist Art Journal published interviews with breakthrough female artists, and included creative writing pieces and art historical essays to keep the content consistently diverse. Featured artists worked in all mediums, and over twenty historical profiles of female figures in art were published. The articles included both a positive modern review of the artist's work, as well as a biographical section which included why the artist was looked over. [3]
The Feminist Art Journal was also used as a space where gender discrimination within the art world was called out. In the first two editions the magazine, a column called "Male Chauvinist Exposé" was featured in the journal. [2] Both individual people and institutions, ranging from newspapers, to museums, to universities were denounced for sexist language and actions. [3]
Over time, the publication's exposés became decreased as the journal focused more on living female artists, regularly conducting interviews that covered the artist's childhood, career, education, influences, gender role/career balance, and even any relationship with a male artist. [3]
In 1975, in an attempt to appeal to a larger readership, Cindy Nemser changed the format of the journal from an ad-free tabloid style to an ad-inclusive journal. This change ultimately did not help the journal survive. The magazine folded in 1977 due to financial strain..
In an interview, Patricia Mainardi claimed that journals like The Feminist Art Journal saw their demise because they had reached their goals. More mainstream publications were pressured into paying attention to female artists after the gained success of publications like The Feminist Art Journal, so journals that were specifically devoted to female artists became devalued. [6]
Redstockings, also known as Redstockings of the Women's Liberation Movement, is a radical feminist nonprofit that was founded in January 1969 in New York City, whose goal is "To Defend and Advance the Women's Liberation Agenda". The group's name is derived from bluestocking, a term used to disparage feminist intellectuals of earlier centuries, and red, for its association with the revolutionary left.
Faith Wilding is a Paraguayan American multidisciplinary artist - which includes but is not limited to: watercolor, performance art, writing, crocheting, knitting, weaving, and digital art. She is also an author, educator, and activist widely known for her contribution to the progressive development of feminist art. She also fights for ecofeminism, genetics, cyberfeminism, and reproductive rights. Wilding is Professor Emerita of performance art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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..
Feminist art is a category of art associated with the late 1960s and 1970s feminist movement. Feminist art highlights the societal and political differences women experience within their lives. The hopeful gain from this form of art is to bring a positive and understanding change to the world, in hope to lead 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 towards expanding the definition of art through the incorporation of new media and a new perspective.
SOHO20 Artists, Inc., known as SOHO20 Gallery, was founded in 1973 by a group of women artists intent on achieving professional excellence in an industry where there was a gross lack of opportunities for women to succeed. SOHO20 was one of the first galleries in Manhattan to showcase the work of an all-woman membership and most of the members joined the organization as emerging artists. These artists were provided with exhibition opportunities that they could not find elsewhere.
"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 using 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.
Lila Katzen, born Lila Pell, was an American sculptor of fluid, large-scale metal abstractions.
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.
Irene Peslikis was an American feminist artist, activist, and educator. She was one of the early founders and organizers in the women's art movement, especially on the east coast.
Cindy Heller Nemser was an American art historian and writer. Founder and editor of the Feminist Art Journal, she was an activist and prominent figure in the feminist art movement and was best known for her writing on the work of women artists such as Eva Hesse, Alice Neel, and Louise Nevelson.
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.
June Druiett Blum was a multimedia American artist who produced paintings, sculptures, prints, light shows, happenings, jewelry, art books, pottery, conceptual documentations, and drawings. She was also a feminist curator and activist who worked to advance the women's movement and increase visibility for women artists.
Women Artists in Revolution (WAR) was a New York City-based collective of American women artists and activists that formed in 1969. They seceded from the male-dominated Art Workers' Coalition (AWC), prompted by the Whitney Museum of American Art's 1969 Annual, which included only eight women out of the 143 featured artists shown.
Patricia "Pat" Mainardi is a leading authority on nineteenth-century European art and European and American modernism, and a pioneering professor of women's studies.
Marjorie Kramer is a figurative painter of al fresco landscapes and feminist self-portraits.
Norma Broude is an American art historian and scholar of feminism and 19th-century French and Italian painting. She is also a Professor Emerita of art history from American University. Broude, with Mary Garrard, is an early leader of the American feminist movement and both have redefined feminist art theory.
We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 is an exhibition held at the Brooklyn Museum of Art from April 21, 2017, through September 17, 2017. The exhibition surveys the last twenty years of black female art and presents more than forty artists and activists who have decided to dedicate their work to the fight against racism, sexism, homophobia, and class injustice. It is not organized chronologically or by authorship, but thematically.
The Conference of Women in the Visual Arts was an event held on April 20, 1972, through 22, 1972 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC. The conference was organized by Cynthia Bickley, Mary Beth Edelson, Barbara Frank, Enid Sanford, Susan Sollins, Josephine Withers, and Yvonne Wulff. The impetus behind the conference was anger over the complete lack of women represented at the Corcoran Biennial the previous year, 1971. The three day conference consisted of lectures and panels of women artists and art historians. It was attended by over 300 female artists, art historians, critics and museum curators.
Judith Kapstein Brodsky is an American artist, curator, and author known for her contributions to feminist discourse in the arts. She received her B.A. from Harvard University where she majored in Art History, and an M.F.A. from Tyler School of Art at Temple University. She is Professor Emerita in the Department of Visual Arts at Rutgers, State University of New Jersey. A printmaker herself, Brodsky is founding Director of the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper in 1996, later renamed the Brodsky Center in her honor in September 2006, and which later joined the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) in 2018. She was also co-founder, with Ferris Olin, of the Center for Women in the Arts and Humanities at Rutgers University in 2006. She was the first artist appointed as president of the Women's Caucus for Art, an active Affiliated Society of the College Art Association.