Vernita Nemec (born 1942 in Painesville, Ohio), also known by the performance name Vernita N'Cognita, is a visual and performance artist, curator, and arts activist based in New York City. She earned her BFA at Ohio University in 1964 and has resided in New York City since 1965. [1] She is also known for her soft stuffed sculpture, [2] collages, [3] [4] artist's books, [5] photographs, and installations. [6] [7] [8] Nemec adopted the pseudonym "N'Cognita," a pun on incognito, as a way to honor artists who have not become well-known. [6]
Nemec began her multifaceted career in art making, curating, and arts activism in 1969, at MUSEUM: A Project for Living Artists. [9] That year, with Carolyn Mazzello, [10] she originated and contributed to X-12, one of the first exhibitions to feature only women artists. [11] [10] [12] In the early 1970s, she was a member of Art Workers Coalition and Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), along with Nancy Spero, Leon Golub, Cindy Nemser, and Lucy Lippard. She also wrote for the feminist art periodical, Womanart. [13] Nemec worked with other arts activist groups, including Art Against Apartheid and Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D). [14]
Nemec became an artist-member of SOHO 20 Gallery in 1975. [15] For her second solo show at SOHO 20, Nemec painted the gallery's 50-foot wall orange and covered it with orange paper, pencil and xerox self-portraits, stuffed dolls with her own face, and fabric silhouettes, as “a recording of the artist’s life (real or imaginary) and an exercise in self-searching." [16]
In 1978, Nemec, Barnaby Ruhe, and Bill Rabinovitch organized the Whitney Counterweight, an exhibition that protested the elitism of the Whitney Biennial. As she explained to Grace Glueck of the New York Times, "We've felt from the beginning that the idea of the Whitney Biennial as an overview of American art was a very limited concept." [17]
In subsequent years, Nemec shifted her activism to helping artists. From 1989 to 1999, she was President and part-time Executive Director of Artists Talk On Art. [18] In 1999, she became the part-time director of Viridian Artists, [1] an artist-owned gallery in the Chelsea district of New York City. From 1994 to 2011, she organized 19 exhibitions of Art from Detritus around the United States; they consisted of environmental art made from recycled materials. [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [4] [24] Nemec's own visual art includes detritus works, for which she has been labeled an "environmental artist".
Nemec's performance work began with film backgrounds for the experimental filmmaker Phill Niblock. [25] [26] Her performances include audio projects for Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine, work with Linda Montano, [27] gallery appearances, [28] [29] guerrilla performances, [6] and appearances in large venues, such as Judson Church, as part of a series of programs curated by Movement Research. [30] [31] [32]
Nemec was the last woman painted by the feminist artist Sylvia Sleigh in a series of 36-inch portraits, completed between 1976 and 2007, which feature women artists and writers. [33]
Helen Frankenthaler was an American abstract expressionist painter. She was a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work for over six decades, she spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work. Frankenthaler began exhibiting her large-scale abstract expressionist paintings in contemporary museums and galleries in the early 1950s. She was included in the 1964 Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition curated by Clement Greenberg that introduced a newer generation of abstract painting that came to be known as color field. Born in Manhattan, she was influenced by Greenberg, Hans Hofmann, and Jackson Pollock's paintings. Her work has been the subject of several retrospective exhibitions, including a 1989 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and been exhibited worldwide since the 1950s. In 2001, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
Carolee Schneemann was an American visual experimental artist, known for her multi-media works on the body, narrative, sexuality and gender. She received a B.A. in poetry and philosophy from Bard College and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois. Originally a painter in the Abstract Expressionist tradition, Schneeman was uninterested in the masculine heroism of New York painters of the time and turned to performance-based work, primarily characterized by research into visual traditions, taboos, and the body of the individual in relation to social bodies. Although renowned for her work in performance and other media, Schneemann began her career as a painter, saying: "I'm a painter. I'm still a painter and I will die a painter. Everything that I have developed has to do with extending visual principles off the canvas." Her works have been shown at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the London National Film Theatre, and many other venues.
Nancy Graves was an American sculptor, painter, printmaker, and sometime filmmaker known for her focus on natural phenomena like camels or maps of the Moon. Her works are included in many public collections, including those of the National Gallery of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Gallery of Australia (Canberra), the Des Moines Art Center, Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), and the Museum of Fine Arts. When Graves was just 29, she was given a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. At the time she was the youngest artist, and fifth woman to achieve this honor.
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.
Deborah Kay Butterfield is an American sculptor. Along with her artist-husband John Buck, she divides her time between a farm in Bozeman, Montana, and studio space in Hawaii. She is known for her sculptures of horses made from found objects, like metal, and especially pieces of wood.
Florine Stettheimer was an American modernist painter, feminist, theatrical designer, poet, and salonnière.
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..
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.
Rosalyn Drexler is an American visual artist, novelist, Obie Award-winning playwright, and Emmy Award-winning screenwriter, and former professional wrestler. Although she has had a polymathic career, Drexler is perhaps best known for her pop art paintings and as the author of the novelization of the film Rocky, under the pseudonym Julia Sorel. Drexler currently lives and works in New York City, New York.
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.
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.
Martha Wilson is an American feminist performance artist and the founding director of Franklin Furnace Archive art organization. Over the past four decades she has developed and "created innovative photographic and video works that explore her female subjectivity through role-playing, costume transformation, and 'invasions' of other peoples personas". She is a recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and an Obie Award and a Bessie Award for commitment to artists’ freedom of expression. She is represented by P•P•O•W gallery in New York City.
Dellamarie Parrilli is an American painter and visual artist and record producer who is noted for her evolving, self-taught abstract style that encompasses numerous genres and media. Parrilli's art has been in gallery exhibitions in Europe and the United States, particularly in Chicago and New York.
Nicole Eisenman is a French-born American artist known for her oil paintings and sculptures. She has been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship (1996), the Carnegie Prize (2013), and has thrice been included in the Whitney Biennial. On September 29, 2015, she won a MacArthur Fellowship award for "restoring the representation of the human form a cultural significance that had waned during the ascendancy of abstraction in the 20th century."
The Sister Chapel (1974–1978) is a visual arts installation, conceived by Ilise Greenstein and created as a collaboration by thirteen women artists during the feminist art movement. Before its completion, the critic and curator Lawrence Alloway recognized its potential to be "a notable contribution to the long-awaited legible iconography of women in political terms." The Sister Chapel is on permanent display at the Center for Art and Social Engagement, an initiative of the Rowan University Art Gallery in Glassboro, New Jersey.
Judith Bernstein is a New York artist best known for her phallic drawings and paintings. Bernstein uses her art as a vehicle for her outspoken feminist and anti-war activism, provocatively drawing psychological links between the two. Her best-known work features her iconic motif of an anthropomorphized screw, which has become the basis for a number of allegories and visual puns. During the beginning of the Feminist Art Movement, Bernstein was a founding member of the all-women's cooperative A.I.R. Gallery in New York.
Shirley Gorelick was an American figurative painter, printmaker, and sculptor. She "rejected both the extremes of nonobjectivity and photographic exactitude," choosing instead to use a range of sources that included photographs, live models, and her own sculpted life studies.
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 (later the Whitney Biennial), which included only eight women out of the 143 featured artists shown.
Sharon Wybrants is an American painter, performance artist, and educator.
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.