Judy Chicago is an American feminist artist, art educator, and writer known for her large collaborative art installation pieces about birth and creation images, which examine the role of women in history and culture. During the 1970s, Chicago founded the first feminist art program in the United States at California State University, Fresno which acted as a catalyst for feminist art and art education during the 1970s. Her inclusion in hundreds of publications in various areas of the world showcases her influence in the worldwide art community. Additionally, many of her books have been published in other countries, making her work more accessible to international readers. Chicago's work incorporates a variety of artistic skills, such as needlework, counterbalanced with skills such as welding and pyrotechnics. Chicago's most well known work is The Dinner Party, which is permanently installed in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. The Dinner Party celebrates the accomplishments of women throughout history and is widely regarded as the first epic feminist artwork. Other notable art projects by Chicago include International Honor Quilt, Birth Project, Powerplay, and The Holocaust Project. She is represented by Jessica Silverman gallery.
Katherine Murray Millett was an American feminist writer, educator, artist, and activist. She attended the University of Oxford and was the first American woman to be awarded a degree with first-class honors after studying at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She has been described as "a seminal influence on second-wave feminism", and is best known for her book Sexual Politics (1970), which was based on her doctoral dissertation at Columbia University. Journalist Liza Featherstone attributes the attainment of previously unimaginable "legal abortion, greater professional equality between the sexes, and a sexual freedom" in part to Millett's efforts.
Alice Neel was an American visual artist, who was known for her portraits depicting friends, family, lovers, poets, artists, and strangers. Her career spanned from the 1920s to 1980s. Her paintings have an expressionistic use of line and color, psychological acumen, and emotional intensity. She pursued a career as a figurative painter during a period when abstraction was favored, and she did not begin to gain critical praise for her work until the 1960s.
The Woman's Building was a non-profit arts and education center located in Los Angeles, California. The Woman's Building focused on feminist art and served as a venue for the women's movement and was spearheaded by artist Judy Chicago, graphic designer Sheila Levrant de Bretteville and art historian Arlene Raven. The center was open from 1973 until 1991. During its existence, the Los Angeles Times called the Woman's Building a "feminist mecca."
Sexual Politics is the debut book by American writer and activist Kate Millett, based on her PhD dissertation at Columbia University. It was published in 1970 by Doubleday. It is regarded as a classic of feminism and one of radical feminism's key texts, a formative piece in shaping the intentions of the second-wave feminist movement. In Sexual Politics, an explicit focus is placed on the omnipresence of male dominance throughout prominent 20th century art and literature. According to Millett, western literature reflects patriarchal constructions and the heteronormativity of society. She argues that men have established power over women, but that this power is the result of social constructs rather than innate or biological qualities.
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..
Alma Routsong was an American novelist best known for her lesbian fiction, published under the pen name Isabel Miller.
Noel Phyllis Birkby was an American architect, feminist, filmmaker, teacher, and founder of the Women's School of Planning and Architecture.
Dolores Alexander was a lesbian feminist, writer, and reporter. Alexander was the only executive director of the National Organization for Women (NOW) to have resigned because of the homophobic beliefs in the early inception of NOW. She co-opened the feminist restaurant "Mother Courage" with Jill Ward. Until her death, in 2008, she continued to believe in the need for the women's rights movement in contemporary times, stating that "It's bigotry, and I don't know if you can eliminate it".
The tART Collective was an intersectional feminist and anti-racist art collective in New York City. Founded in 2004 and was running until January 2020 when the group announced its decision to end tART Collective, the group was the longest-running feminist art collective in the city. This group was created to help show support towards feminist content artists. During the years that tART was active, membership rose to two dozen members locally and internationally, and the collective served as a post-graduate plan for artists.
The feminist art movement refers to the efforts and accomplishments of feminists internationally to produce art that reflects women's lives and experiences, as well as to change the foundation for the production and perception of contemporary art. It also sought to bring more visibility to women within art history and art practice. By the way it is expressed to visualize the inner thoughts and objectives of the feminist movement to show to everyone and give meaning in the art. It helps construct the role to those who continue to undermine the mainstream narrative of the art world. Corresponding with general developments within feminism, and often including such self-organizing tactics as the consciousness-raising group, the movement began in the 1960s and flourished throughout the 1970s as an outgrowth of the so-called second wave of feminism. It has been called "the most influential international movement of any during the postwar period."
Go! Push Pops, formally named The Push Pop Collective is a queer, transnational, radical feminist art collective under the direction of Elisa Garcia de la Huerta and Katie Cercone.
Swati Khurana is a writer and contemporary artist of Indian-American origin. She was born in New Delhi, India in 1975. She emigrated to New York in 1977, where she lives and works. She graduated from Poughkeepsie Day School in 1993. She holds a B.A. in history from Columbia University, M.A. in Studio Art and Art Criticism from New York University, and an MFA in creative writing at Hunter College.
Womyn's land is an intentional community organised by lesbian separatists to establish counter-cultural, women-centred space, without the presence of men. These lands were the result of a social movement of the same name that developed in the 1970s in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and western Europe. Many still exist today. Womyn's land-based communities and residents are loosely networked through social media; print publications such as newsletters; Maize: A Lesbian Country Magazine; Lesbian Natural Resources, a not-for-profit organisation that offers grants and resources; and regional and local gatherings.
Éditions des Femmes is a French feminist publishing house that was launched in 1972, mainly by women of the collective Psychoanalysis and Politics led by Antoinette Fouque, with other activists of the MLF, and funded by the patron Sylvina Boissonnas. They offer works written by women, women focused issues related to human rights and women's empowerment, women's creativity and reflection, and also produce audio books.
Stefanie Claire Zadravec is an American playwright. Her full-length plays include Tiny Houses, Colony Collapse, The Electric Baby, Honey Brown Eyes, and Save Me. She has won numerous awards including the Helen Merrill Emerging Playwright Award, Francesca Primus Prize, and the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding New Play. She is a resident playwright at New Dramatists.
Caroline Morgan Clowes was a Hudson River School painter who, at a time when that particular style was declining in popularity, earned accolades by depicting farm animals, frequently cattle, drawn from the vicinity of the home of the extended family that had adopted her, Heartsease, in LaGrange, Dutchess County, New York.
The Women's Interart Center was a New York City–based multidisciplinary arts organization conceived as an artists' collective in 1969 and formally delineated in 1970 under the auspices of Women Artists in Revolution (WAR) and Feminists in the Arts. In 1971, it found a permanent home on Manhattan's far West Side. A trailblazing women's alternative space, the Center provided exhibition and performance venues, workshops, and training courses for artists in a wide range of media for over four decades, with a focus on developing women's skills, bringing their work to the public, and fostering innovation. Prominent visual artists exhibited at the Interart Gallery, which in 1976 mounted the first ever festival of black women's film. The Interart Theatre—the Center's off-off-Broadway stage—and its productions won numerous honors. The Center hosted the Women's Video Festival for several years and ran a video program responsible for a variety of notable works.
The Elverhoj Art Colony, originally known as the Elverhoj Colony of Artists and Craftsmen, was founded in 1912 in Milton-on-Hudson, New York, by Danish-American artists A. H. Andersen and Johannes Morton. The name is an Anglization of the Danish word Elverhøj, which is the title of a fairytale by Hans Christian Andersen and of the first Danish national play, commissioned by King Frederick VI in 1828.
