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, The Birth Project, Powerplay, and The Holocaust Project. She is represented by Jessica Silverman gallery and Salon 94 gallery.
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.
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.
Arlene Raven was a feminist art historian, author, critic, educator, and curator. Raven was a co-founder of numerous feminist art organizations in Los Angeles in the 1970s.
Rachel Rosenthal was a French-born interdisciplinary and performance artist, teacher, actress, and animal rights activist based in Los Angeles.
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..
Linda Levi is an American artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Peter Ford Young is an American painter. He is primarily known for his abstract paintings that have been widely exhibited in the United States and in Europe since the 1960s. His work is associated with Minimal Art, Post-minimalism, and Lyrical Abstraction. Young has participated in more than a hundred group exhibitions and he has had more than forty solo exhibitions in important contemporary art galleries throughout his career. He currently lives in Bisbee, Arizona.
Ed Moses was an American artist based in Los Angeles and a central figure of postwar West Coast art.
Mira Schor is an American artist, writer, editor, and educator, known for her contributions to critical discourse on the status of painting in contemporary art and culture as well as to feminist art history and criticism.
Maxwell Hendler is an American painter. In 1975, he became the first contemporary artist to have pictures in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Joyce Aiken is an American feminist art historian, artist, and educator. Aiken taught the subject for over 20 years at California State University, Fresno, and assisted her students in opening a feminist art gallery. This helped put Fresno, California on the map as a key place for the feminist art movement. Most recently, she served as the director of the Fresno Arts Council.
Nancy Buchanan is a Los Angeles-based artist best known for her work in installation, performance, and video art. She played a central role in the feminist art movement in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Her work has been exhibited widely and is collected by major museums including the Museum of Modern Art and the Centre Pompidou.
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.
Merion Estes is a Los Angeles-based painter. She earned a B.F.A. at the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque, and an M.F.A. at the University of Colorado, in Boulder. Estes was raised in San Diego from the age of four. She moved to Los Angeles in 1972 and first showed her work at the Woman's Building in Los Angeles. As a founding member of Grandview 1 & 2, she was involved in the beginnings of Los Angeles feminist art organizations including Womanspace, and the feminist arts group "Double X," along with artists Judy Chicago, Nancy Buchanan, Faith Wilding, and Nancy Youdelman. In 2014, Un-Natural, which was shown at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in Los Angeles and included Estes' work, was named one of the best shows in a non-profit institution in the United States by the International Association of Art Critics.
Karen LeCocq is an American artist. She is a internationally-known sculptor whose work combines organic materials and found objects.
Orly Cogan is an Israeli-American fiber artist who works with and combines multiple mediums. She is best known for crafting hand stitched embroidered figures on top of previously embroidered vintage fabrics.
Suzanne Jackson is an American visual artist, gallery owner, poet, dancer, educator, and set designer; with a career spanning five decades. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world. Since the late 1960s, Jackson has dedicated her life to studio art with additional participation in theatre, teaching, arts administration, community life, and social activism. Jackson's oeuvre includes poetry, dance, theater, costume design, paintings, prints, and drawings.
Nancy Genn is an American artist living and working in Berkeley, California known for works in a variety of media, including paintings, bronze sculpture, printmaking, and handmade paper rooted in the Japanese washi paper making tradition. Her work explores geometric abstraction, non-objective form, and calligraphic mark making, and features light, landscape, water, and architecture motifs. She is influenced by her extensive travels, and Asian craft, aesthetics and spiritual traditions.
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.
