May 20
Feminism

 

 

Chief concerns of 70s Feminism:

Sylvia Sleigh.  The Turkish Bath.  1973.
Butler, Cornelia.  WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution.  Los Angeles:
The Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007.

Gain full social and economic equality
Reveal and question society's definition of women's roles
To examine the natural processes of the body long disregarded by western culture
To express (finally) the woman's identity
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yoko Ono. Cut Piece. 1965.
Newhall, Edith. "A Long and Winding Road." ARTnews. October 2000: 162 -165.

 

Performance Art = art where the actions of an individual or a group at a particular place and in a particular time, constitute the work

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Dinner Party

Judy Chicago. The Dinner Party. 1974 - 79.

 

"Meant to end the ongoing cycle of omission in which women were written out of the historical record." - Judy Chicago

 

 

 

 

 

 

Are we there yet?

Marilyn Minter .  Stepping Up . 2005.
http://thinkingaboutart.blogs.com/art/images/marilyn_minter.jpg
In the US in 2006, for every $1 males earn, women earn 77 cents on average
At the present rate of progress, it will take 50 years to close the wage gap nationwide
 

The world's first elected female president was Vigdis Finnbogadottir of Iceland, whose term lasted from 1980 to 1996
Rwanda currently has the largest percentage of women participating in its national legislature with 49%
 
The United States Congress is currently comprised of 16.3% women (the world average is 9%)
In 2006, Nancy Pelosi became the first female Speaker of the House (second in presidential line of succession)
 
Art museums still present only an average of 15% women in curated exhibits, and a mere 4% of museum acquisitions are works by women artist - Guerrilla Girls

 

 

 

 

 

 

Detail of The Dinner Party

Dinner Party setting for Mary Wollstonecraft
Stokstad, Marilyn. Art History. Revised Second ed. Vol. 2. New York: Prentice Hall Inc., and Harry N. Abrams, 2005.

Dinner Party setting for Sojourner Truth
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner
_party/place_settings/sojourner_truth.php

Dinner Party setting for Emily Dickinson
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner
_party/place_settings/emily_dickinson.php
More place settings
Installation art = art that uses sculptural materials and other media to modify a particular space. It is not necessarily confined to a gallery or museum space and often incorporates the viewer into the work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Red Canna

Georgia O'Keefe. Red Canna. c. 1924.
University of Arizona Museum of Art

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dinner Party settings for Virginia Woolf and Georgia O' Keefe
http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~ulrich/femhist/art.shtml
essentialism = the view that, for any specific kind of entity, there is a set of defining characteristics that the entity must possess in order to be recognized as that kind of thing. A classic example is the question of whether a tiger without stripes (an albino) is still a tiger?  The essential properties of a tiger are those without which it is no longer a tiger.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Destruction of the Father

Louise Bourgeois. The Destruction of the Father. 1974.
Preble, Duane, Sarah Preble and Patrick Frank. Artforms. Seventh ed. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2002.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Louise Bourgeois.  Maman as installed at National Gallery of Canada. 2005.

Maman was bought by the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao for $4 million in 2006

 

 

 

 

 

 

Louise Bourgeois. Filette (Little Girl) (Sweeter Version) . 1968.
Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, and Society. Third edition. New York: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 2002.

Robert Mapplethorpe. Portrait of Louise Bourgeois. 1982.
Warr, Tracey. The Artist's Body. London: Phaidon Press Ltd., 2000.