Judy Chicago

Judy Chicago is an American feminist artist, her work scrutinizes the culture and roles of women in history.Her most famous work is "The Dinner Party" which is at the brooklyn museum in New York

Judy Chicago

The Dinner Party

The dinner party is at a triangular table which has 39 place settings, each setting represents a historical famous woman. 

Alice Neel

Alice Neel was an American artist who grew up in Pennsylvania and graduated from the Philadelphia School of Design for Women in 1925. She was known for her paintings which were considered “confrontational” and “brutally honest.” In her artwork, Neel points out the flaws most people try to conceal to stimulate emotion. She emphasizes the ideal image everyone has in their head about what they should look like, or more specifically the image that a man conjures in his head when thinking about a nude woman. Her artwork stresses that there is no ideal body type and we must learn to accept the way we look, imperfections and all.

In Self-Portait, Neel paints a self portrait in a very vulnerable state, posing nude for her audience. She allows the viewers to see all that she is, and she is not ashamed to show the reality of her 84-year-old body.

In Nancy and Olivia, Neel shoots down the stereotype of woman in society. The mother, carrying her child in her arms, looks alarmed and her eyes show that she is quite frightened. The stereotype that the woman is the nurturer and the caretaker suggests that all women are meant to be mothers, and they are only good for the role of a mother and nothing more.

Rebecca Gomperts

Rebecca Gomperts is a Dutch artist, human rights activist and physician. She is widely known for the creation of a non-profit organization called Women on Waves; an organization dedicated to the  provision of safe, professional and legal non-surgical abortion services to women in countries with laws that prevent them from terminating unwanted pregnancies.

The medical abortions (abortions done through the use of drugs or combination tablets as far as the 9th week of pregnancy) are performed by having the women in respective countries board a ship which is then sailed out to high seas in order to enable Dutch laws be in effect aboard the ship -- thus allowing them to carry out the medical abortion.

In addition to providing these services, she also aims to shed light on the complications that illegal abortions can cause, as well as offer reproductive counseling and administer contraceptives.

Say Goodbye To Coat Hangers. N.d. Womenonwaves.org. Web. 30 Jan. 2015. <http://www.womenonwaves.org/image/2012/6/15/coathangers.png%28mediaclass-base-page-main.d2c518cc99acd7f6b176d3cced63a653791dedb3%29.jpg>.

Abortion Pills A Gift From God. N.d. Womenonwaves.org. Web. 30 Jan. 2015. <http://www.womenonwaves.org/image/2012/4/4/misoprostol_pills.jpg%28mediaclass-base-page-main.d2c518cc99acd7f6b176d3cced63a653791dedb3%29.jpg>.

Immaculate Contraception. N.d. Womenonwaves.org. Web. 30 Jan. 2015. <http://www.womenonwaves.org/image/2012/4/4/misoprostol_conception.jpg%28mediaclass-base-media-preview.d2c518cc99acd7f6b176d3cced63a653791dedb3%29.jpg>.

"Rebecca Gomperts." Www.Womenonwaves.org. Web. 31 Jan. 2015. <http://www.womenonwaves.org.ipaddress.com/>.
"Rebecca Gomperts." Womenonweb.org. Web. 31 Jan. 2015. <http://womenonweb.org.hypestat.com/>.

Zinaida Serebriakova

Was a Russian painter who studied classical art. She was inspired by Venetsianov,Tintoretto, Poussin, Jordaens and Rubens. An exhibition of work can be found in Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev. Her prime years was from 1914–1917, during which she would depict the life in rural Russia.

Harvest 1915

House of cards 1919

Georgia O' Keefe

Georgia O' Keefe was an American artist who was born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin in 1887. She was very passionate about art and attended many different schools to study art- such as New York University, The University of Virginia and Columbia University. Her vision was to focus more on images that were important to her, rather than what others expected art to be about. She formed her art through her own life experiences and created images of objects that surrounded her everyday life. While art was constantly changing, and painters normally painted several types of images, Georgia O' Keefe mostly stayed true to drawing the same images throughout her entire life; these drawings consisted of flowers, bones and landscapes that were found in close distances to her. She had an impact on Americans because she was able to show her audience that although she draws mostly the same pictures, she was able to depict some differences. She once quoted, "If I could paint the flower exactly as I see it no one would see what I see because I would paint it small like the flower is small. So I said to myself - I'll paint what I see - what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it - I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.” 

The picture above was drawn by Georgia O' Keefe, called Red Canna. This is a close up drawing of the real flower she had observed and she paints it in such a way where she is able to add the specific colors and textures to make it in to the real life form she had seen herself. 

The pictures she would draw would be shown to develop over time, and show the audience where the differences are seen, rather than always creating brand new paintings. She would take a drawing she had previously worked on and make some additions to it, maybe by giving it more color or editing it based on a new life experience she had encountered. By the end of her career, Georgia had gathered several images; those that were based off one another, as well as those that were just a series. Because she had moved from place to place and seen these images in a different way, she always had an imagination to build on her drawings.

Rinko Kawauchi posted by Naixuan Bian

Dania Saleh

Art and Women

I consider myself to be a Muslim-Arab American woman and I uphold pride in representing myself by wearing the hijab (Islamic headscarf). It can be rather frustrating to get frequent stares and receive odd questions like “Do you take a shower with that thing on?” There is also an endless list of preconceived notions that Westerners have towards Muslim women who wear the hijab. This consists of us being “oppressed”, we are forced to wear the headscarf, we don’t have the same rights as men, or the best stereotype of all time is that we are not independent. These falsified statements and the medias portrayal of Muslims have caused an up rise of Islamophobia in the United States. 

Many Muslim women have proven our society wrong by working as doctors, lawyers, social workers, authors, artists etc. An artist that sparked my attention is Sara Foryame. She is a “female, Muslim, contemporary artist exploring the religion Islam branching out to the media portrayal in particular focus to Muslim women, gender identity, cultural and social influences world wide and transculturalism and urbanism in the Middle East.” One of her artworks consists of a 15 seconds video of  scarves placed into plastic bags that is shaken up, thrown around and squeezed by a person’s hands wearing pink dishwashing gloves. Sara explains this specific artwork by saying:

The cloth is assigned political and cultural contexts but what we are looking at, at the end of the day is a piece of cloth, threaded and woven together into a form. The project explores how the media sculpts, prods and squeezes the depiction of Muslim women and their scarf. I remove the woman from the image, making no room for assumptions, and ask the viewer what does the scarf mean now? The media has killed the Muslim Woman, her dreams, and her accomplishments and left the anchored scarf for autopsy. 

This is the link to her blog and the 15 seconds video 

http://www.frozenvanity.com/#!death-of-a-muslim-woman/c1b33

Martha Rosler: Political Art

Martha Rosler's art addresses the ignorance of modern society and it's impact on the world. The women's illusion of how the world operates is completely different from reality. It shows how our society manages their daily life with technology while children are trying to keep their families together. The painting reveals how the world functions and depicts their uninformed attitude towards the world.

Kara Walker by Malwina Maczka

Kara Walker was born in Stockton, California on November 26, 1969. She went to the Rhode Island School of Design. 

The artwork that made her famous and kickstarted her career was "Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart." 

Here are some other murals she worked on, all in the style of black sillhouettes against a white wall

Ana Mendieta

Art was always dominated by males for as long as art has been around, however there were always an enormous amount of females trying to destroy that male dominance. One of these artists was Ana Mendieta. She was from Cuba and was a strong believer in feminism and that was shown in her artwork of the "Silueta series" which took place from 1973-1980. These photographs were some originals of Ana's personal body which makes the statement she was trying to deliver stronger, and others were objects in shape of the body. She even went to the extreme measures of incorporating blood into her art work as a sign of the pain that was being felt at the time.



"There's a devil inside me"

Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger has been identified as an American conceptual artist. Her work is rather famous for being depicted in black and white. They are usually constructed with the ideals of feminism and consumerism in mind. Kruger's publications indicated her opinions on sex, feminism, religion, stereotypes, power, etc. This of course was not the social norm for her era; thus allowing her to influence the expansion of the feminism movement.  

This photograph blatantly incorporates the feminist movement. The little girl in the picture is being shown by the older female that they do not need anyone to be their hero. They are their own heroes.

Her imagery in this photograph deals with body issues in consumerism. 

Back to Baroque Times

Artemisia Gentileschi

Autoritratto in veste di Pittura (1638-39)

       My assignment originally consisted of finding a female contemporary artist that had impacted society and had addressed some type of social or cultural issue. As much as I wanted to correctly do the assignment, temptation had lured me in another direction. I have always had quite an admiration and an interest for Baroque Art. The tension, the drama, the complexity, and the obscurity, has always drawn my attention. Caravaggio, Vermeer, Velazquez, have been a few of my favorite, but the one artist that I love the most and had left an impression on me goes by the name of Artemisia Gentileschi. Artemisia Gentileschi was not only a famous Italian Baroque artist, but was also a female. In my opinion she is one of the first female artists that paved the road for others to follow. In a time of patriarchy and misogyny, Artemisia was capable of becoming the first woman member of the Accademia di Arte del Disegno in Florence. 

           

          Without any support or sponsorship, Artemisia was still able to disprove many men and critics wrong. She indeed became one of the most famous painters in the seventeenth century despite the hardships and discrimination she had to go through because she was a woman. Many of her emotions and frustrations reflected through her art. Painting of victims, suicides, and suffering women from myth and bible stories were displayed in her paintings. Although Artemisia was a victim of rape from her own Art tutor, she did not let this stop her. She fought through a trial to regain her dignity and restore her future. My small summary does no justice to capture the real essence of Artemisia, but all I can say is that this women was simply incredible and was able to create masterpieces that no other man could replicate. 

Artemisia Gentileschi

Artemisia Gentileschi was an Italian Baroque painter who, although overlooked as an artist because of her gender, continually produced works of art depicting powerful mythical women. Gentileschi's work was as equally impressive as her male contemporaries' but the public could not accept that a young woman could have such talent in painting. This led to accusations against her of receiving help from her famous artistic father. All of the work is undoubtedly hers as she focuses on illustrating the importance of the unity of women while her father painted mostly in a Mannerist style. Long after, Artemisia was commended for her detailed work and was the first woman to be admitted into the Accademia di Arte del Disegno in Florence, Italy's art capital during the Baroque period.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Frida Kahlo

I believe Frida Kahlo's work critically addressed a cultural and social issue. During her life, she lived under her husband's shadow because he was a famous artist in Mexico. After her death, her work became famous and known. The issue that Frida helped tackle was the issue of equality of women in art. She was a great artist but even so, by being a woman she was still overshadowed by her famous husband. I believe she helped pave the way for other female artists. Frida empowered many women to believe their art could be recognized in a world predominantly dominated by male artists.

Broken Column Painting, 1944.

When we hear the word “feminist,” what do we think of? A common image that comes to mind is a woman, strong-willed and fighting for her rights–like this one:

There’s nothing wrong with that image, for she most certainly is a feminist. There’s just an underlying assumption that is often, but not always, true.While women have accomplished some amazing feats on their own, there can be no question that men have a vital role to fill in the feminist movement. We have to move past the thinking that dictates women should fill the submissive role, live to be a housewife, and let the man be the breadwinner. Certainly women can choose that role, but they should never feel like they have to because they can’t do anything else.

WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution

Edited by Cornelia Butler and Lisa Gabrielle Mark

There had never been art like the art produced by women artists in the 1970s—and there has never been a book with the ambition and scope of this one about that groundbreaking era. WACK! documents and illustrates the impact of the feminist revolution on art made between 1965 and 1980, featuring pioneering and influential works by artists who came of age during that period—Chantal Akerman, Lynda Benglis, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Valie Export, Mary Heilmann, Sanja Iveković, Ana Mendieta, Annette Messager, and others—as well as important works made in those years by artists whose whose careers were already well established, including Louise Bourgeois, Judy Chicago, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Lucy Lippard, Alice Neel, and Yoko Ono.

The art surveyed in WACK! includes work by more than 120 artists, in all media—from painting and sculpture to photography, film, installation, and video—arranged not by chronology but by theme: Abstraction, "Autophotography," Body as Medium, Family Stories, Gender Performance, Knowledge as Power, Making Art History, and others. WACK!, which accompanies the first international museum exhibition to showcase feminist art from this revolutionary era, contains more than 400 color images. Highlights include the figurative paintings of Joan Semmel; the performance and film collaborations of Sally Potter and Rose English; the untitled film stills of Cindy Sherman; and the large-scale, craft-based sculptures of Magdalena Abakanowicz.

Written entries on each artist offer key biographical and descriptive information and accompanying essays by leading critics, art historians, and scholars offer new perspectives on feminist art practice. The topics—including the relationship between American and European feminism, feminism and New York abstraction, and mapping a global feminism—provide a broad social context for the artworks themselves.WACK! is both a definitive visual record and a long-awaited history of one of the most important artistic movements of the twentieth century.

-In my opinion, this article represents a cultural movement in history. It expresses women empowerment through art using media. This image is not a collage of just diverse naked women, it is an art of movement in history in relation to race, era, and progress. 

Marina Abramovic

Marina Abramovic has been an influential artist in performance art since the 1970's. She is Serbian and based in New York City. She was born in 1946. 

One of her most powerful pieces was Rhythm 0. This performance piece was 6 hours in 1974 in Naples. This let the audience interact with her. 72 items were placed on a table and the audience could do as they please with her and the objects. In an interview with Marina, 40 years later, she describes how terrifying the experience was from people carrying her body, and someone putting a loaded gun to her head. The object of the piece was to see how the audience interacted with her without her acting like a living person. 


http://www.complex.com/style/2014/01/marina-abramovic-reflects-on-rhythm-0

Georgia O' Keefe

     Georgia O' Keefe was an American artist who was born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin in 1887. She was very passionate about art and attended many different schools to study art- such as New York University, The University of Virginia and Columbia University. Her vision was to focus more on images that were important to her, rather than what others expected art to be about. She formed her art through her own life experiences and created images of objects that surrounded her everyday life. While art was constantly changing, and painters normally painted several types of images, Georgia O' Keefe mostly stayed true to drawing the same images throughout her entire life; these drawings consisted of flowers, bones and landscapes that were found in close distances to her. She had an impact on Americans because she was able to show her audience that although she draws mostly the same pictures, she was able to depict some differences. She once quoted, "If I could paint the flower exactly as I see it no one would see what I see because I would paint it small like the flower is small. So I said to myself - I'll paint what I see - what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it - I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers." 

    
The picture above was drawn by Georgia O' Keefe, called Red Canna. This is a close up drawing of the real flower she had observed and she paints it in such a way where she is able to add the specific colors and textures to make it in to the real life form she had seen herself. 

The pictures she would draw would be shown to develop over time, and show the audience where the differences are seen, rather than always creating brand new paintings. She would take a drawing she had previously worked on and make some additions to it, maybe by giving it more color or editing it based on a new life experience she had encountered. By the end of her career, Georgia had gathered several images; those that were based off one another, as well as those that were just a series. Because she had moved from place to place and seen these images in a different way, she always had an imagination to build on her drawings.

Mary Cassat

Mary Cassatt
Mary Cassatt attended Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. During her time, most women were discouraged to have a career in art or anything for the matter. Her father completely objected to her career choice, but she insisted anyways. At the age of 22, (1866) she travel to Europe to study with European painters without her father's approval. She decided to live abroad in Europe to study with artists, but her father declared that he would "rather see his daughter dead than to live abroad as a 'bohemian.'" despite all the hatred that she received from her father as well as the public, she continued in her career choice and became very successful at it. She was invited by Edgar Degas to join the group of impressionists, becoming a prominent figure in the Impressionism Era. She began using pastels and created more saturated colors by making strokes and criss crossing them along for optical facilitation, which creates an "impressionistic" style. Unfortunately, people like Henry Bacon, a friend of the Cassatts believed that impressionists were extremists and have some sort of ailment in their eyes; however, they became more well-known and highly recognized for their works.

Cassatt managed to deal with the hatred of society and did not let it hinder her work in any anyway, but rather utilized it as motivation. It was the hatred that fueled her inspiration to become a succesful artist.

Cassatt's works mostly consist of portraits of a mother and child despite the fact that she never got married nor had any children. I believe this reflects her ideology of women's importance in society and it may reflect the need for women to proliferate; thus, it shows the utmost importance and reliance that society does have on women, which I believe was Cassatt's idea and motive as a painter.

The Art of the Human Body

Taught in the well known institution Rutgers University, as well as revealing her creativity through forms of film, photography, and painting, contemporary artist Carolee Schneemann's general focus in her work are erotic, gender, or on the human body. While currently working in art media, she originally started her career by being a painter. While her first well known piece of art is not being a painting, it is actually a photo of herself surrounded with various material and life, known as Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions. Through the course of her career, she adopted the idea of feminism and incorporated it in her work, such as her erotic film known as Fuse, where the male and female are equal, not one higher than the other. She incorporates herself in her work to distinguish the creativity women have in art that seems to be unnoticed. 

1964: Meat Joy

1975: Inner Scroll

Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo was a Mexican artist who was mostly known as the wife of famous muralist Diego Rivera. Although she was an artist herself, her work was not as widely recognized because seemingly, she lived in the shadow of her husband and many other famous artists during her lifetime. Most of her work were self-portraits where she depicted herself as a woman with strong facial features, one of them being her obvious unibrow.

After her death, Frida Kahlo rose to fame because people started to praise her work. Despite being a woman in her lifetime surrounded by many famous male artists, she still had the courageous attitude of making her way to the top. She has paved the way for female artists then and now. Today, Frida Kahlo is celebrated by many people as a role model for feminism. A movie titled, Frida, was created as Salma Hayek graciously played her role. Her unique face graces many articles, clothing pieces, stamps, and many museums and cultural institutions.

Frida Kahlo Self Portrait

Self Portrait- Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera

Yayoi Kusama

Kusama is a Japanese female artist who has been a precursor of the pop art, minimalist and feminist art scene in New York City since the 1970's. She has inspired many male artists such as Andy Warhol! It's shocking to me how Andy Warhol remains so famous and evident in our pop culture, yet the artist who inspired him is barely known. I visited her exhibit in December of 2013 and her work is so interesting. Waiting for hours to see her work for a mere minute was absolutely worth it. She is famously known through her love of polka dots and psychedelic colors, and her exhibit "I, Who Have  Arrived in Heaven" at the David Zwirner Gallery was evident of that. Here are all pictures I took except for the second one!

Claude Cahun was a French artist, photographer and writer from the 1920's to the 1940's. She often portrayed herself in male clothing and hairstyles. While contemplating her image, she experimented with gender. Her work  political and social and it impaired traditional views on gender roles. Cahun's art is an example of how the surrealist movement gave women the freedom to question social and sexual tradition .

The Immaculate Carrie Mae Weems

When asked to name the first 15 artist that comes to mind, I am ashamed to say that only one of the fifth teen was a female. Oblivious to the endless list of magnificent females artist that essentially play a significant role in the artistic world, especially, Carrie Mae Weems who takes art to a whole new level. Weems work is much bigger than just a picture or a nice frame but explores race, gender and social issues through scrutinizing the notion of history and identity. Weems is a extremely important figure for African American females who assisted in creating a foundation for creators portraying issues of discrimination from the 20th century. Weems as well as those that followed in her footsteps broke through barriers of the male dominated art world as well as influenced this pivotal shift in historical and modern social issues such as race and gender. Weems work has contributed to significant movements such as the Harlem Renaissance and fought for equal representation for women when it came to art shows.

(The picture below is from Weems well known Kitchen Table Series.)

This is a portrait from a artist from the Middle East that is the breaking the barrier that many woman from the country Saudi Arabia face. This is called "Blinded by Tradition". Manal Al Dowayan speaks about woman in her country were told not to speak loudly, told to wear a veil over their faces and even have their names be erased. She wanted woman of the culture to be recognized and not be afraid to be seen as a person.

Natalia Anciso

Natalia Anciso is a Mexican-American who was born and raised in Texas near the Mexican-American border along the Rio Grande. Her art work mainly portrays legends that have been passed down through her family, and the struggles of living along the Mexican-American border with the issues those attempting to come across illegally into the United States, the violence surrounding the area, and drug trafficking. In her series "Pinches Rinches" exams how many of those attempting to cross the border were captured by Texas Rangers and were lynched and killed.

Carrie Mae Weems

Carrie Mae Weems is an American artist who is best known for her photography.In her photographs Weems, tackles topics such as racial jokes and racism. Her most famous art work is "The Kitchen Table Series".Carrie is the star in the series. In these photographs she wanted to exploits the issues of family dynamics, sex and gender roles and how they affect ones identity.

 Below is a photo from The Kitchen Table Series .