The Feminist art movement (1960s-80s), an overview

The Feminist art movement (1960s-80s), an overview: (Click on images to view them full-size)

It is an indisputable fact that women have always played some role as artists in the past. The significance or extent of that contribution at specific times was usually inhibited by male domination over social behavior, taste and value. So although individual women have contributed a great deal to the history of art, they have usually suffered undeserving neglect of their accomplishments. With the freeing of women politically through suffrage and the consequential progress made in accessing formerly male domains, such as business and sports, they are being recognized for the quality of their art along with that of male artists. The early phase of this recognition took the form of appreciating women's domestic arts on as high a level as that of the graphic, sculptural and architectural arts. Exhibits in museums, galleries and private spaces helped to accomplish the assessment of women's domestic arts as “fine art”. Now, as a matter of course, they are accepted and recognized in all media by the quality of their creations. Judy Chicago (b. 1939) and Miriam Schapiro (b. 1923) were two important co-founders of the Feminist Art Movement (1960s) in San Diego.

Feminist artists deal with many issues in their work: stereotypes about women; issues of gender, discrimination, society's expectations for women, violence against women, etc. They also explored many questions: Do women have a different way of sharing their experiences in life than men? Are men and women intrinsically different? What does equality with men look like? What does it mean to be “female”? It also became clear over time that: not all feminists had/have the same goals; not all women artists are feminist artists; not all art by feminist artists is feminist.

Much of the feminist art was collaborative (strength in numbers), and much of it was meant to be offensive in order to get people's attention and confront inequality, past wrongs and present-day committed against women, and to let the world know what women (as individuals and as a group) wanted. And by creating large, colorful artwork with explicit, offensive, and/or provocative subject matter, women also broke free from the constrictive restraints that society had bound them in for so long. Moreover, if the pieces were ugly or made the viewer uncomfortable, it was because many of the pieces dealt with ugly subject matter: rape and domestic violence were shameful, whispered words at that time. One main goal of this art movement was to raise awareness about these crimes and enact changes to protect women.

Many feminist artists were simply striving to have their voices heard, to correct injustice and work toward a more equal society- one where women aren't taken advantage of, aren't spoken down to, are given the same opportunities as men, are taken seriously, etc. Of course, many feminist artists took the movement “too far” by calling for a reversal of gender roles, desiring a society that was ruled by women, with the men being subservient; others went so far as to say men weren't needed at all and we'd be better off without them. Obviously this is not the solution to the problem of inequality between the sexes, but it is important to remember that this movement is the result of hundreds, if not thousands, of years of, for the most part, men exerting forceful control over women; there was a lot of pent-up anger.

“From the beginning until the 1970s, the women's art movement challenged the entire valuative system of American Modernism: the feminist art movement reclaimed craft, insisted on the importance of content, contested the mythology of history, favored collective over individual production, asserted a place for the autobiographical, and, perhaps most radically, refuted the idea that art is ever neutral or universal because the movement discovered that the voice previously called universal was actually nothing more than the voice of a Euro-American man.” - Laura Cottingham, critic

Miriam Schapiro was a NY-based abstract expressionist field painter before she moved to Southern California in the late 1960s to teach art at UCSD. While she and Judy Chicago were teaching there, they helped female students to restructure an old house into a completely feminine environment. These artist-teachers' interests had been aroused by the long history of women's beautiful and often intricate designs or patterns for domestic applications, such as sewing, weaving, and crocheting. Wanting to bring attention to this long-neglected domestic art tradition, Schapiro began to make abstract and semi-representational collages of women's craft and needlework materials. She called these “femmages”. These works, beyond their qualities as art, may be interpreted as analogies or symbols of the long-devalued role of women's arts in general. Schapiro continued through the 1980s and 1990s to create lively, colorful images, usually with discernible but sometimes ambiguous content. Many are related to searches for self-identity and melancholy at the gradual dissolution of the women's movement using metaphorical images of other female artists of the past such as Mary Cassat, Berthe Morrisot, and the Mexican artist Freda Kahlo, along with her own. Above left, “Heartland”, 1985. What kinds of "feminine" crafts are combined in this image? How is this image "feminine"? 

Judy Chicago is an extremely influential and well-known artist, author, feminist, educator, and intellectual whose career now spans four decades.

In the early seventies after a decade of professional art practice, Chicago pioneered Feminist Art and art education through a unique program for women at California State University, Fresno, a pedagogical (academic) approach that she has continued to develop over the years. She then brought her program to Cal-Arts, where she team-taught with Miriam Schapiro, producing with their students the ground-breaking Womanhouse project.

In 1974, Chicago turned her attention to the subject of women's history to create her most well-known work, The Dinner Party, which was executed between 1974 and 1979 with the participation of hundreds of volunteers. This monumental multimedia project, a symbolic history of women in Western Civilization, has been seen by more than one million viewers during its sixteen exhibitions held at venues spanning six countries.

The principal component of The Dinner Party is a massive ceremonial banquet arranged in the shape of an open triangle—a symbol of equality—measuring forty-eight feet on each side with a total of thirty-nine place settings. The "guests of honor" commemorated on the table are designated by means of intricately embroidered runners, each executed in a historically specific manner. Upon these are placed, for each setting, a gold ceramic chalice and utensils, a napkin with an embroidered edge, and a fourteen-inch china-painted plate with a central motif. Each place setting is rendered in a style appropriate to the individual woman being honored.

Wing One of the table begins in prehistory with the Primordial Goddess and continues chronologically with the development of Judaism; it then moves to early Greek societies to the Roman Empire, marking the decline in women's power, signified by Hypatia's place setting. Wing Two represents early Christianity through the Reformation, depicting women who signify early expressions of the fight for equal rights, from Marcella to Anna van Schurman. Wing Three begins with Anne Hutchinson and addresses the American Revolution, Suffragism, and the movement toward women's increased individual creative expression, symbolized at last by Georgia O'Keeffe. View the entire collection online (Parental preview and accompaniment suggested) http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/home.php

The Guerrilla Girls (established 1985) are a group of anonymous women who protested the sexist attitudes and actions of the art world by assembling together and wearing gorilla masks, carrying signs and distributing flyers. These signs were usually humorous in tone, but serious in content, such as their “Ten Reasons” poster. Others gave shocking statistics revealing the discrimination against women in museum and gallery shows, such as “When racism...” Given that well over half the art students in undergraduate programs at colleges and universities across the United States were/are women, their severe under-representation in museums and galleries was/is clearly due to discrimination, not lack of skilled women artists.

  

 

Barbara Kruger: In “Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face,” (1981) a stone bust of nondescript everywoman takes the focus, her bright white outline contrasting sharply with the pitch black background. With no arms or legs, the woman has little agency. She blankly stares ahead, away from the viewer. The viewer’s gaze, then, literally hits the side of her face. “Your gaze hits the side of my face,” her thoughts seemingly echo. With the text superimposed on the image, this leaves the viewer in an uncomfortable position: as the image draws the viewer’s eyes to the woman, the viewer feels somewhat a voyeur: apparently, the woman does not want the attention, but she has no choice but to oblige the viewer’s eyes. The wording choice of gaze also connotes the “male gaze”, which according to feminist criticisms, objectifies women while normalizing men, which seemingly occurs in this image.