Women Artists Together

Female Artists and the Digitization of Labor in the Music Industry

The digital revolution brought about by new technology and the eroding of intellectual property rights has simultaneously brought about increased opportunity as well as increased competition among content creators in the music industry — artists and bands as well as record labels. This change is evident in the “long tail” and “superstar effects” hollowing out the middle class of artists as well as lowering barriers to entry. It is well documented that women are still under-represented in many fields of the modern economy. Given this background, how do female pop artists fare in the music industry over time? This research utilizes a sample of the Billboard Hot 100 charts from the 1990s and 2000s and finds that female artists are dramatically and consistently under-represented on the pop charts. Though the percentage of female solo artists is nearly 50%, female artists still account for less than a quarter of the total artists who make the charts. At the same time female solo artists and groups with at least one female artist are remarkably more productive at producing pop hits than male solo artists and groups with no female artist involvement. This, perhaps, represents an opportunity for entrepreneurial female artists in the future as production and consumption bottlenecks are dismantled in a superstar-dominated culture.

Reviewed by: Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman: Painting and the Novel in France and Britain, 1800–1860 by Alexandra K. Wettlaufer Melissa Percival (bio) Alexandra K. Wettlaufer, Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman: Painting and the Novel in France and Britain, 1800–1860. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011, 338 pp. $59.95 (cloth). Alexandra Wettlaufer’s book explores the figure of the female artist in France and Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century, juxtaposing the careers of actual women with representations of female artists in portraiture and the novel. This task requires an awareness of the different working conditions of artists on both sides of the Channel, and also a sensitivity to the varied inflections of artistic representation in different cultural milieux and artistic genres. To her credit, the author mainly keeps this vast, complex territory well under control. In her Introduction, exceedingly well grounded in previous scholarship, she describes how female artists and writers contended with two distinct issues: firstly the patriarchy of the artistic profession, and secondly the masculinist discourse of Romanticism—so anxious about the male artist’s survival that it ruthlessly quelled any notion of female creativity. Against these obstacles, Wettlaufer tells a largely positive story of the struggle by women artists to forge a creative identity in the public sphere. Their achievements, she argues, are not least down to their collective endeavors in affirming a sisterhood of artists. Moreover, she suggests, through the realism and pragmatism with which they approached their task, nineteenth-century women artists provided a compelling counter-model to the self-aggrandizing, dislocated Romantic male artist. Three thematic sections follow on, each neatly comprising three chapters. Part I examines the artist’s studio (actual and represented) as a charged physical space where women forged their careers and negotiated their entry to the sphere of cultural production. Wettlaufer contrasts an eighteenth-century discourse of exceptionality (foregrounded in Mary Sheriff’s work on Louise Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun) where female artists’ endeavors were constructed in terms of isolation and rivalry, with a collective ideal that emerged in the early nineteenth century where female artists’ groups were formed as alternatives to the homosocial cliques of, for example, Jacques-Louis David or the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. More organized French studio practice is contrasted with the informal support networks of the female art scene in Britain. Also stressed is the sisterhood of the arts themselves—the paragone is here gendered as masculine—where female writers and artists mutually supported one another. With reference to paintings [End Page 164] of the studio by artists such as Amélie Cogniet and Mary Ellen Best, Wettlaufer shows how gendered notions of space, objectification and viewing practice were challenged. Two novels are discussed in subsequent chapters. Firstly Marceline Desbordes-Valmore’s studio novel, L’atelier d’un peintre, which questions and subverts many gendered tropes of the artist, is read as a “corrective” to the “misognynistic fantasies” of Balzac. Then Anna Mary Howitt’s utopian vision of female solidarity, Sisters in Art, is analyzed with reference to campaigns in Britain for women’s education and professional rights. In Part II, “Cosmopolitan Visions,” links between the female artist and the Other are explored. Chapter 4 includes a comparative reading of Germaine de Stael’s Corinne, ou l’Italie and Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale, both novels where hierarchies of cultural difference are mapped onto gender hierarchies. The placing so close together of Stael and Owenson throws up some unexpected complexities—which may be more obvious to this English reviewer than to readers from other shores. Namely, it would have been worth exploring Oswald’s “Scottishness.” As a land-owner of English descent, Oswald represents the colonizer of his native Scotland, a land with an unfettered indigenous culture as compelling as that of Ireland or Italy. Class issues subtend this discussion, and one wants to know more about class in relation to other parts of the book. To what extent did the “sisterhood” of artists enable women of all backgrounds, not just those from artistic or privileged milieux, to participate in the sphere of cultural production? “Cosmopolitan Visions” is...

ABSTRACTThe historically male‐dominated discourse encompassing artistic creativity has often failed to acknowledge the voices and contributions of women. Female artists continue to face barriers in terms of accessing opportunities, attaining positions of prominence, and earning potential, in comparison with their male counterparts. This inequality is deleterious to female artists and society. Therefore, it is important to understand the relationship between artistic creativity and gender, with a particular emphasis on elite female artistic exemplars. The present qualitative study utilized in‐depth semi‐structured interviews, in accordance with the methodology of Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis, to explore the role of gender in relation to artistic creativity among 10 eminent Australian female visual artists. Findings indicated that participants were affected detrimentally by gender‐based inequality on personal, professional, and sociocultural levels. Their experiences as women, however, also inspired and informed their artistic creativity aesthetically and conceptually. The findings challenge patriarchal conceptualizations of the “male artistic genius” by presenting a female‐focused counternarrative. Implications for educating, supporting, and empowering current and emerging female artists to excel are discussed.

While professional women artists responding to modernism's emphasis on individuality contributed to the 1890s decline of women's collective art culture, so did increased social class solidarity. Cincinnati's women museum advocates backed the goals of women's art culture embodied in Kensington-style institutions, including art training and decorative and fine arts parity. Women's art culture contained internal class tensions; women backed women's art labor both as a new artistic career path and as charity for the deserving poor. Cincinnati's women museum supporters exacerbated such class tensions when they targeted elite male donors by promoting art training to reform working-class men who lacked the unifying refinement that mitigated class tensions in women's art culture. Women thereby consolidated a cross-gender charitable elite patron class at the expense of women's art culture. Museum-trained women artists, furthermore, successfully advocated shifting to an institutional fine arts focus, addressing an elite patron class newly consolidated by women's museum advocacy.

The Cult of Artistry in Zelda Fitzgerald's <i>Save Me the Waltz</i>

The Cult of Artistry in Zelda Fitzgerald's <i>Save Me the Waltz</i>

The Arrival of New Women

Blues lyrics have long been recognized for their earthiness, their apparent directness and their ability to make the listener feel as if they are being directly and personally addressed. This article pays particular attention to the manner in which female blues artists talk to their audience about love, in both an ethereal sense and a more down-to-earth sense, and is an extension of the preliminary work of Kuhn (1999), who briefly examined the lyrics of male singers. Kuhn’s study concentrated on the seductive strategies of male blues lyrics and applied speech act theory to her corpus (five songs, by three artists). This article aims to extend Kuhn’s enquiry by examining the lyrics sung by early female blues artists. It is, and has generally been, intuitively assumed by those less familiar with the blues that female artists are less risqué and less assertive in requesting their needs, and more genteel in expressing their desires and feelings. This article investigates this assumption, both qualitatively and quantitatively, by applying an amended model of Tyrmi’s (2004) typology of love. This is applied to a corpus of female blues artists totalling 111 songs by 39 different artists, who predate the 1950s. The results show that these women were as forward as men in stating their needs, often in a most direct and colourful manner, and that sexual metaphor abounds in the lyrics of early female blues artists.

The topic of feminism was not discussed by scholars until the 20th century, but it has become a highly debated issue in today's society. Female portrait artists have been historically marginalized due to the origins of portraiture being intended to please male viewers. In the past, women were predominantly viewed as mothers and housewives within the social context. However, the research has revealed that numerous female artists defied the societal norms of the time and made unique efforts to achieve independence as professional women. In the long history of painting, there have been many female painters who have expressed feminist ideas through their art. This article compares the self-portraits of two portrait painters, Frida Kahlo and Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, in terms of painting themes, methods, and the representation of women. This study explores how female artists' paintings were influenced by the rise of female consciousness in different periods. The final result concludes that feminist awakening is depicted in female-themed paintings across different social periods by female artists.

&lt;p&gt;This thesis considers the ways in which the figure of the ‘woman artist’ has been constituted in published sources in Aotearoa New Zealand’s art history, between 1928 and 1989. Most of the texts dedicated specifically to women artists in this country were written in the latter half of the twentieth century, and were produced with the intention of writing women artists back in to the histories from which they had been excluded. This thesis operates from a different perspective. Rather than assuming a starting point of women’s absence from a national art history, it traces instead those written representations of the ‘woman artist’ as they exist in the published literature. Through the construction of a genealogy of such representation, this thesis examines the ideologies which are both embedded in, and perpetuated by them. In doing so it makes evident and interrogates the gendered power dynamics which have shaped the writing of Aotearoa New Zealand’s art history. This thesis is structured chronologically, charting the formation and expansion of a coherent national arts discourse against shifting notions of national and cultural identity. The trajectory of this discourse was shaped by a canonical impulse, constructing an unfolding narrative which centres upon a succession of key artistic figures. This thesis argues that the structuring of this – largely male, Pākehā – narrative, acted to subsume gendered difference, rendering women increasingly peripheral within its pages. The model of subsumed difference is also apparent in feminist critiques of this dominant art history, which are critically interrogated in the latter half of this thesis. As women sought to challenge the relative exclusion of women artists from this dominant narrative, they also perpetuated their own exclusions, often in terms of culture or sexuality. Through discursive analysis of both ‘mainstream’ art history, and the feminist writings which addressed it, this thesis presents two significant arguments. First, that stereotypical representations of women artists play a structural role – to marginalise women – within Aotearoa New Zealand’s art history. Secondly, that feminist interrogations of such histories failed to account for the multiplicity of women’s subjectivity. I conclude by instantiating and calling for an alternative approach that challenges the subsuming of such difference within a single, homogenous narrative. Such an approach will produce histories that interrogate, rather than perpetuate, the gendered and cultural power dynamics embedded within society.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This thesis considers the ways in which the figure of the ‘woman artist’ has been constituted in published sources in Aotearoa New Zealand’s art history, between 1928 and 1989. Most of the texts dedicated specifically to women artists in this country were written in the latter half of the twentieth century, and were produced with the intention of writing women artists back in to the histories from which they had been excluded. This thesis operates from a different perspective. Rather than assuming a starting point of women’s absence from a national art history, it traces instead those written representations of the ‘woman artist’ as they exist in the published literature. Through the construction of a genealogy of such representation, this thesis examines the ideologies which are both embedded in, and perpetuated by them. In doing so it makes evident and interrogates the gendered power dynamics which have shaped the writing of Aotearoa New Zealand’s art history. This thesis is structured chronologically, charting the formation and expansion of a coherent national arts discourse against shifting notions of national and cultural identity. The trajectory of this discourse was shaped by a canonical impulse, constructing an unfolding narrative which centres upon a succession of key artistic figures. This thesis argues that the structuring of this – largely male, Pākehā – narrative, acted to subsume gendered difference, rendering women increasingly peripheral within its pages. The model of subsumed difference is also apparent in feminist critiques of this dominant art history, which are critically interrogated in the latter half of this thesis. As women sought to challenge the relative exclusion of women artists from this dominant narrative, they also perpetuated their own exclusions, often in terms of culture or sexuality. Through discursive analysis of both ‘mainstream’ art history, and the feminist writings which addressed it, this thesis presents two significant arguments. First, that stereotypical representations of women artists play a structural role – to marginalise women – within Aotearoa New Zealand’s art history. Secondly, that feminist interrogations of such histories failed to account for the multiplicity of women’s subjectivity. I conclude by instantiating and calling for an alternative approach that challenges the subsuming of such difference within a single, homogenous narrative. Such an approach will produce histories that interrogate, rather than perpetuate, the gendered and cultural power dynamics embedded within society.&lt;/p&gt;

Review of Gendered Bodies: Toward a Women's Visual Art in Contemporary China, Reviewed July 2016 by Annie Kasner, Independent Scholar, annie.kroshus@gmail.com.

This thesis explores how women artists articulate their subjectivity through autobiographical writings such as memoirs, diaries, and romans à clef. It begins by acknowledging the difficulties many women artists experience in claiming or asserting their identity as artists. In traditional and masculinist ways of understanding art, creativity is assumed to involve an act of transcendence from material circumstances and everyday life. For many women artists such acts of transcendence are not possible. By writing about their own lives, women artists give themselves space to negotiate and confront myths and institutionalised values about art and to produce counter-institutional histories. In the thesis I investigate how three women artists, Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington and Faith Ringgold, write about their lives and their art. I note how each of these artists place their art not only in studio spaces set aside from everyday life but also in domestic spaces saturated by everyday life. Indeed, they each offer vivid accounts of domestic spaces including rooms and furniture. My method of reading is to follow each of these artists through spaces, from room to room, into and outside of houses. Domestic spaces are also filled by intimate relationships; women artists, in writing about art also write about their roles within these relationships. I explore how women artists are called upon to perform certain roles that risk distancing them from their lives as artists. Whether they fulfil these roles or not, I argue that the rationale they provide for the roles they take up is how they assert their creative identities. By exploring how women artists write about art, this thesis demonstrates how art can be created given the restrictions of physical environments, social norms and gendered expectations. Throughout, the thesis engages with classic feminist critiques of domesticity and recent queer and feminist reflections on the subject. It demonstrates how creativity can come from the very struggle to make room.

Women (Re)Writing Milton