American Women Artists Research Articles

Latin American Women Artists: Subsidiary Human Beings? The Latin American Women Artists, 1915–1995 case

In 1995, the exhibition "Latin American Women Artists, 1915–1995" opened at the Milwaukee Art Museum. This exhibition marked the first-ever survey of Latin American women artists organised in the United States. Curated by Geraldine Pollack Biller, the show included works by thirty-five women artists active in eleven Latin American countries. This article aims to analyse the categories (“women artists”, “Latin American art”, and “Latin American women artists”) adopted by the exhibition and to examine some of the artists whose works were exhibited. What artists were selected? What were the implications of the selection? Did it reinforce certain stereotypes associated with Latin America and its art? Informed by feminist and Latin American art theories, deconstructing Euro-American notions of Latin American art, I argue that the emphasis on women artists did not significantly change the perception of Latin American art as “fantastic”. The thesis presented by anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner in 1974, which suggests that women have been traditionally linked with nature while men are associated with culture, can be illuminating when applied to comprehending the Latin American exotic cliché presented by the exhibition. Women were seen as doubly subsidiary human beings (in Rivolta Femminile’s words): non-Western and members of the second sex.

From Zora Neale to Missionary Mary: Womanist Aesthetics of Faith and Freedom

In this essay, I discuss the art of Missionary Mary Proctor, a contemporary folk artist from Tallahassee, Florida, in the context of the literary aesthetics of the renowned twentieth-century anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston. In comparing these Southern-born African American women artists, I argue that both are rooted in an aesthetic praxis deriving from their shared womanist ethics. My goal in this inquiry is to highlight the faith-based aesthetic traditions of African American women and reveal the manner in which discourses of freedom intertwine with literary and visual aesthetics and faith-based practices in African American folk art and literature. To that end, I analyze the prevalence of themes of liberation within the spiritual discourses of Southern African American women artists such as Missionary Mary Proctor and theorize the manner in which a landscape of Black female liberation is envisioned within their works.

Negotiating the Melancholy of Alterity : The Oppositional Digital Visual Culture of East-Asian American Women Artists

Through the interview of four East-Asian American women artists of diverse backgrounds, alongside semiotic analysis of their selected works, I investigate their oppositional digital art practice as well as their general online experiences. The digital sphere replicates the same forms of racially and sexually based oppression that occurs in the non-digital world in rapidly diverging forms. The main findings demonstrate that digital technologies offer novel ways for East-Asian American artists to resist oppression, visibilize their struggles, and explore their identities. Oppositional techniques can be sorted into three broad categories describing the archival, discursive, and voyeuristic capabilities of digital space. These categories describe a broad range of practices including generating alternative autobiographical histories, forging larger communities of resistance, and subverting the white male gaze. East-Asian American women artists actively challenge structural power through innovative multimedia methodologies that challenge mainstream representations in which they are regarded as subhuman, and resist essentialized roles and fixed markers of East-Asian culture and identity. Their diverse experiences converge upon the common goal of resisting hegemonic order and fostering a supportive space in which the voices of their community can be heard. Drawing on movements like postcolonial feminist scholarship from Anne Anlin Cheng, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, and Saidiya Hartman, as well as Third Cinema, I argue that social media sites and other internet communities expand and enable the development of a digital postcolonial aesthetic and art practice for East-Asian American women artists, allowing them to exercise agency over their artistic and historical narratives.

American Women Artists, 1935–1970: Gender, Culture, and Politics

American Women Artists, 1935–1970: Gender, Culture, and Politics

Editorial Introduction

Editorial Introduction

An Autoethnography of the Artist as a Young Woman? Susanna Paine's Roses and Thorns (1854)

ABSTRACT Roses and Thorns, or Recollections of an Artist (1854), the autobiography of American painter Susanna Paine (1792-1862) has been overlooked despite its historical value, due to its alleged affinity to fiction. In this article I argue that Paine’s narrative should be read instead as an early attempt to write in the autoethnographical mode; I demonstrate my argument by focusing on one such “fictional” element, her use of composite vignettes. I find that exploring Paine’s narrative style and the dynamics between the personal and the social offers a new path to trace the impact of early nineteenth-century socio-economic changes had on American women artists; second, it highlights the difficulties in rendering that life into a narrative, and last it calls attention to the intertwining of “truth,” memory and imagination in autobiographical writing.

Música e imagen: Usos del cuerpo fragmentado para un pensamiento estético femenino en Cecilia Vicuña y Violeta Parra

In this article we study the relationship between the Chilean artists Violeta Parra and Cecilia Vicuña (20th-21st centuries) while addressing the common aspects of their artistic proposals and describing how the phenomenon of female creative legitimation takes place under the condition as Latin American women artists. Framed within the issue of invisibility of women in music and art, we are interested in showing how these women think about art, what aesthetic foundations guide their creations, what fields of knowledge inform their work, and ultimately, how to contribute to the elaboration of a narrative on the production of feminine thought based on the theoretical assumptions of Luce Irigaray and other authors. In this investigation, we study the uses of the fragmented body as a fundamental topic present in the work of these two artists through the analysis of visual and musical texts.

Review: Transatlantic Encounters: Latin American Artists in Paris between the Wars, by Michele Greet

Review: <i>Transatlantic Encounters: Latin American Artists in Paris between the Wars</i>, by Michele Greet

Corporeal Identities, Maternal Artivism: A New Decolonial Approach to the Study of Latin American Women Artists

Stemming from Grosfoguel’s decolonial discourse, and particularly his enquiry on how to steer away from the alternative between Eurocentric universalism and third world fundamentalism in the production of knowledge, this article aims to respond to this query in relation to the field of the art produced by Latin American women artists in the past four decades. It does so by investigating the decolonial approach advanced by third world feminism (particularly scholar Chandra Talpade Mohanty) and by rescuing it from—what I reckon to be—a methodological impasse. It proposes to resolve such an issue by reclaiming transnational feminism as a way out from what I see as a fundamentalist and essentialist tactic. Following from a theoretically and methodological introduction, this essay analyzes the practice of Cuban-born artist Marta María Pérez Bravo, specifically looking at the photographic series Para Concebir (1985–1986); it proposes a decolonial reading of her work, which merges third world feminism’s nation-based approach with a transnational outlook, hence giving justice to the migration of goods, ideas, and people that Ella Shohat sees as deeply characterizing the contemporary cultural background. Finally, this article claims that Pérez Bravo’s oeuvre offers the visual articulation of a decolonial strategy, concurrently combining global with local concerns.

Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985, Pacific Standard Time Festival: Live Art LA/LA

Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985, Pacific Standard Time Festival: Live Art LA/LA

Representation of American History by Asian American Women Artists in the 1980s and '90s

Representation of American History by Asian American Women Artists in the 1980s and '90s

“1 + 1 = 3” Joining Forces: Coreen Simpson’s Photographic Suite

In 1986 Gallery 1199 in New York and the Muse Community Museum in Brooklyn jointly organized a two-part exhibition for “Where We At” Black Women Artists, the collective of African American women artists. The exhibition was an initiative of “Where We At,” when its members decided to invite a number of African American male artists to create a collaborative installation exhibition. According to the exhibition organizers, African American artists Charles Abramson and Senga Nengudi, “1 + 1 = 3” is an erotic equation. Male and female work together to create a third thing that has qualities of both yet also has a life of its own. The most interesting aspect of this project was the photographs of couples by the well-known African American photographer and artist Coreen Simpson. Simpson was invited to photograph the couples and the final products of their collaboration. The process of photographing the project becomes a new artistic performance on its own right, a process in which the artists and the photographer entered into a separate dialogue and negotiation of their own. This article reproduces many of Simpson’s photographs, along with her accompanying text, “Spirits.”

Asian American Women Artists: Performative Strategies Redefined

When a woman artist uses her body in a performative fashion, the viewer becomes witness to an active process of cultural navigation. The body becomes a site of immediate engagement. The choice to employ artistic strategies drawn from cultural experience conveys and highlights the problem of constructing identity in a world that rejects and even fears what is unknown. By transcending stereotypes long held by Americans and rejecting traditional Asian Confucian ideology of the respectful and submissive woman, Asian American women of Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese descent draw attention to cross-cultural fluidity in negotiating language, history, politics, and cultural perception.

Paths to the press: printmaking and American women artists, 1910-1960

Paths to the press: printmaking and American women artists, 1910-1960

Torah Study, Feminism and Spiritual Quest in the Work of Five American Jewish Women Artists

��� While most contemporary American Jewish women artists (of the “second wave”) have expressed their Jewish identity in art by engaging with historical and social issues (anti-semitism, the Holocaust, assimilation, immigration, ethnicity, etc.) this article focuses on the works of two groups of Jewish women artists who have an advanced knowledge of Torah and Hebrew, and whose works engage profoundly with Jewish texts. Helene Aylon, Bruria Finkel and Gilah Yelin Hirsch have been immersed in Jewish studies since childhood whereas Ruth Weisberg and Cheselyn Amato pursued their learning somewhat later in life, as Jewish teachings became more available to women. All of these artists are feminist creators and activists and have been participating in various aspects of the feminist movement and the women’s art movement in the U.S. This article explores the differences in their expressions of Jewish identity, and, primarily, the ways in which the teachings of Torah and knowledge of Hebrew (including the study of Kabbalah) have produced innovative Jewish insights in the work of feminist artists who are steeped in the Jewish canon.

Creating their own image: the history of African-American women artists

Creating Her Own Image argues that, for centuries, African American women artists have, through their artistic production, created an alternate vision of how women of color should be preceived in American culture. This synthesis, organised chronologically, covers major themes in African major artistic movements, such as abstract art, vernacular art and postmodernism in painting, sculpture, and other forms.

Feminist Exhibitionism: When the Women's Studies Professor Is a Curator

While teaching Alice Walker's classic 1974 essay Search of Our Mothers' Gardens in my Introduction to Women's Studies courses, have for the past nine years supplemented it by showing an excerpt from a filmed documentary. This 1992 British-made documentary about Walker features readings from her work, dramatizations of scenes from the novel Possessing the Secret of Joy, historical footage from the civil rights era in the United States, and commentary by various talking heads, such as Gloria Steinem and the late Barbara Christian. But most important, it relies on interviews with Walker herself, portions of which are intercut throughout. In the section of the documentary that show in class-the segment devoted to the creation and impact of the central argument of Search of Our Mothers' Gardens-Walker's on-camera presence is particularly arresting and inspiring, as she talks about the unacknowledged artistry of poor African American women in the rural South. Yet every year, present this powerful feminist statement to my classes with some hesitation and misgivings. Why? Because the students both see and hear Walker accompanying her celebration of the arts of women of color with the following slam: I don't like museums, which is a very white Western notion of what you do with art, because it takes it out of context of life, and think for many indigenous people, earth people, you create beautiful things because beauty is all around you. mean, what else would you do? (Shaw 1992). For me, Walker's words pose a dilemma. want my students to take Walker's perspective seriously; yet don't want them to dismiss out-ofhand either the achievements or the potential of museums and other institutional exhibition spaces, such as those in university galleries and libraries, as sites for doing feminist and anti-racist work. On the contrary, would like them to consider such established spaces as opportunities for feminist pedagogy and outreach, not merely as irredeemable symbols of elitism. Indeed, would like my students to feel equally inspired and challenged by the alternative point-of-view of African American women artists such as the sculptor and printmaker Elizabeth Catlett, who has exhibited in libraries such as the Main Public Library in Las Vegas, Nevada, using community-based galleries as though they were museums, on the principle that Making my work available . . . where it is accessible to Black working people is very important to me (LaDuke 1992, 138).

Contemporary Native American Women Artists: Visual Expressions of Feminism, the Environment, and Identity

Contemporary Native American Women Artists: Visual Expressions of Feminism, the Environment, and Identity

Art as a Political Act: Expression of Cultural Identity, Self-Identity, and Gender by Suk Nam Yun and Yong Soon Min

A number of artists of color, including Asian American women, are creating art from the basis of their lived experiences. Within minority groups searching for their cultural identity, establishing self-identity is an important process. For various psychological and sociological reasons, artists seem inspired to seek deeper meaning and a broader participation in cultural work.1 Asian American women artists, in particular, are currently making art as a means of exploring self-identity, cultural identity, and gender issues. Korean/Korean American minority women artists are creating art as a reaction to their cultural upbringing, which questions issues of identity, gender, ethnicity, politics, cultural, and socioeconomic status. These contemporary artists are breaking away from traditional cultural expectations and overcoming social barriers as artists, women, and Koreans/Korean Americans. With the growing public awareness of women's consciousness and sense of self as women in Korea and as an ethnic minority in America, these artists are redefining their identity. Despite the traditional patriarchal Confucian hierarchy; lack of social, institutional, and political support; and stereotypic gender, cultural, and socioeconomic status expectations for women, a few have stepped out of their traditional roles as women and have become successful artists in Korea and America.

Painting Herself out of a Corner: The Woman Artist in American Society

Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870-1930. By Kirsten Swinth. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. 305 pages. $45.00 (cloth). $18.95 (paper). At Home in the Studio: The Professionalization of Women Artists in America. By Laura R. Prieto. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. 292 pages. $39.95 (cloth). What happens when a feminist historian produces a social history of American women artists in the early modern era? Two ambitious studies, published simultaneously, offer answers to this question. Coincidentally, both of them—revised dissertations—adopt a model of professionalization as an organizing and explanatory mechanism, and each overlaps the other to a considerable degree. Prieto casts a wider net, beginning with Anna Claypoole Peale early in the nineteenth century and ending finally with modernist painters, including (inevitably) Georgia O'Keeffe. Swinth contracts her scope somewhat, starting out in the Gilded Age and taking her narrative up to the same modernist finish line. Both draw on archival sources and offer a considerable fund of new information and anecdotes about women's training, struggles, networks, conflicts, and careers. Both concentrate almost exclusively [End Page 681] on institutional and social histories and include often fascinating vignettes of lesser-known artists such as Emily Sartain or the Native American Narcissa Chisolm Owen. Both are useful contributions to a field still much in need of further study. At the same time, neither deals adequately with visual images, be they self-portraits or photographs of women students at work in the atelier. As works of history both have notable strengths; as works of art history (women's or otherwise) they exhibit certain failings, large and small. 1 Swinth systematically works her way through a set of focused chapters, each one anatomizing a different facet of the art worlds in which women made their way first as students and then as professionals. The first two chapters highlight the study of art at home and abroad, as institutions were forced to accommodate the dramatic surge in numbers of female students. During this time, women had to juggle and often choose between marriage and career, while laboring to transcend the onus of amateurism that clung persistently to female artistic practice. In the endeavor to legitimize their enterprise, women artists adopted the trappings and structures of professionalism, which guided and shaped masculine art practice as well. The next two chapters take up the problem of artistic self-fashioning and marketing in the intensely competitive art world of the Gilded Age, when women artists increasingly posed a threat to masculine domination of the field. The fifth chapter considers turn-of-the-century art criticism, which (among other tactics) deployed Darwinian biological essentialism to support the contention that "genius" and "masculinity" went together, naturally and exclusively. At the same time, male artists participated in restructuring the model of middle-class culture. Formerly dedicated to the elevation and refinement of all society, culture now became the domain of an implicitly masculine self-realization. In tandem with these new goals, male artists shucked off the Gilded-Age veneer of refinement and professionalism, refashioning themselves as vigorous individualists. The sixth chapter considers modernist women's attempts to reconcile sexual and professional identity by formulating a language of authentically and immutably female self-expression. Shaping the narrative is the recurrent pattern of "gain, backlash, and recouping," as women artists negotiated shifting gender ideologies along with discursive and institutional changes (4). Again and again, in Swinth's account, men colonize realms of female endeavor or devise systems of exclusion that push women to the margins. When the [End Page 682] "decorating craze" is in full swing, for example, male artists enter the territory enthusiastically, eventually occupying "positions of control in the movement, determining interior schemes and producing designs for decorative art societies" (78). When the gallery system emerges, dealers fill their stables with men, forcing women to find other marketing venues. In one such instance, Swinth exhibits a "small clipping that perhaps best exemplifies the...