Women Artists Research Articles

The Inheritance and Development of Traditional Chinese Needlework under the "the Belt and Road Initiative"

As an important part of the intangible cultural heritage, traditional Chinese women's needlework is facing the challenge of inheritance and development. The cultural connotations embodied in Chinese women's needlework art are concentrated in three aspects: the natural view of the unity of man and nature, the primitive folk view, and the artistic view of auspiciousness. It still has high social and cultural value in contemporary society. Therefore, in response to the impact of large-scale mechanized production, women's needlework culture urgently needs to innovate and develop through new designs, new techniques, new media, new ideas, and new models. At the same time, under the background of the "Belt and Road" construction, Chinese women's needlework, as a characteristic cultural business card, plays a role in international exchange and cooperation, cultural output, and China's image building. Providing constructive suggestions for its development and inheritance is conducive to promoting Chinese women's needlework to compose a new chapter of the Silk Road in the contemporary international arena.

From Representation to Sabotage: The New Practices of Russian Antiwar Groups

AbstractSince February 24, 2022, new oppositional groups—Feminist Antiwar Resistance (FAR), Stop the Wagons, Combat Organization of Anarcho‐Communists (BOAK), the Russian Freedom Legion, and others—have emerged in Russia. Politically, they range from socialist and anarchist to nationalist or fascist, and in their visual media present a range of anonymous protest subjectivities, from the young feminist female artist to the Molotov cocktail‐throwing anarchist to the army defector. Differences notwithstanding, antiwar groups resemble one another in their use of anonymity and sabotage, departing from the culture of the prewar Russian opposition to Putin. The new antiwar groups seek to demonstrate the existence of a broad decentralized movement, but one that continues, rather than disrupts, historical narratives. This article pays special attention to narratives produced by “railway partisans” currently operating in Russia and Belarus, analyzing how they challenge, through tactic as well as rhetoric, their regimes’ uses of World War II history for state‐building myths. I find that antiwar activists claim that sabotage, vandalism, and other forms of material damage represent continuity—rather than break or rupture—with historic forms of grassroots resistance.

Riding against patriarchy

Equestrian portraiture has historically upheld gender norms by depicting powerful men and excluding women artists. 17th and 18th-century equestrian portraits of women depicted them as passive objects, often overshadowed by their male counterparts. These portraits reinforced traditional gender roles and upheld the patriarchal hierarchy prevalent during that time. This paper examines how Ghanaian contemporary artist Sarfowaa challenges patriarchal traditions through feminist self-portraiture in appropriated historical equestrian paintings. Through visual analysis of composition, techniques, symbols and contextualize selected artworks, this article explores how Sarfowaa subverts the equestrian genre by inserting herself into these male-dominated paintings. Her self-portraits provide a powerful statement of resistance that reclaims authority and agency for women. By contextualizing Sarfowaa's work within feminist art movements and theory, this paper analyzes how her art dismantles traditional gender roles and norms. The results demonstrate that Sarfowaa's portraits further the aims of feminist portraiture through their bold questioning of patriarchal power structures. This research expands current scholarship on the intersections of art, portraiture, feminism, and political resistance. It appeals to academics, artists, and audiences interested in the capacity of contemporary art to drive social change.

Approaches to Help Older Women in ART

Ancient Chinese emperors sent messengers to the whole country and explored an elixir of life. Determent of aging has been an ultimate hope for humans for a long period. In the modern era, aging become a hot topic to be solved according to longevity. Equality of both sexes in society contributed to the late marriage and start of making children. There happen adverse effects to being conceived in the aged ovaries. The quality and quantity become impaired by the ovarian aging process. In the artificial reproductive treatment, the obtained number of oocytes in ovarian hyperstimulation diminishes in aged women. The aging impairs quality both in the nucleus and cytoplasm. Chromosomal and genetic abnormalities increase lower implantation and higher abortion. In aged women, PGT-A may be effective to effective treatment. On the other hand, aging affects organelles in the cytoplasm of oocytes by protein metabolic dysregulations. Especially it induces mitochondria dysfunction. Mitochondria are called a “powerhouse” and have an essential role in oogenesis and embryogenesis. There exist 200,000-40,000 mitochondria DNA copies in the mature oocytes. Mitochondria dysfunction causes maturation arrest of oocytes, fertilization failure, late cleavage, and fragmented embryos. We have two strategies to solve this problem by enhancement of mitochondrial function. One is the holistic approach. Reactive oxygen species (ROS) or free radicals impair mitochondrial function. Also, mitochondria themselves are known to produce ROS. We measure Diacron-Reactive Oxygen Metabolites (d-Rom) and biological antioxidant potential (BAP) that are predictors of systemic ROS level and antioxidant competence, respectively. Another method is a cell-engineering approach. We have conducted autologous mitochondria transfer into mature oocytes. The quality of the oocytes and embryos were dramatically improved by this method, and we obtained 13 healthy children.

Killing the Angel in the House: The Marble Faun and the Imagination of Violence

ABSTRACT The article offers a specific investigation of female violence as both an explicit and a covert theme of The Marble Faun. Woman’s capacity to inflict harm is not just adumbrated in Miriam’s instigation to murder, but keeps resurfacing in multiple images, fragments, and allusions that mobilize a vast cultural archive. Unlike most readings of Hawthorne’s last completed novel, this article argues that the paradigm of active violence fails to successfully separate the sinfulness of the “dark lady” Miriam from the purity of the “fair maiden” Hilda. Rather, the specter of disruptive agency haunts both characters and appears to be inextricably associated with their identity as self-dependent artists living abroad, inhabiting studios that subvert the nineteenth-century definition of women as private domestic subjects. The symbolic association between female artists, violence, and the erosion of the domestic ideal is further explored through Hawthorne’s subtly unsettling encounters with actual women (Harriet Hosmer, Anna Jameson, Fredrika Bremer) living in Rome, as reported in his journal.

The image of male / female artist in Ukrainian literature at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries in the gender aspect

The study examines gender issues in the works of Ukrainian writers on the border of the 19th and 20th centuries, whose main heroes and heroines are representatives of art. In the dramaturgical works of this time, due to the departure from the social issues, the problems of gender equality and the possibility of choosing their life path by women actresses are intensified. This topic today remains an almost unexplored in scientific works, which determines the relevance and scientific novelty of our article. The purpose of the study is to consider the processes of modernization of Ukrainian literature in the context of gender and feminist issues, as well as to analyze the peculiarities of writers’ interpretation of images of artists in prose and drama using general scientific approaches and comparative typological method. The research results allows to state that such writers as O. Konisky and H. Khotkevych seek to reveal the peculiarities of the worldview of their characters. At the same time, the attitude of the heroes towards the female gender is traditional, the chosen ones of the musicians – main literary personages – should be female associates who fully support the lofty thoughts and deeds of their husbands. Actors and actresses in the plays by M. Starytsky and I. Karpenko-Kary raise the most difficult issues of family life, fidelity and betrayal of wives and husbands in marriage, life in a civil marriage and others that continue to be relevant in our time. L. Starytska Cherniakhivska, Lesia Ukrainka and O. Kobylianska, going beyond gender issues in the direction of feminist views, transfer the emphasis in their plays and short prose to the tragedy of a talented woman who devoted herself to art. Thus, Ukrainian writers of the studied period considered in sufficient detail the problem of gender relations in their modern society, in particular, the issue of family betrayal in its interpretation by representatives of the opposite sexes, and built a kind of hierarchy of relations between women and men.

Dancing and Rapping the Good Life: Sharing Aspirations and Values in Vietnamese Hip-Hop

Rap and hip-hop's diverse dance styles have been practiced in Vietnam since the 1990s, shortly after the country's integration into the world economy. What started out as a sphere of popular culture dominated by men was soon appropriated by female artists. The female rapper Suboi, Vietnam's “Queen of Rap,” is internationally renowned, and more and more young women are engaging in dancing on the streets. This article investigates the aspirations of female hip-hop practitioners in Vietnam's major cities, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. What does leading the good life mean to them, and how do they navigate the ambiguous moral landscape coproduced by authoritarianism and liberalism? Drawing on Aihwa Ong's (2008) concept of self-fashioning and AbdouMaliq Simone's (2019) practices of crafting, harvesting, and detachment, this article examines how young women use hip-hop as a creative device to achieve personal freedom and make a career for themselves. Carving out spaces for themselves in the male-dominated rap industry and dance community, they negotiate existing gender norms in both the music genre and Vietnam's urban society.

Examining the Artistic Style of Local Female Artists' Selected Works

This study explores diverse artistic styles in Malaysian female artists' works, stemming from varied approaches and mediums. It aims to dissect how these styles evolved, influenced by local and international art histories. Artworks scrutinise their distinct styles, unravelling the interplay between ideas, content, and context whereas literature clarifies the style of the visual artworks that are embedded in their artworks. Discussion according to their theme and how the technique, medium and, of course, will share a new direction and contribution of style portrayed in every artwork. The artworks' content and context, showcasing the artists' innovative contributions to the artistic landscape.

Gender and Deterritorialized Identity

This article explores the immersive audio-visual and sculptural art installations in the 59th Venice Biennale (2022) of three transnational contemporary women artists with familial ties to former colonies and protectorates. The Afro-Caribbean artist Sonia Boyce, MBE, presented Feeling Her Way in the British National Pavilion, for which she won the Golden Lion, the biennale’s highest honor. Zineb Sedira, a Franco-Algerian artist who lives and works in Britain, exhibited Les rêves n’ont pas de titre (Dreams Have No Titles) in the French National pavilion. The Moroccan artist, Latifa Echakhch, who was raised in France and lives in Switzerland, represented Switzerland with Le Concert, a sculptural sound installation. Each of their multidisciplinary installations engages differently with the intersections of race, gender, and ethnicity to challenge cultural stereotypes and erasures—of women artists and histories of liberation struggles. This article introduces early works by each artist as a basis for understanding how their biennale projects are decolonial and feminist in order to argue that the deterritorialized may reterritorialize—create new spaces of enunciation—in and through culture. The Venice Biennale installations of Boyce, Sedira, and Echakhch bring light to intersections of present-day and historical politics and memory by engaging with identity—individual and collective—as constructed, negotiated, and always in flux. Their work is shaped by migration, displacement, refugee status, exile, and the frontier as site of obstruction and passage.

Being (not) at home: Exiled women artists in postwar New York

In postwar art, the question of exile is the question of home. House defines a space as a locative concept. Home represents a place with a symbolic value of belonging and refers to objects, people, and ideas. Home does not designate a fixed state but rather a relational and transformative site in which individual and collective acts of remembering are embedded. In this article, the author explores the aesthetics of exile in the artistic production of exiled women artists in postwar New York, most notably Ruth Vollmer, Louise Nevelson, and Eva Hesse, who have often been excluded from the discourse around 1960s sculptural practice. The author casts the mode of construction and the viewing experience of their artworks through the notions of home and body. This contribution focuses on the intricate interrelations between women, domesticity, and artmaking associated with the aesthetics of exile and displacement, which significantly challenges any stable and absolute conception of home and place. By drawing on the works of feminist scholars and theorists, such as Sarah Ahmed, Julia Bryan-Wilson, and Iris Marion Young - in their argument that the idea of home and the practices of homemaking support relational identities-the author sheds light on how women artists in exile investigate notions of home, borders (both physical and psychological), diasporic longing, habitation, and uprootedness in a constant state of exchange.

From the left to the right, from the fringe to the centre: The trajectories of Iran's DIY hip-hop culture

This article focuses on Iranian hip-hop's changes between 2009 and 2023. Focusing on ‘resistance hip-hop’, it analyses the established discourse of nationalism within resistance hip-hop songs. The article shows how the newly emerged forms of DIY hip-hop in Iran and the diaspora increasingly lean towards right-wing politics. Mainstream Iranian hip-hop increasingly reinforces a patriarchal, patriotic, and centralizing discourse at the expense of the marginalization of minoritized groups, including women, queers, ethnicities, and nationalities. In addition, the article examines the new developments among the Iranian women who started their careers on the verge of the Women-Life-Freedom movement. Some women artists refuse to reproduce the patriarchal and patriotic discourses dominating recent hip-hop productions; instead, they simultaneously defy the Islamic regime's norms of gender identity and that of the mainstream male-centric pro-nationalist hip-hop.

Women botanical-illustrators and their successors in the Israeli culture: merging historical heritage with contemporary art

ABSTRACT Exploring the flora and fauna of the land of pre-state Israel stood at the heart of the Zionist venture. Zionist institutions took efforts to educate the Jewish population, trying to connect it to the land by learning it. This involved various ways of familiarising children and adults with their surroundings, with botanical illustration as an important agent working for that cause. This article aims to examine the three botanical women illustrators who contributed significantly to Israeli science and art, followed by three contemporary women artists whose art is inspired by them. Using a methodology combining visual analysis with the artists' interviews, it will be demonstrated how botanical illustration of the past is embedded in contemporary art. Both share a perception of plants as crucial elements populating the planet, and as objects of aesthetic investigation. These perceptions have led to various attitudes: first, exploring the plant in nature and observing it thoroughly throughout the artistic process. Second, the image created remains botanically identifiable, thus echoing a scientific approach. Third, the plant's Hebrew name is sometimes included. The noticeable inspiration of historical illustrators for contemporary artists lies both in the choices of the images themselves and in the practice of creating them.

Psychological characteristics of karate martial and pencak silat athletes special sport class viewed from gender

Purpose. The purpose of this study was to determine the Psychological Characteristics of Karate Martial and Pencak Silat Athletes Special Sport Class Viewed from Gender Materials and Methods. Sports psychology is the study of a person's behavior in sports and sports activities. One of the sports that requires knowledge of sports psychology in the coaching process is martial arts and karate. The type of research used in this research is quantitative research using surveys. This research is a study used to test hypotheses about the relationship between the psychological characteristics of pencak silat karate athletes and the Special Sports Class of pencak silat in Surakarta in terms of gender. The data analysis technique used Miles and Huberman analysis and independent sample test with the test flow used in this study using SPSS version 23. Results. The results of data analysis showed that the hypothesis testing of the psychological characteristics of male and female karate martial arts athletes, it is known that the t value is 0,509 with α 0,620 (p0,05). While the analysis of hypothesis testing on male and female pencak silat martial arts athletes obtained a t value with α 0,837 (p0,05). Conclusions. The analysis obtained p 0,05, then Ho is accepted. It can be concluded that at a significance level of 0,05 there is no significant difference between the psychological characteristics of male and female karate athletes in the Surakarta Special Sports Class (KKO) in terms of gender.

Foucault's Docile Bodies Perspective: The Figure of Seniwati's Feminism in the Wido Documentary Film

Discussion of docile bodies has been absent in film analysis. Most research is attracted to study gender representation in which women are frequently underrepresented. Thus, this study aims to examine the documentary film of Wido, a female artist, through Michel Foucault's theory of docility. This research is attracted to Widowati's narration as a Javanese woman artist who must be able to manage between her profession as an artist and a housewife respectfully. The data are the narration and scenes of Wido as both a female artist and a housewife in the documentary movie “Wido”. All data obtained are analysed textually, applying Foucault's notion of docile bodies. The research argues that the representation of Wido challenges the notion of docile bodies. Despite Widowati still glorifying her domestic roles, the feminine prescription of which women should be responsible for domestic chores, she subsequently exchanges the domestic responsibility with her husband to work in public as an artist. She also acknowledges that she is the family's breadwinner without diminishing her husband's primary responsibility as the head of the family. The fluidity of gender roles she performs contradicts the notion of docile bodies in which women are always taught and supervised to glorify their femininity.

Friction and Failure in the Secondary Art Classroom: Cultivating Decolonial Transformative Pedagogies of Hope

AbstractThis article explores how the colonisation of womens bodies, as perpetuated through the art trope of the female nude, has constructed a specific bodily ideal that still resonates and informs how we view women's bodies in contemporary life. I address how the same narratives that restrict our understanding of the female body, also restrict our understanding of drawing. I share part of my PhD practice research: PhEminist Skins of Resistance, a project conducted in my school, which sought to decolonise the legacy of the female nude and support the empowerment of the young women artists who populate the classrooms in which I teach. Theoretically informed by PhEmaterialism (feminist posthumanism and new materialism research methodologies in education), material agency is positioned as vital to an embodied learning experience and situates how I (re)position life drawing as a tool to re‐imagined and disrupt heteronormative and raced colonial imaginings of the female body. I further explore how this project created space within the secondary art classroom for creative‐activism, and the power of such learning environments to reach out beyond the constraints of neo‐liberal educational structures and inspire transformative pedagogies of hope.

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.

Avant-Garde and Kitsch in María Blanchard’s Neo-Cubism

Abstract The exceptionality of the women artists who achieved recognition within the circles of the avant-garde in the first decades of the twentieth century involved a number of performative strategies to avoid the risk of being confined to the category of ‘women painters’. The case of María Blanchard, a Spanish painter integrated in the School of Paris, exemplifies the problematics faced by women working in the avant-garde. Her trajectory from synthetic Cubism to neo-Cubist figuration follows the pattern of many of her male contemporaries working under the sociopolitical and market pressures in the post-war period, but the simultaneous assimilation of and ironic distance from the prevailing aesthetic ideologies is a distinctive feature of her style shared by other women artists. As Cubism became mainstream and began to lose its subversive power, Blanchard’s interest in challenging conventional artistic discourses and hierarchies found expression in kitsch aesthetics.

Correction to: Three women artists in postwar France: Anna-Eva Bergman, Germaine Richier, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva

Correction to: Three women artists in postwar France: Anna-Eva Bergman, Germaine Richier, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva

Cancer incidence among visual artists: 45 years of follow-up in four Nordic countries

Introduction Professional visual artists constitute a heterogeneous vocational group, including, but not limited to painters, photographers, textile artists, and sculptors who may face exposure to workplace hazardous substances and lifestyle factors that may contribute to the development of selected cancers. The objective of this registry-based cohort study was to assess the cancer incidence among Nordic visual artists. Materials and methods This study is based on data from the Nordic Occupational Cancer (NOCCA) project that combines census data of 15 million people from all Nordic countries and cancer registries from 1961 to 2005. For the present study we selected a cohort of visual artists from Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. Standardized incidence ratio (SIR) analyses were conducted with the cancer incidence rates for the entire national study populations used as reference rates. Results In male visual artists, there were statistically significant excesses in cancers of the tongue (SIR 2.91, 95% confidence interval 1.74–4.55), oral cavity (2.09, 1.26–3.27), pharynx (2.18, 1.45-–3.15), testis (1.91, 1.11–3.05), renal pelvis (2.48, 1.42–4.03) and bladder (1.33, 1.14–1.55). The risk was significantly decreased for cancers of the lip (0.45, 0.18-0.93) and stomach (0.65, 0.50–0.84). In female visual artists, the only significantly increased risk was observed for breast cancer (1.29, 1.13–1.48) and the only significantly decreased risk for stomach cancer (0.43, 0.17–0.88). The incidence of lung cancer was close to the population average in both sexes. Conclusions The non-elevated incidence of lung cancer suggests a similar prevalence of smoking between visual artists and the general population, while the elevated risk of cancers of mouth and pharynx among male visual artists is suggestive of more widespread alcohol drinking. The excess risk of urogenital cancers might be associated with exposure to solvents.

‘Generative Traumatic Wounds’: Notes of a Female Artist – A Conversation with Chiara Lagani

‘Generative Traumatic Wounds’: Notes of a Female Artist – A Conversation with Chiara Lagani