Feminist Art!

The "first wave" of feminism began in the mid-19th century with the women's suffrage movements and continued until women received the right to vote, in 1920. Organized feminist activism effectively ceased between 1920 and the late 1960s,.  Feminist art movement began producing work during the renaissance of the larger women's movement in the late 1960s, also referred to as the "second-wave" of feminism.

Some women artists work have been posthumously identified as proto-feminist.  For example, Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois created works that contained imagery dealing with the female body, personal experience, and ideas of domesticity, even if the artists did not explicitly identify with feminism. These subjects were later embraced by the Feminist art movement. The Feminist artists of the "second-wave" expanded on the themes of the proto-feminist artists by linking their artwork explicitly to the fight for gender equality and including a wider visual vocabulary to help describe their goals. This has been most prominent in the United States, Britain, and Germany, although there are numerous precursors to the movement, and it has spread to many other cultures since the 1970s.

Eva Hesse was born January 11, 1936, in Hamburg. Her family fled the Nazis and arrived in New York in 1939. She became a United States citizen in 1945.  When Hesse was ten years old, her mother committed suicide. Racked with anxiety throughout most of her life, She was accepted by the School of Art and Architecture at Yale University, New Haven, where she studied painting with Josef Albers. In 1959, Hesse received her B.F.A. from Yale and returned to New York, where she worked as a textile designer.  Hesse had her first solo show, of drawings, the following year at the Allan Stone Gallery, New York. In 1964. From 1968 to 1970, Hesse taught at the School of Visual Arts, New York. In 1969, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and after three operations within a year, she died May 29, 1970.

What is feminist art?

Feminist art is art by artists created consciously in light of developments in feminist art theory in the early 1970s.  In New York City, which had a firmly established gallery and museum system, women artists were largely concerned with equal representation in art institutions.  In California, women artists focused on creating a new and separate space for women's art, rather than fighting an established system.

The 1980s

With the end of the 1970s, an era of radical idealism in the arts came to a close with the new conservatism of the Reagan and Thatcher administrations. The Feminist artists of the 1980s focused more on psychoanalysis and post modern theory, which examined the body in a more intellectually removed manner than the embodied female experience that dominated the art of the 1970s. Artists continued to expand the definition of feminist art and although they were not always aligned with a coherent social movement, their works still expressed the need for women's equality. The Feminist artists of the 1970s made many advances, but women were still not close to equal representation.

Guerrilla Girls

The Guerrilla Girls, a group formed in 1985, best known for fighting against sexism and racism in the art world by protesting, speaking, and performing at various venues while wearing gorilla masks and adopting pseudonyms to hide their identity to avoid real-world repercussions for speaking out against powerful institutions. The Guerrilla Girls took Feminist art in a new direction by plastering posters all over New York and eventually buying advertising space for their images. Their posters used humor and clean design to express a pointed, political message.

A Multi-Disciplinary Movement

There is no singular medium or style that unites Feminist artists, as they often combined aspects from various movements including Conceptual art, Body art, and Video art into works that presented a message about women's experience and the need for gender equality.

Feminist art and Performance art often crossed paths during the 1970s and beyond, as performance was a direct way for women artists to communicate a physical, visceral message. Often Body and Performance art overlapped in Feminist art.

Gender Performance

. By sharing gender specific experiences with audiences, these artists were using the "knowledge is power" model to influence new ways of thinking about traditional female stereotypes and to inspire empathy and compassion for the female condition.

Body as Medium

Artist Ana Mendieta used blood and her own body in her performances, creating a primal, but not violent, connection between the artist's body, blood, and the audience (and nature). Feminist artists saw blood as an important symbol of life and fertility directly connected to women's bodies.

Sexual Equality and  De-Objectification

Many Feminist artists illuminated an imperative to end sexism and oppression with works that went against the traditional ideas of women as merely beautiful objects to be visually enjoyed. As Lucy Lippard stated, "When women use their own bodies in their art work, they are using their selves; a significant psychological factor converts these bodies or faces from object to subject." These works compelled viewers to question society's social and political norms.

Domesticity and Family Life

A woman describing efforts to improve herself and her family through gourmet cooking. Her dialogue is randomly interrupted with slides showing glossy images from food and travel magazines meant to depict consumerism's baiting of the everyday housewife.

Later Developments - After Feminist Art
The feminist movement exponentially expanded what art is, and how we look at art, and who is considered to be included in the discourse of art making that it caused a tremendous, radical change. 

Today's generation of women artists, like Kara Walker and Jennifer Linton, continue to speak directly about sexism and equality in their works.