Feminist Posters + Photography

FEMINIST ART

Boycott Nestle by Rachael Romero, 1978



Poster by the Guerrilla Girls



Untitled Image by Carrie Mae Weems



Seduction by Lynn Hershman

Feminist Art at Villanova UAG

Women Collared for Work: Anecdotal Art

For over two decades Judith Schwab wanted to do a feminist art exhibit about “20th century women and the obstacles they had to overcome.” Such a solo exhibit would take a lot of time to accomplish. Now the exhibit is finally here, and its on tour.

Schwab asked seven “tremendously creative and inspiring artists” she knew to collaborate with her. It took 10 years to do but their tour de force traveling art exhibit is now hitting the road.

The next stop on that road is the Villanova University Art Gallery (depending on when you read this we recommend researching when the exhibit is coming to a gallery near you). The free public reception is on Friday, January 14th, from 5 to 7 pm in the Villanova UAG (so take your Valentine date with you!), which is located in the Connelly Center on the Villanova campus.

The show continues to February 17.


Margo Allman

Allman's calligraphic paintings honor the unsung Japanese-American women who without trial were forcibly taken from their homes by the U.S. Government during World War II and interred in guarded military compounds. A painter, sculptor and printmaker for more than 55 years, Allman is a distinguished alumni of The Moore College of Art and Design and is listed in Who's Who in American Art and Who's Who in America. Her work is held in museums and private collections worldwide.


Bernice Davidson

A leader in international art exchanges for peace and environmental stewardship, Davidson brings to the exhibit life-sized figurative weavings in reed of early 20th century suffragettes jailed for their non-violent campaign to gain the right to vote for American women. Her life-sized Native American figure speaks to Native children forcibly removed from family and culture to attend distant government boarding schools, and to one child who successfully escaped and returned home.


Maria Keane

Mixed media monoprint collages by artist/professor Maria Keane pay tribute to the professional women illustrators of the Howard Pyle School, such as Olive Rush, Elenore Abbott, and Anna Whelan Betts and Ethel Franklin Betts, whose work lit up the Golden Age of American Illustration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and expanded career opportunities for women in art. Keane has been adjunct professor of fine arts at Wilmington (Del.) University since 1986.


Rosemary Lane

Working with cast paper over wood, Rosemary Lane presents three-dimensional human-form relief pieces honoring artists who inspired her and a new generation of artists in the 1980s. Her role models include leading American feminist artist Judy Chicago and abstract expressionist Louise Nevelson, a pioneer of environmental sculpture. A retired University of Delaware art professor, Lane's work has been exhibited in over 150 national invitational and juried shows.


Judith Schwab

Schwab offers 1940s' images hearkening to “Rosie the Riveter”, wartime food rationing, and the bib collar, and 1950s' art, fashion (e.g., the Peter Pan collar), and the deepening civil rights struggle. She has been a leader in international art exchange for the promotion of peace. In 2009 Schwab was awarded a Broward Cultural Council Award from the Broward County Board of County Commissioners, Florida, and a Delaware Division of the Arts Emerging Artist Fellowship in 1986-'87, and an Established Artist Fellowship 1993-'94.

Wilma B. Siegel, MD

The costumed soft sculptures created by Siegel represent “Flower Children Grown Up”, women who have made significant contributions to their communities. An award-winning artist, Siegel's psychological portraits of AIDS victims and survivors, the changing faces of AIDS, breast cancer survivors, the homeless, and the elderly have gained national recognition. A distinguished oncologist, she was a pioneer in the hospice movement, opening one of the first hospices to accept AIDS patients.

Ann Stein

Stein presents a rich visual appreciation of the accomplishments of Frances Perkins, America's first woman Cabinet member. Each of Stein's period items and drawings stands as a symbol of Perkins and the ground-breaking labor laws and other social advances she championed as Franklin D. Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor. A sculptor, Stein's work is archived in the National Museum of Women in the Arts and exhibited in the Corcoran Gallery and the Art Museum of the Americas.


Deborah Stelling

Incorporating photographs, metal, and wood stitched to an acrylic background, the five mixed media paintings by Stelling pay tribute to Eleanor Roosevelt and Georgia O'Keeffe, including some pithy quotes by them. Stelling has won fellowships and grants from the University of Delaware, the Delaware Division of the Arts and the MacDowell Colony, the oldest artists' colony in the United States. She is founder of SYNE, a group of artists who have exhibited in Europe and Scandinavia.

The Villanova University Art Gallery is open weekdays from 9 am to 5 pm.

Telephone the Art Gallery at (610) 519-4612 or visit their website at artgallery.villanova.edu.

Model's Revenge by Alexis Hunter

"Dear friends

I am showing the 1974-77 series the Model's Revenge at the London Art Fair at the Richard Saltoun Gallery, along with the feminist photographer Jo Spence's work. We both showed together at the Hayward Gallery in 1979, and I am delighted to tell you that both Jo's and my work has been well received.

Alexis Hunter"

Stand 34
The London Art Fair
19 - 23 January at Islington's Business Design Centre (map)
52 Upper St | City of London | N1 0QH

2010 Feminist Films + The Bechdel Test Women in Movies

A lot of feminist films came out in Fall 2010. Below is a synopsis of each to whet your interest in watching them.

Secretariat - The life story of Penny Chenery, owner of the racehorse Secretariat, who won the Triple Crown in 1973.

Conviction - A working mother puts herself through law school in an effort to represent her brother, who has been wrongfully convicted of murder and has exhausted his chances to appeal his conviction through public defenders.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest - Lisbeth is recovering in a hospital and awaiting trial for three murders when she is released. Mikael must prove her innocence. Meanwhile, Lisbeth is plotting her own revenge against the people who put her in this situation.

Fair Game - Plame’s status as a CIA agent was revealed by White House officials allegedly out to discredit her husband after he wrote a 2003 New York Times op-ed piece saying that the Bush administration had manipulated intelligence about weapons of mass destruction to justify the invasion of Iraq.

For Colored Girls - Each of the women portray one of the characters represented in the collection of twenty poems, revealing different issues that impact women in general and women of color in particular.

Tiny Furniture - About a recent college grad who returns home while she tries to figure out what to do with her life. written, directed and starring Lena Dunham.

Made in Dagenham - A dramatization of the 1968 strike at the Ford Dagenham car plant, where female workers walked out in protest against sexual discrimination.

Miral - A drama centered on an orphaned Palestinian girl growing up in the wake of the first Arab-Israeli war who finds herself drawn into the conflict.

The Tempest - In Julie Taymor’s version of ‘The Tempest,’ the gender of Prospero has been switched to Prospera. Going back to the 16th or 17th century, women practicing the magical arts of alchemy were often convicted of witchcraft. In Taymor’s version, Prospera is usurped by her brother and sent off with her four-year daughter on a ship. She ends up on an island; it’s a tabula rasa: no society, so the mother figure becomes a father figure to Miranda. This leads to the power struggle and balance between Caliban and Prospera; a struggle not about brawn, but about intellect. Directed by Julie Taymor.

You Won’t Miss Me - A kaleidoscopic film portrait of Shelly Brown, a twenty-three year-old alienated urban misfit recently released from a psychiatric hospital. Co-written and directed by Ry-Russo Young.

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The Bechdel Test for Women in Movies

The Bechdel Test is a simple way to gauge the active presence of female characters in Hollywood films and just how well rounded and complete those roles are. The test was created in 1985 by Allison Bechdel in her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For.

It is astonishing the number of popular movies that can’t pass this simple test. It demonstrates how women’s complex and interesting lives are underrepresented or non-existent in the film industry. Women have jobs, creative projects, friendships and struggles among many other things that are actually interesting in our lives… and yet Hollywood simply skips over those topics in favour of stories about male characters who are made more interesting.

This topic is also covered on numerous other websites, including:

The Bechdel Test Movie List: A very long list of movies and where they rate on the Bechdel Test.

Why Film Schools Teach Screenwriters Not to Pass the Bechdel Test, an essay by Jennifer Kesler.

The Dinner Party finds a home

FEMINIST ART - It took decades for the iconic "The Dinner Party" installation to find a home in an art gallery or museum. Truth is, nobody was willing to take it. It was shunned.

No longer.

The Dinner Party, an important icon of 1970s feminist art and a milestone in twentieth-century art, is presented as the centerpiece around which the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art is organized.

The Dinner Party is comprised of a massive ceremonial banquet, arranged on a triangular table with a total of thirty-nine place settings, each commemorating an important woman from history. The settings consist of embroidered runners, gold chalices and utensils, and china-painted porcelain plates with raised central motifs that are based on vulvar and butterfly forms and rendered in styles appropriate to the individual women being honored.

The names of another 999 women are inscribed in gold on the white tile floor below the triangular table. This permanent installation is enhanced by rotating Herstory Gallery exhibitions relating to the 1,038 women honored at the table.

However a lot of bitterness remains about the monumental piece. Judy Chicago, the woman who organized it all, didn't pay the artists who contributed their time and skill to the project. And if you watch documentaries of the process used to make it you realize she wasn't a very nice person to all the workers/artists who helped with the project. She took all the glory for herself, hence the bitterness. (Sure it was "for a good cause", but Judy Chicago could be making more of an effort to share the credit.)

And on top of that, does The Dinner Party really deserve all the attention? Certainly it is one of biggest, most well-known feminist art installations of the 1970s, but there are other artists who probably deserve more attention.

To make matters worse Judy Chicago has been an 'one hit wonder'. She has been coasting on her laurels ever since. It is perhaps no surprise that it took so long for The Dinner Party to finally find a home.

Rozsika Parker, feminist art historian

ART HISTORY - Check out this blog post about Rozsika Parker, a feminist art historian.

And while you're at it check out this post about the cartoon Cathy. Ack!

And also Black Womanhood in Art.

And finally What Women have done to Art.

Enjoy!

In other news we are looking for feminist art about Christmas and/or other holidays. Send your JPGs to suzannemacnevin(atsymbol)gmail.com.

Feminist Art by Men

FEMINIST ART - Sometimes men make feminist art.

Its a little unexpected when it happens, but some of it is surprisingly good. Many of the paintings by political artist Charles Moffat for example.

Another example is the untitled piece by Cuban artist José Gómez Fresquet (Frémez) below, done circa 1970.



Fresquet made the poster (silkscreen on paper 18 3/8 x 24 1/8 inches) around 1970 as an antiwar statement in solidarity with Vietnamese women. The poster’s minimalist approach (a la Che Guevara posters) makes the connection between the objectification of women and violence against women, while also bringing up race and class issues.

The poster later was popularized and reprinted in the United States by the Chicago Women’s Graphic Collective.

So its an important piece about a feminist issue. It doesn't matter if its done by a man. All that proves is that at least some men are on the right track. Its progress.

Cult Sisters 5

FEMINIST ART - The Cult Sisters 5 may not be the Group of Seven, if anything they're the furthest from the long dead Canadian group of artists. The five artists are:

J.M. Culver
Kara Hendershot
Louisa Greenstock
Gina Louise
Erin Sayer

What binds them together is they're all female and proud of it... and they've opened their own gallery, the Cult Status Gallery in Minneapolis. In 2009 Sayer met Hendershot as she was painting “this awesome portrait of Conan O’Brien on the wall.” The rest of the group met through Facebook.

“We are five emerging female artists, and our work makes a strong statement,” says Culver. “I think that’s what connects us all together.”

“We’ve done like everything through Facebook,” admits Sayers.

“You wouldn’t necessarily look at our work and say, 'Oh, a woman did that,'” explains Culver about their conflicting artistic styles. Culver dredges up childhood memories using charcoal/acrylics, Louise uses mixed media and poetry, Sayer and Greenstock's works drip with rock star sexuality... some of its rather unlady-like.

“Maybe it’s because we don’t draw vaginas and flowers,” laughs Sayer. “The society is still a little patriarchal,” she says. “I think people for some reason still trust men more.”

Their new gallery will be focused on young artists, but there will be healthy dose of art by both genders.

Kate-Christine Miller

FEMINIST ART - Feminist art is making a comeback, so says Kate-Christine Miller.

The 25-year-old multi-media artist and University of Guelph student is one of the organizers of Ladyfest Toronto, an annual feminist festival.

According to Kate-Christine Miller there’s long been a stigma around feminist art (both in universities and in art world in general), despite the success of high-profile feminist artists like Allyson Mitchell and Shary Boyle. Miller discovered her professors weren't that interested in feminist art. (She should have tried York University in Toronto instead, where there is an abundance of professors who enjoy the topic and a whole 6-credit class on feminist art.)

“You could tell that the professors had seen the same 20-year-old girls making the same thing over and over again, but that’s because we hadn’t learned about it,” explains Miller. “It was really hard to reflect on this giant body of feminist work and contribute something new because we thought we were the first person ever to think of it.”

According to Miller however feminism is a growing phenomenon in Canada's art galleries. There are more feminist artists at The Power Plant (a contemporary gallery in Toronto), and a recent issue of the Toronto-based arts quarterly, C Magazine, was devoted entirely to feminist art.

As an artist herself Miller explores the history of feminist art, but doesn't restrict herself even if 'its been done before'. She grew up in St. Catharines, Ontario, and her parents shared the duties of parenting and domestic life. “The idea of gender equality was very much a part of my life,” she says.

She also contributed to the book "Saturday Night: Untold Stories of Sexual Assault", an anthology of anonymous stories of women. Recently Miller started a new job as the administrator for the Association for Women’s Rights in Development in Toronto.

Miller says she is worried “about the hysteria over young girls everywhere in the world.”

“It’s just ultimately setting them up for failure to teach people not to stand up for themselves, and that they are just victims of some sort of hyper-sexual machine,” she says. “I don’t think that freaking out about young girls is helping them.”

Girls today need to be reassured their own decisions are the right ones and only they can determine what is best for themselves, believes Miller.

(We were unable to display Miller's art on here, which is mostly in video and textile.)

Feminist Art Vs. Peter Nygard

Peter Nygard is a Canadian fashion guru who makes women's clothing. In one of his factories in Jordan 1,200 women from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and India are being held captive, forced to make women's pants until they pay off their "debt".

Its not just a sweatshop. Its slavery.

The women aren't allowed to leave. They are locked in bed bug infested dormitories, given very little food and water and if they make mistakes they are beaten and/or raped by their Jordanian masters.

Meanwhile in the Bahamas Peter Nygard has his huge island estate with hundreds of servants and a net worth of $800 million USD. Even there he treats his workers like slaves. They're not allowed to leave and he frequently deducts from their wages.

There is even a CBC documentary about Peter Nygard, exposing how he treats the workers on his estate. The documentary was made before the U.S.-based National Labor Committee (NLC) released a report revealing that Peter Nygard was also involved in human trafficking and slavery in Jordan.

Peter Nygard and his lawyers of course deny any knowledge of human trafficking and slavery at his overseas factories... but then again his former employees in North America having been suing him for years now over labour violations, sexual abuse and there's even a rumoured rape/murder of a 16-year-old girl from the Dominican Republic.

So here's the deal... we're going to have a Feminist Art Contest. The theme is Peter Nygard / His Enslavement of Women.

The prize? There is no prize. Why should anyone get a prize? We're talking about a man who enslaves women in foreign countries just so he can sell clothing to rich yuppies and in turn make himself richer.

Submit your art via JPEG (it could also be a YouTube video) to the Facebook group mentioned below. There's no deadline either. Any and all submissions will be reposted on this blog. Its a purely honourific contest, the goal isn't money or fame, its sending a message that people like Peter Nygard are filth.

Consider it a chance to make a difference in the world and make your voice heard. In the meantime please join the Facebook Group: Boycotting Peter Nygard and let the world know that a man who treats women like slaves doesn't deserve to make money selling women's clothing.

UPDATE! THE OLD BOYCOTT PAGE WAS DELETED NO THANKS TO NYGARD'S LAWYERS: Please join the new group at Boycott Nygard's Brands

A Plethora of Feminist Art

The following is a plethora of different feminist art by various artists.



Jess Larson - Defensive (from the Look and Learn, Little Girl series) - circa 2009

Larson has an upcoming show at the Humanities Fine Arts Gallery at the University of Minnesota. The reception is Thursday January 21st, 2010 at 7 PM. The show runs until Friday March 12th, 2010.


Viktor Freso - Martina - 2007

Viktor Freso is male, but he's known for tackling interesting subjects. I especially like his "Onion is Healthy" time-based art piece from 2006 when he placed hundreds of onions outside a public building along with a sign saying "Onion is Healthy" and watched as hundreds of people stole the onions. Male feminist artists are not unheard of, check out the following interview with Charles Moffat.

Viktor's works will be in Chicago at the Open Concept Gallery until Feb. 25th, 2010.




Elke Krystufek - Proper Use - 2005

Elke Krystufek's series "Less Male Art" will be showing at the Kestner Gallery (kestnergesellschaft) until July 2nd 2010 in Hanover Germany.

Kirsten Justesen

FEMINIST ART - Kirsten Justesen was born in 1943. She currently lives and works in Copenhagen and New York. She studied at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen 1975.

Her activities comprise a wide range of genres, from body art and performance art, to sculptures and installation. Justesen was part of the avant-garde scene of the 1960s, where she became a pioneering figure within the three-dimensional modes of art that incorporate the artist's own body as artistic material. These experiments led her in the direction of the so-called feminist art which challenged traditional value systems during the 1970s. Her later works constitute broader investigations of relationships between body, space, and language.

Justesen has created a series of exhibitions, events, museum installations, performances, and mural work in Denmark and the rest of world since the mid-60s. And received number of awards including a life-long grant from The Danish Arts Foundation. Justesen has been a visiting professor and lecturer at art academies in Scandinavia, the U.S., and the Middle East.

The 1970s were especially dedicated to an investigation into the feminine gaze at a time where Justesen’s studio was located between the kitchen and the nursery. Justesen is continuously fighting for women artists’ rights and influence in the art world at many levels--from her work on various boards and positions in foundations, to co-organizing seminars concerning women artists’ positions in society.

Justesen has designed sets for a number of theatres since 1967. The co-operations in the 1990s were mainly with ballet companies. This included libretto and production design with the Randi Patterson Company as well as the building up education for set designers at The Danish National School of Theatre from 1985-90.

Justesen's artwork is represented in private and public collections, worldwide, including Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen. Kors Drag was published 1999; it comprises a collection of 200 images and 100 lines of words, rewritten by international female artists. Meltingtime # 11 is a retrospective catalogue published in 2003, documenting the melting times presented since 1980. Meltingtime # 16 will take place in Venice in October 2007.

Feminist Artist Statement

"….. Duchamp couldn’t think of anything new.
But for us women artists there was a lot to discover!

To a woman artist wanting everything, society seemed pretty narrow in the 1960s. A battle started in order to conquer breathing space, action space and language space in the world--which, from my point of view, includes having children, a career, and access to means of production in that postwar, welfare and increasingly global environment.

From this simple wish sprang various strategies towards society, strategies which I considered art work--and thank you Mr. Duchamp for deleting the border lines. The revolution was that women artists did this together and insisted on surviving all kinds of bloodshed.

This was done to perceive visual images from a female point of view. Unfold the invisible. Not that easy when you have been educated in a classical sculpture department. What does it look like? My studio was for a long time an inspiring threshold between the nursery and the kitchen.

The images which I have chosen for this feminist art base are part of that struggle. Sculpture # 2, 1968 is a more formal sculptural investigation, as is the last one shown from 1980, Ice Bride # 3 (conquering an iceberg-- melting time!). It refers to three-dimensional investigations that still challenge me.

I have used my own body in most of my work, in order not to get lost.

I take part in this feminist art base as evidence of an ongoing female strategy."

Art, Education, Censorship & Copyright Laws

ART HISTORY - I have an ongoing feud with this crazy woman over the difference between educational usage and the breaking of copyright laws.

Her argument is she wrote it, therefore its hers to distribute.

I however believe that anyone should be able to distribute educational material, in this case pertaining to art history. My argument is that as long as its for educational purposes it falls into the realm of Fair Use, and indeed if I ignored the chance to spread such educational material it would essentially be censorship.

"Fair use is a doctrine in United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as for commentary, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching or scholarship. It provides for the legal, non-licensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author's work under a four-factor balancing test. The term "fair use" originated in the United States, but a similar principle, fair dealing, exists in some other common law jurisdictions. Civil law jurisdictions have other limitations and exceptions to copyright."

So in essence I am correct as far as the law goes, but she refuses to understand the principle of it. Some jurisdictions use the Fair Dealing law which is more strict about usage, but when it comes to things posted on the internet pretty everything is fair game because it falls under international laws.

Here's what happened. Years ago we came across a website that was poorly designed and hadn't been updated in a long time. Our immediate assumption was that this website was defunct... but a lot of the articles we thought were valuable for art history education purposes, so we copied the articles and placed them on several active/popular websites so more people could read them, appreciate them and learn from them.

It should be noted at this point we did try contacting the owner of the defunct website, asking for their permission to reproduce (it is only polite after all). They never responded, confirming our conclusion that their website was defunct and no longer in use.

Several YEARS passed and this crazy woman emailed us asking the articles to be removed. According to her the original website is still active (despite looking otherwise). Yada yada yada, we eventually did, but it was a big long argument and we really only did it because she was super annoying and not because of any legal reasons.

What we did was place all the articles on a blog... which qualifies as a news zone. So not only is it educational, buts its also considered a news item. Whenever there is more news on that particular topic we can post more articles... and because it qualifies as both an educational and news website it is CLEARLY exempt from copyright laws.

And frankly what artist doesn't want free promotion and their paintings listed on lots of art history websites? Doesn't every artist want their painting to be as popular as the Mona Lisa some day?

These days we have her blocked, but occasionally she manages to send us a message somehow and we have to find a new way to block her. Whenever she does that however it INSPIRES us to write another article about the importance of education over censorship/copyright. Like today.

Hey crazy lady, stick that up your arse and rotate.

With respect to art (and anything on the internet) the topic of Fair Use comes up frequently. Many artists, notably Andy Warhol, have become known for their usage of other people's works in an effort to create something.

Thus artists, writers, bloggers, educators, feminists, activists and anybody with a bone to pick will always be usurping old material, showing it over again, sometimes changing it, sometimes leaving it as is... and they will always be protected by the laws of Fair Use.

THE ABOVE IMAGES WERE USED WITHOUT PERMISSION. :)

Guerrilla Girls

FEMINIST ART - They are a secret society whose names, faces and number of members remain unknown. But their message is heard loud and clear, as in overseas-in-other-countries “loud” and billboard-sized “clear.” They are the Guerrilla Girls and they threaten to be anywhere at anytime. Their upcoming visit to Albuquerque, however, is no secret.

Co-founders of the Guerilla Girls, Frida Kahlo and Käthe Kollwitz (adopting the names of dead women artists as pseudonyms is part of the group’s shtick) will give a presentation at the Kimo Theatre promising to “educate, infuriate and entertain.” The feminist art group has been rocking the boat since 1985, admonishing institutions in the art and film world that perpetuate sexism and racism. Despite their trademark gorilla masks, these are women who should be taken quite seriously.
The Guerrilla Girls have produced posters, books, billboards and entire exhibits displaying the cold, hard facts about the low percentage of women and minority artists represented in art and film. One poster produced by the group is aimed at the film industry and touts facts such as “No woman has ever won an Oscar for direction, cinematography or sound,” “94 percent of writing awards have gone to men” and “In 1987, 2.4 percent of major films were directed by women. By 1999, that number rose to a whopping 4 percent.” Other examples of the group’s work include the White House receiving a gift of estrogen pills courtesy of the Guerrilla Girls and a slew of informative coasters found their way into bars in Europe.

Museums and libraries have collected entire portfolios of Guerrilla Girl posters and after 20 years of raising their own unique brand of hell, it is not uncommon for their name to pop up in art history and women’s studies classes.

What started as a way to vent frustration by tacking up posters in New York City in the dark of night has blossomed into an activist group manifesting a noticeable change in American culture. But despite these inroads, there is still a lot of work to do, as Kollwitz explained recently in an interview with Local iQ. Though seemingly intimidating with their hairy masks and black attire, this group is much less judgmental than one would expect. Kollwitz is somewhat understanding of why people are hesitant to associate themselves with the word “feminism.”

“(It) has been demonized for so long,” she said of the common feminist stereotype as humorless, dour, bitchy and ugly. “I can’t tell people what to call themselves ... the labels aren’t super important. But to me it’s important to call myself a feminist. It’s a whole new way of looking at the world.”

As intimidating as feminism can be for some, part of the Girls’ ammunition is humor and wit, hence the gorilla masks. Kollwitz noted that the group believes feminism could use a little humor and it certainly helps to spread their message to those who may not initially be convinced.

“We aren’t just interested in talking to people who agree with us,” Kollwitz explained, adding that when addressing people who may find their messages abrasive, a little humor goes a long way. “It lets you sneak in and surprise and disarm them.”

516 Arts invited the Guerrilla Girls to speak in Albuquerque as part of their Speak Out: Art, Design & Politics exhibition, which is on display through December 20. The co-sponsor of the visit, Through the Flower, is a local non-profit art organization founded by accomplished artist, Judy Chicago.

Susannah Rodee, executive director of Through the Flower, described her excitement about the event in a recent interview, saying that the efforts of the Guerrilla Girls, “Are directly related to the mission of Through the Flower, which is to educate the public about the importance of art and its power in countering the erasure of women’s achievements.”

In addition to their presentation, the Guerrilla Girls will also facilitate a workshop. After the masked avengers explain their philosophy on political art, workshop participants will be given the opportunity to work on their own political art pieces in small groups.

“Great projects have come out of these workshops,” Kollwitz said. “We get out of town and then the people (from the workshops) go and raise hell.”

Though the group has at times been in serious danger chased, threatened, etc., Kollwitz noted that not all Guerrilla Girls adversaries tend to react in such an inciting way.

“A lot of discrimination is unconscious, people just perpetuating the status quo,” she said.
Kollwitz added that the Guerrilla Girls has often received letters of apologies and thanks. Most importantly, the group’s unique and unparalleled work has prompted well-known museums to increase their displays of works by minorities and women. But the Guerrilla Girls aren’t relaxing one bit and will continue to roam the world, reinventing the “F” word along the way.

Ed Fox

FEMINIST ART - By Ed Fox.

"In the early days I just wanted to be given a chance. I got rejected numerous times by the fashion and adult industries, photo reps, and advertising agencies. I have kept every rejection letter and every fan mail I have ever received. The Art Center College of Design and the rest of the people that tried to put me down really held me back. I felt like Rocky taking a pounding. I knew that the harder I got beat, the greater the reward would be—that there would be more of an impact when I would finally get up.

While studying at the Art Center I was told numerous times I was wasting my talent by creating erotic imagery. I followed my dream, and on my way up with my head down, ten years had passed. Comments on my photography went from “You are stunting yourself” to “You are in the beam of the light.” I used to be the little boy flipping anxiously through the pages of adult magazines, and now I’m the one making them—I still can’t believe it.

My fascination with the female form and appreciation for light is what inspired me to become a photographer. I create to satisfy the need to see a better image than the last, and there is ample gratification if at least one other person values my work. I would rather be famous than rich. The fans validate my vision and inspire me to create more.

The most tempting part of a woman’s body is her feet. Feet are a woman’s second body, one I can enjoy without her being offended or even aware. I began noticing painted toenails at the age of 14 and slowly fine-tuned the fetish into my life. Never would I have imaged that my “little secret” would attract so many people.

I originally wanted to become a photographer so I could shoot for Playboy. Since I realized that wasn’t going to happen, I started focusing more on the type of imagery I secretly desired to make. I believe now that I will ultimately be appreciated more by shooting what I really want and for being published by Taschen. I am so grateful for the chance they have given me. I saved myself for Taschen because I wanted my first and possibly only book to be the best it possibly could. It’s printed documentation that I exist—I have finally left my mark. I want to be remembered as an esthete who made a difference in the adult world."

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Hasisi Park

FEMINIST ART - By Hasisi Park.

We assume that artists are of a different category to normal people, and they live a special life. As an artist and photographer, I’ve been trying to put myself in a general category of normal life. I create projects and series out of intimate life through my relationships or the roles I have to fulfill, and all the discordances between my circumstances and I. I’m female after all, so often my works speak for women. For example, being a femme fatal in The Housemaid (a series of work, homage to a filmmaker Kim Ki Young), trying to be a member of a whole new family in The Family (a series of work from Japan), and making a small funeral for bloody panties. I role-play a certain character in an absurd situation, or exaggerate trivial events of everyday life to give women a chance to reconsider their dejected viewpoint toward the world and themselves.

As a lazy and weird-looking Hikikomori (a Japanese term referring to the phenomenon of reclusive individuals who have chosen to withdraw from social life), which may explain why I don’t use pretty models in my work. I prefer to appear in front of a camera. Being a Hikikomori is certainly related to my attitude and perception of art because it limits what I can get from outside. Rather than being a spectator, I choose to be objectified by frightened women, including myself. When you first look at my photographs, it seems difficult to identify with the character because she plays out what most women can’t present in normal life. But it unconsciously arouses desires of becoming one of the characters in the image. By merging gratification of deviation and satisfaction of aspiration, my works could be classified as feminist art.

People who only believe what they see are easily cheated. Lacan once said, “Cynics believed in their eyes miss effectiveness of symbolic fabrication even though the fabrication is realities which compose our life.” I’d like to stimulate people with indirect seduction, which could be a total lie, meaning fictional. On the assumption that the lie itself makes people uncomfortable and insulted, the symbolic fabrication of the image affects people, and they automatically find a connection to their memories or experiences. That is the most important aspect of producing art for me. I don’t have the answer to what I should keep focusing on to awaken people or satisfy them. But I know I want to develop the relationship between audience and artist, and a genuine way exists through an interaction. I will keep providing interesting clues and narratives to make viewers click on their own memory so that they can create a brand new story of themselves.

Melanie Manchot

FEMINIST ART - Right: Melanie Manchot. Emma & Charlie I, 2001.

'Emma & Charlie I' is the first image in a triptych which belongs to the 'Fontainbleau Series', consisting of four such triptychs in total. The series takes as its starting point the well known anonymous image in the Louvre of Gabrielle d'Estree and her sister in the bath. Throughout its existence this work has over and again caught people's curiosity and attention and has recurred as reference for artists across generations.

Drawn to the very ambiguity of the gesture as well as to the contrast between the intimacy of the touch and the blankness of the protagonists expression I set out to work with different sets of women restaging the situation. The invited women have different types of relationships to each other and how this manifests across the three images is a process of discussion, collaboration and experimentation. In each case I ask the two women to first restage the image itself and to then continue to find gestures and moments of touch while remaining constrained within the confines of the bath.

A Victory for Obama is a Victory for Women

Congratulations to Barack Obama, the new president of the USA. A victory for Obama is a victory for men and women around the world.

Let all the world sing and dance in celebration!

Black Womanhood

Wellesley College’s Davis Museum and Cultural Center

Right: DOUBLE FUSE: Wangechi Mutu’s playful razzmatazz makes reference to the past but lives in the present.

“Black Womanhood,” the exhibit at Wellesley College’s Davis Museum and Cultural Center, must have seemed like a sharp idea when it was being put together. It examines the ways in which “contemporary artists are challenging historic and often stereotypical images that present black women as the alluringly beautiful Other, the erotic fantasy, or the super-maternal mammy.” By now this is familiar, if still urgent, stuff; what makes this outing special is that it gathers more than 100 objects — traditional African art, Western colonial photos and postcards, and contemporary art — that connect today’s dissectors with the origins of the ugly stereotypes they’re working to take apart.

Barbara Thompson, who organized the show for Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum of Art in New Hampshire, does a good job of mapping the territory. But it’s an uneven show with a dour vision that leaves a mediciny taste in your mouth — and, I think, offers signs of a generation gap among curators.

The art of African women was traditionally pottery, beadwork, basketry, textiles, and the decoration of their own bodies (tattoos, scarification, hairstyles, body paint). But Westerners collected primarily African sculpture, masks, and costumes — which tended to be made by and for African men. The women’s portrayal of themselves was more abstracted, less obvious than their men’s literal, if stylized, depictions of women. The show presents women-made pots with bumps and patterns that make reference to women’s physiques and body scarification. The women’s pieces emerge directly from their work and their rituals — like a leather skirt beaded by an adolescent girl in her seclusion as she made the traditional passage into womanhood.

The most charged part of the show surveys early-20th-century Western photos and postcards of African women. Western attitudes are apparent in images that treated the women as curious ethnographic specimens and pin-ups — either untamed, sexually available African primitives or Oriental harem girls. Photographers tailored their shots to different audiences by photographing the same models elaborately garbed or in various states of undress. A postcard of a young topless Temne woman lounging on a rug was published around 1910 as “Timnie Girl, Sierra Leone.” When it was republished in the 1920s, the caption read, “Just you and me. Sierra Leone.” These postcards could be the foundation of an electrifying stand-alone exhibit.

Right: HOT-EN-TOT: More of the contemporary work should have Renée Cox’s crackle and swagger.

But “Black Womanhood” — primarily work by black women, with some contributions by men and whites — deflates as it moves to the art of today. Sokari Douglas Camp’s 1995 sculpture Gelede from Top to Toe is an African woman turned into an armored tank of steel and chicken wire with wooden breasts that jut out like battering rams. In Renée Cox’s giant 2001 photo self-portrait Baby Back, she imitates Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s 1814 painting La grande odalisque by reclining, with nothing hiding her brown skin except for red heels, on a gold chaise longue. Cox asks how race colors our notions of beauty, and she teases black-white, male-female hierarchies. Ingres’s naked white lady is an imagined harem girl holding a fan; Cox has a whip.

More of the contemporary work should have Cox’s crackle and swagger. It should sadden, celebrate, anger. You’d think Kara Walker’s bawdy, violent versions of ante-bellum paper-cut silhouettes would be just what this show needs, but the 1997 pop-up book that’s here is too tiny to convey the fierce beauty of her best work.

The then-and-now focus favors artists whose work is built on looking back — but many artists seem hemmed in by their historical references. And the theme pigeonholes art that is more expansive, like María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s 1994 self-portrait When I Am Not Here/Estoy Allá. The photo shows her naked body from her chin to her belly, everything painted with blue waves. Slung over her shoulders and hanging over her breasts are a pair of baby bottles. Milk seems to drip from the bottles and her breasts into a simple wooden boat that she cradles. A black Cuban native who lives in Brookline with her white husband and their son, Campos-Pons often makes reference to the African diaspora and traditional African art. But her explorations of motherhood, race, and much else have their own rich mysterious symbols, and they’re planted in the present by her sculptural and symbolic use of hair extensions and beads.

These are highlights among contemporary works that are mostly dull, didactic, and rote — like a 1990-’91 photo from Carla Williams’s How To Read Character series that pairs a diagram of the parts of a cow with a photo of the nude artist. It’s art focused more on being good for you than on engaging you. “Global Feminisms,” a survey of recent international feminist art that was organized by the Brooklyn Museum and appeared at the Davis last fall, was similarly full of dour art. This eat-your-broccoli didacticism seems at least a decade behind the times.

In “Black Womanhood,” that’s partly because much of the newish work is at least 10 years old. But it also seems to represent a generation gap among curators who haven’t picked up on the changes in this area of art over the past decade or so. These curators know black and feminist art of ’80s and ’90s, which often took the form of pared-down didactic critiques. What they’ve missed is emerging women artists and artists of color who while continuing to berate the straight white guys who’ve kept their people down also create exuberant visions of what the future can hold. And they’ve embraced lavish beauty — often for its own sake. Among younger black artists, this trend tends to show up as vivid psychedelic colors, glitter, and patterns and fabrics that make reference to traditional African art as well as ’60s and ’70s Afro soul. These artists remain engaged with the past, but in terms of the themes and styles of their childhoods, when the transformations of the civil-rights movement, feminism, and post-colonialism began to be felt.

The single example of all that here is Wangechi Mutu’s 2003 collage and ink drawing Double Fuse. It depicts weird futuristic glam twins with hands made of motorcycle parts and glittering skin-tight outfits with blond hair as epaulets. The patterns recall African art, but the goofy, cheeky, playful razzamatazz is more about beauty than a comment on the past.

Where are Chris Olifi, Mickalene Thomas, Lorna Williams, Laylah Ali, Saya Woolfalk, Yinka Shonibare, El Anatsui, and the Chicago artist Nick Cave? The show would benefit from flashbacks to Betye Saar’s acid 1972 assemblage The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, which gave the icon a broom in one hand and a rifle in the other. Or cartoonist Robert Crumb’s notorious ’60s caricature Angelfood McSpade, which was inspired by racist comics of the 1920s and ’30s.

And though it doesn’t fit the show’s then-and-now focus, I wish “Black Womanhood” had a place for pseudonymous Chicago artist Lo (see www.livingoprah.com), who is spending this year following, as closely as she can, the advice Oprah Winfrey gives on her television show and her Web site and in her magazines. If that doesn’t tell us something deep about black womanhood today, what does?

Open Letter to Anti-Abortionists

Open Letter to Anti-Abortionists

"IF ANTI-ABORTIONISTS SPENT HALF AS MUCH TIME GETTING RID OF POVERTY AS THEY SPEND TRYING TO GET RID OF ABORTION POOR WOMEN WOULDN'T NEED ABORTIONS AS OFTEN ANYWAY."

73% of women who have abortions are living below the poverty level (earning $9,570 or less per year).

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