Throughout
history, women have been recognized lesser as opposed to men, and
sometimes not recognized at all, for their work. Prior to my Art and
Women class, I had almost no knowledge of any artists, regardless of
their gender. However, I was exposed to a world of an ongoing
struggle fought for centuries, where male patriarchy dictated unequal
pay, and recognition. I am glad I now know of several women artists,
their work, and the odds they battled in order to be recognized for
it. I will discuss five women artists, who quite honestly stood out
to me, and they are Sonia Delaunay, Frida Kahlo, Faith Ringgold, Judy
Chicago, and Shirin Neshat.
Sonia
Delaunay (November
14, 1885 – December 5, 1979) belonged
to the era of the “isms”, strictly, the Modernism era, as she
painted abstract art. She was a Ukranian born French artist who
worked most of her life in Paris. She was amongst the pioneers of the
Orphism art movement, using strong colors and geometric shapes, as
presented in Chadwick, “ease
of movement and primacy of color as expressive medium also
characterized Sonia Delaunay's work in both painting and
decoration"(Chadwick, 260).
Sonia
Delaunay, Couverture, 1911
She
painted, and also explored textile design and stage set design, and
was the first female living female artist to have a retrospective
exhibition at the Louvre in 1964. Her
work in modern design included the concepts of geometric abstraction,
the integration of furniture, fabrics, wall coverings, and clothing.
Delaunay's painting Coccinelle
was featured on a stamp jointly released by the French Post Office,
La Poste and the United Kingdom's Royal Mail in 2004.
Sonia
Delaunay, Simultaneous Contrasts, 1912
Frida
Kahlo (July 6th,
1907 – July 13th,
1954) was a Mexican Surrealist painter who typically
painted self-portraits using vibrant colors in a style that was
influenced by cultures of Mexico, and European Surrealism. Her
self-portraits were usually a depiction of her life and her pain,
mental and physical.
At the age of eighteen she was involved in a
bus accident that crushed her, left her immobile, and permanently
damaged her reproductive ability. She spent her recovery time
painting and drawing, including numerous self portraits using a
mirror across from her bed. She stated,
"I
paint myself because I am often alone and I am the subject I know
best".
Her
art spans over a hundred and forty paintings, including over fifty
self portraits, many of them in a Surrealist style using symbolism to
depict her pain and anguish. Unlike most Surrealists however she
disliked the idea of the dream world and psychology. She stated,
"They
thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I
painted my own reality"
Frida
Kahlo, The Broken Column, 1944
She
was included in esteemed group shows in the Museum of Modern Art, the
Boston Institute of Contemporary Arts, and the Philadelphia Museum of
Art. Her 1944 piece "The Broken Column" may be the one
painting that best shows her pain. The nails in her body and the
tears in Frida's eyes are a metaphor for the excruciating physical
pain, while her nudity depicts her helplessness and sexual angst.
Frida
eventually became an impassioned Communist. Since the 70's and 80's,
numerous articles, books and documentaries have been made about her
life and art, as she was a central historical figure of the
Neomexicanismo Art Movement in Mexico, the 1983 movie Frida,
Naturaleza Viva,
Haydeen Herrera's Frida:
The Biography of Frida Kahlo,
and the 2002 film Frida.
Frida
Kahlo, The Two Fridas,
1939
Faith
Ringgold (Faith Will Jones) was born in Harlem, New York City on
October 8, 1930. She was raised during the Harlem Renaissance and
exposed by her parents to all of its cultural offerings. She suffered
from asthma as a young girl,she spent a lot of time at home with her
mother, who was a fashion designer and taught her to sew and work
creatively with fabrics. She enrolled at the City College of New York
in 1950, and wound up studying art education when the liberal arts
department denied her application. She married a musician named
Robert Wallace, with whom she would have two children, and would
divorce several years later, after Wallace developed a heroin
addiction that would eventually lead to his death. After receiving
her B.S. in 1955, she taught art in the public school system and also
enrolled in a graduate studies program at City College, where she
developed her own art. She received her M.A. in art in 1959 and later
toured Europe, visiting many of its finest museums.
Faith
Ringgold, Die, 1967
She
remarried to Burdette Ringgold in 1962 and began a series of
paintings which counted among her most important work—American
People, which
was featured in her first solo gallery show in 1967. Centered around
themes from the civil rights movement, paintings such as Neighbors,
Die,
and The Flag Is
Bleeding
all capture the racial tensions of the era. In 1970, Ringgold’s
Black Light
series was featured in her second solo gallery show. Early in the
1970's, Ringgold visited the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and was deeply
affected by its collection of Tibetan thangka
paintings in particular, which influenced her art. Upon returning to
New York, Ringgold began to incorporate similar elements in her work,
painting with acrylic on canvases with fabric borders and creating
cloth dolls and soft sculptures, including Wilt,
which depicted basketball legend Wilt
Chamberlain.
She left her teaching job in 1973, and branched out in other
directions, beginning a collection of portrait sculptures called The
Harlem Series,
and creating African-influenced masks that were included in
performance pieces.
Faith
Ringgold, Who’s Bad?, 1988
She
also made posters in support of the Black Panthers and activist
Angela
Davis.
She attempted to have her autobiography published, but was
unsuccessful, and so discovered a new way to tell her story. She drew
inspiration from Tibetan art, and began a series of quilts that
remains perhaps her best-known work. She assembled the first quilt,
Echoes of Harlem
in 1980 and went on to make numerous others, eventually incorporating
text as well.
Faith
Ringgold, Tar Beach, 1988
In
the 1990s, Ringgold embarked on a literary career and published the
children’s book Tar
Beach (1991)—adapted
from her quilt of the same name, and her memoir We
Flew over the Bridge
(1995) She has written and illustrated more than 15 other children’s
books to date. She was a professor at the University of California at
San Diego, where she taught until 2002.
She
staged protests at museums such as the Whitney and MoMA over the lack
of black artists represented in their exhibitions. At
the Whitney, women artists and African American artists were excluded
from the show. She founded several organizations, such as, Ad
Hoc Women's Art Committee; Women Artists in Revolution (WAR); Women
Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation (WSABAL); and National
Black Feminist Organization.
Judy
Chicago (born July 20th, 1939) is an artist, author,
feminist, educator, and intellectual whose career now spans five
decades. She has been included in hundreds of publications across the
world, which attests to her influence within and beyond the art
community.
Judy
Chicago, "Virginia Woolf", The Resurrection Triptych,
1973
After
a decade of professional art practice, in 1974, Chicago explored the
subject of women’s history to create her most well-known work, The
Dinner Party, which was executed between 1974 and 1979 with the
participation of hundreds of volunteers. This monumental multimedia
project, a symbolic history of women in Western Civilization, has
been the subject of countless articles and art history texts and is
included in innumerable publications in diverse fields. In 2007, The
Dinner Party was permanently housed at the Brooklyn Museum as the
centerpiece of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.
“The
Dinner Party comprises 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” (Brooklyn Museum, The Dinner
Party)
She
recently, Chicago published a final updated book, The Dinner Party:
Restoring Women to History (The Monacelli Press, 2014).
Shirin
Neshat (born March 26, 1957) is an Iranian visual artist who is known
mainly for her work in film, video and photography.
Her work is entailed by the Postmodernism era, and it contrasts Islam
and the West, femininity and masculinity, public life and private
life, antiquity and modernity, while bridging the spaces between
these subjects. Neshat
has been recognized countless times for her work, such as being named
Artist of the Decade by Huffington Post.
Shirin
Neshat, The Last Word, 2003
Her
work refers to the social, cultural and religious codes of Muslim
societies and the complexity of certain oppositions, such as man and
woman. She portrays this theme by showing two or more coordinated
films simultaneously, creating stark visual contrasts through motifs
such as light and dark, black and white, male and female. Her work
recognizes the complex intellectual and religious forces shaping the
identity of Muslim women throughout the world, and examines concepts
such as martyrdom, the space of exile, and the issues of identity and
femininity.
Today,
I can proudly say that I have more knowledge of women artists, and
through my Art and Women class was able to experience the struggle
they went through in order to be recognized for their effort and the
quality of their work. I hope to share this knowledge with other
friends, both women and men, struggling to be recognized for their
work, and inspire them to believe in the work they do.
Works Cited:
- Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, and Society. Fifth Edition. New York: Penguin, 2002. Print.
- Guerrilla Girls. The Guerrilla Girls' Bedside companion to the History of Western Art. New York: Penguin, 1998. Print
- https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/dinner_party
- http://www.gladstonegallery.com/artist/shirin-neshat/#&panel1-1
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