Friday, May 13, 2016

Extra Credit: Can You Name 5 Women Artists?

      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:
  1. Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, and Society. Fifth Edition. New York: Penguin, 2002. Print.
  2. Guerrilla Girls. The Guerrilla Girls' Bedside companion to the History of Western Art. New York: Penguin, 1998. Print
  3. https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/dinner_party
  4. http://www.gladstonegallery.com/artist/shirin-neshat/#&panel1-1

No comments:

Post a Comment