Can You Name 5 Women Artists?

In the Sackler Center of the Brooklyn Museum, plenty of women artists had a vivid insight to the messages that they wanted to send through their work of art. Many of these women's artwork convey the political problems in the past and their call to action to advocate change by films, banners, wall art, portraits, and the like. Five female artists to focus on are Cecilia Vicuna, Tina Modotti, Lady Pink, L.J. Roberts, and Coco Fusco.


1. Cecilia Vicuna was a Chilean artist who concentrated on the topic of the troubled economy, the destruction of the environment, and homogenization. She was born in the capital of Santiago in the 1970s. Her art exhibitions are displayed in museums including Museo Nacional Bellas Artes de Santiago and the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London.

2. Tina Modotti was an Italian artist  who moved to Mexico in 1923 as the apprentice of American photographer Edward Weston. She was committed to the Mexican people and the social ideals of the Communist Party, in which both factors greatly influenced her photography.

3. Sandra Fabara, or "Lady Pink," was a pioneering graffiti artist. She was born in Ecuador, but she grew up in New York City. She started her passion of utilizing graffiti in 1979. She found herself competing with boys in the graffiti subculture from 1979 to 1985. Lady Pink came to be a cult figure in the hip-hop subculture from her graffiti artworks as well as her starring role in the motion picture "Wild Style." She had been putting her paintings in exhibition in art galleries while she was still in high school, and she had her own show at the Moore College of Art when she was 21 years old. The grafitti artist displays her collections of art around museums in the northeast such as Whitney Museum, the MET in New York City, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Groningen Museum of Holland; she continues to create new paintings and teaches school students her 30 years of experience. One of her exhibitions in the Sackler Center was Lady Liberty Is Bush's Whore in 2008, which is a mural that expresses the decreasing civil liberties under George W. Bush. Her depiction of the Statue of Liberty as a sex object, holding fast food, and chained to the president that resembles a monkey expressed her criticisms on what the United States would become based on Bush's direction of the country.

4. L.J. Roberts is an artist who advocated for women's empowerment and LGTBQ rights. She was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. She currently lives and works in Joshua Tree, CA and Brooklyn. As an advocate of the LGTBQ community, her studio's work explores feminist queer, trans politics, the AIDS epidemic, etc. One of his exhibitions that is found in the Brooklyn Museum is Sisters Are Doing It for Themselves in 2011, which challenged the hierarchies of mastery and skill from the image of the women and rifles calling for social and political reorganization.

5. Coco Fusco is an artist, writer, and feminist theorist who explores the politics of gender, race, war, and identity in photography and various other mediums. She created the three series of the artwork The Undiscovered Amerindians:  "Oh Please!" Begged the Gentleman at the Whitney Biennial, How Can the Museum Justify Such Deception, and If People Thought You Were Real, Didn't You Fall? in 2012. These illustrations were documented responses to Fusco and her collaborator, Guillermo Gomez-Pena. She presents humans from non-Western cultures, engaged in long colonial history.