Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Post 4


An outstanding woman artist that has marked history is Judy Chicago. Famously known for her art piece "The Dinner Party," it forms part of the Brooklyn museum. It was originally a gift of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation given in 2002. It was produced from 1974-1979 with the goal of representing every female artist that had been omitted from art history. Her mission was to end the ongoing cycle of omission in which women were written out of historical record. The format of The Dinner Party arranged on a triangular table with a total of thirty-nine plate settings.  Each plate was a representation of every important woman in history.

The piece consists of embroidered runners, gold chalices and utensils, and porcelain plates with different styles that were appropriate to each individual woman being honored. There are a total of 1,038 women being honored at the table. 999 of those women’s names were inscribed in gold on the white tile floor of the table. The triangular shape has significance because it has long been a symbol of the female. It is also an equilateral triangle to represent equality. The 39 plates themselves start flat and begin to emerge in higher relief towards the very end of the chronology, meant to represent modern woman's gradual independence and equality, though it is still not completely free of societal expectations.


Also at the Brooklyn Museum we encountered another phenomenal artist, Wangechi Mutu. Born in Nairobi, Kenya, she was best known for scrutinizing globalization by combining materials of sculpture and imagery to exemplify it. She was inspired by African traditions, international politics, the fashion industry, and science fiction. Her work explores gender, race, war, colonialism, global consumption, and the eroticization of the black female body.

 Mutu is best known for spectacular and provocative collages depicting female figures—part human, animal, plant, and machine—in fantastical landscapes that are simultaneously unnerving and alluring, defying easy categorization and identification. The piece “Le Noble Savage,” shows all of these categories and how she views the female body. You see a mixture of nature, violence, race, and gender all being portrayed through her female image.


Similar to Mutu, Ana Mendieta also created unique erotic pieces, which is why she is my third woman artist. Her experiences were portrayed through her art work. Like many other female artists she used her body as an instrumental part of her artistic practice makes the distance between art and life appear to shrink even further. She first used blood in a 1973 performance protesting against rape. Mendieta’s artistic roots lay in feminism and in the anti-commodification tendencies of earth, performance, and process work in the 1970s. Her work made powerful identifications between the female body and the land in ways that annihilated the conventions of surface on which the traditions of Western art rest. (Chadwick 37)


Violence also fascinated Mendieta. She worked on “Rape Scene” in 1973 as she recreated the scene of a real violent rape-murder of a young woman that had been reported abused on the news. This caused a catastrophe as people passed by in front of a doorway where Mendieta spread animal blood to show the effect of the effect of violence and how she interpreted this woman experienced. Intentionally, there was an absence of causality in these images to displace the viewer’s ability to comprehend each scene as a narrative. The images were meant to challenge the viewer, mediating any sense of transparency in Mendieta’s use of her own body in the work.

Another inspiring female artist is Betye Saar. Born in 1926 in Los Angeles, California is known for her work in the field of assemblage. In the late 1960s Saar began collecting images of Aunt Jemima, Uncle Tom, Little Black Sambo, and other stereotyped African-American figures from folk culture and advertising. She incorporated them into collages and assemblages, transforming them into statements of political and social protest. 


In the 1970s Saar shifted focus again, exploring ritual and tribal objects from Africa as well as items from African-American folk traditions. In new boxed assemblages, she combined shamanistic tribal fetishes with images and objects intended to evoke the magical and the mystical. Her Aunt Jemima art piece became her signature in the art world. Since Saar was a part of the black arts movement in the 1970s, challenging myths and stereotypes. In the 1990s, her work was politicized while she continued to challenge the negative ideas of African Americans. One of her better-known and controversial pieces is that entitled “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima.” It is a “mammy” doll carrying a broom in one hand and a shotgun in the other, and placed in front of the syrup labels. Her work began with found objects arranged in boxes or windows. The items would reflect her mixed ancestry.

Barbara Kruger is my last chosen female artist. Aside from the fact that she was born in Newark, New Jersey, she is an inspiring artist that is best known for being an all-around artist. She did many things like photography, painting, and a bit of sculpture. Kruger’s earliest artworks date to 1969. Large woven hall hangings of yarn, beads, sequins, feathers, and ribbons exemplify the feminist recuperation of craft during this period. Despite her inclusion in the Whitney Biennial in 1973 and solo exhibitions at Artists Space and Fischbach Gallery, both in New York, the following two years, she was dissatisfied with her output and its detachment from her growing social and political concerns. In the fall of 1976, Kruger abandoned art making and moved to Berkeley, California, where she taught at the University of California for four years and steeped herself in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes. She took up photography in 1977, producing a series of black-and-white details of architectural exteriors paired with her own textual ruminations on the lives of those living inside. Published as an artist’s book, Picture/Readings (1979) foreshadow the aesthetic vocabulary Kruger developed in her mature work.



By 1979, Kruger stopped taking photographs and began to employ found images in her art, mostly from mid-century American print-media sources, with words collaged directly over them. The Untitled Perfect - 1980, portrays the torso of a woman, hands clasped in prayer, evoking the Virgin Mary, the embodiment of submissive femininity; the word “perfect” is emblazoned along the lower edge of the image. These early collages, in which Kruger deployed techniques she had perfected as a graphic designer, inaugurated the artist’s ongoing political, social, and especially feminist provocations and commentaries on religion, sexuality, racial and gender stereotypes, consumerism, corporate greed, and power.


 Works Cited:



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