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.
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