Feminist art movement - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The feminist art movement refers to the efforts and accomplishments of feminists internationally to make art that reflects women's lives and experiences, as well as to change the foundation for the production and reception of contemporary art. It also sought to bring more visibility to women within art history

Art history

Art history has historically been understood as the academic study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts, i.e. genre, design, format, and style...

and art practice. Corresponding with general developments within feminism

Feminism

Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...

, and often including such self-organizing tactics as the consciousness-raising group, the movement began in the 1960s and flourished throughout the 1970s as an outgrowth of the so-called second wave of feminism

Second-wave feminism

The Feminist Movement, or the Women's Liberation Movement in the United States refers to a period of feminist activity which began during the early 1960s and lasted through the early 1990s....

. It has been called "the most influential international movement of any during the postwar period" and its effects continue to the present.

Origins

The feminist art movement began in the late 1960s. America's first feminist art education program took place at California State University, Fresno

California State University, Fresno

California State University, Fresno, often referred to as Fresno State University and synonymously known in athletics as Fresno State , is one of the leading campuses of the California State University system, located at the northeast edge of Fresno, California, USA.The campus sits at the foot of...

in California in 1970 when fifteen female students and instructor Judy Chicago

Judy Chicago

Judy Chicago is a feminist artist, author, and educator.Chicago has been creating artwork since the mid 1960s. Her earliest forays into the art world coincided with the rise of Minimalism, which she eventually abandoned in favor of art she believed to have greater content and relevance...

helped pioneer key strategies of the early feminist art movement, including collaboration, the use of “female technologies” like costume, performance, and video, and early forms of media critique. Judy Chicago, with painter Miriam Schapiro

Miriam Schapiro

Miriam Schapiro is a Canadian-born artist based in America. She is a pioneer of feminist art. She is also considered part of the Pattern and Decoration art movement....

, went on to found the feminist art program at California Institute of the Arts

California Institute of the Arts

The California Institute of the Arts, commonly referred to as CalArts, is located in Valencia, in Los Angeles County, California. It was incorporated in 1961 as the first degree-granting institution of higher learning in the United States created specifically for students of both the visual and the...

(CalArts) in Los Angeles, whose students created, in 1972, a month-long feminist installation in an empty house, entitled Womanhouse

Womanhouse

Womanhouse was a feminist art installation and performance space organized by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, co-founders of the California Institute of the Arts Feminist Art Program. Chicago, Schapiro, their students and women artists from the local community participated...

. At CalArts at that same time, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville

Sheila Levrant de Bretteville

Sheila Levrant de Bretteville is a graphic designer, artist and educator whose work reflects her belief in the importance of feminist principles and user participation in graphic design...

founded a feminist design program and Deena Metzger taught feminist writing.

In 1971 the art historian Linda Nochlin

Linda Nochlin

Linda Nochlin is an American art historian, university professor and writer. She is considered to be a leader in feminist art history studies. She is best known as a proponent of the question "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?"...

published a groundbreaking essay 'Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?' in ArtNews in which she investigated the social and economic factors that had prevented talented women from achieving the same status as their male counterparts.

Subsequently, many organizations dedicated to women artists were founded in the 1970s to support women artists. Only a few lasted into the 1990s and beyond.

In response to the 1971 Art and Technology exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is an art museum in Los Angeles, California. It is located on Wilshire Boulevard along Museum Row in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles, adjacent to the George C. Page Museum and La Brea Tar Pits....

, an ad hoc group of women organized, calling themselves the L.A. Council of Women Artists. They researched the number of women included in exhibitions at LACMA and issued a report protesting the absence of women artists from that exhibition, as well as generalized artworld sexism. They set a precedent for later feminist groups (such as the Guerrilla Girls

Guerrilla Girls

Guerrilla Girls are an anonymous group of feminists devoted to fighting against sexism within the visual fine art world internationally. Started in New York City in 1985 to protest gender and racial inequality in the art world, members are known for the gorilla masks they wear to keep their...

).

Women's Caucus for the Arts, an offshoot of the College Art Association was founded in 1972 at the San Francisco Conference. A WCA confernce is held annually and there are chapters in most areas of the U.S.

The Woman's Building

Woman's Building

The Woman's Building was an non-profit arts and education center located in Los Angeles, California, in the United States. The Woman's Building focused on feminist art and served as a venue for the women's movement and was spearheaded by artist Judy Chicago, graphic designer Sheila Levrant de...

which included the Feminist Studio Workshop was founded by Sheila Levrant de Bretteville

Sheila Levrant de Bretteville

Sheila Levrant de Bretteville is a graphic designer, artist and educator whose work reflects her belief in the importance of feminist principles and user participation in graphic design...

, art historian Arlene Raven

Arlene Raven

Arlene Raven was a feminist art historian, author, critic, educator, and curator...

, and Judy Chicago

Judy Chicago

in 1973. Many of the feminist artists and designers from CalArts joined other feminist artists at the Woman's Building, an important center of the west coast feminist artist movement in the 1970s and 1980s in which meetings, workshops, performances, and exhibitions regularly took place. Womanspace Gallery relocated there. During the first year, there were national conferences on feminist film, writing, ceramics, among others.

Simultaneously, women artists in New York also began to come together for meetings and exhibitions. Collective galleries such as A.I.R. in New York and Artemisia in Chicago were formed to provide visibility for art by feminist artists. The strength of the feminist movement allowed for the emergence and visibility of many new types of work by women but also helped facilitate a range of new practices by men. Women Artists in Revolution (WAR) protested the lack of exposure of women artists in 1969. The Ad Hoc Women Artists' Committee (AWC) formed in 1971 to address the Whitney Museum's exclusion of women artists but expanded its focus over time.

The Women's Interart Center in New York, founded in the 1970s in New York City, is still in operation. The Women's Video Festival was held yearly for a number of years in the early 1970s, also in New York City. Many women artists continue to organize working groups, collectives, and nonprofit galleries in various locales around the world.

The Feminist Art Project (TFAP) was founded by the Institute for Women and Arts at Rutgers University

Rutgers University

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...

. The Feminist Art Project is an international collaborative initiative focusing on the Feminist Art Movement and the aesthetic, intellectual and political impact of women on the visual arts, art history, and art practice, past and present. The project is a strategic intervention against the ongoing erasure of women from the cultural record. The Feminist Art Project promotes diverse feminist art events, education and publications through its website and online calendar and facilitates networking and regional program development worldwide. The Feminist Art Project brings together feminist artists, curators, critics, and educators from all backgrounds to shine a spotlight on the accomplishments of the Feminist Art Movement. Its primary goal is to increase the visibility of feminist art and to promote the recognition of the aesthetic and intellectual impact of women on the visual arts and culture. TFAP facilitates regional networking and program development internationally by linking visitors to TFAP Regional Coordinators, now 40 in number. As a result, many universities have created courses dedicated to surveying women's contributions to the art world, and many workshops around the nation have taught and displayed the dynamic elements of feminist art. The Feminist Art Project Calendar posts over 1300 feminist art events and publications. Educational materials are available for downloading from the site's Resource pages called FARE (Feminist Art Resources in Education)

There are thousands of examples of women associated with the feminist art movement. The following are only a few examples of majorly important artists and writers who can be credited with making the movement visible in culture: Judy Chicago

Judy Chicago

, founder of the first known Feminist Art Program (in Fresno, California), Miriam Schapiro

Miriam Schapiro

Miriam Schapiro is a Canadian-born artist based in America. She is a pioneer of feminist art. She is also considered part of the Pattern and Decoration art movement....

, co-founder of the Feminist Art Program at Cal Arts, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville

Sheila Levrant de Bretteville

Sheila Levrant de Bretteville is a graphic designer, artist and educator whose work reflects her belief in the importance of feminist principles and user participation in graphic design...

and Arlene Raven

Arlene Raven

Arlene Raven was a feminist art historian, author, critic, educator, and curator...

co-founders of the Woman's Building

Woman's Building

, Suzanne Lacy

Suzanne Lacy

Suzanne Lacy is an internationally known artist, educator, writer, and former public servant. She describes her work, which includes "installations, video, and large-scale performances", as focusing on "social themes and urban issues." She also served in the education cabinet of Jerry Brown, then...

and Faith Wilding

Faith Wilding

Faith Wilding is a Paraguayan-American multidisciplinary artist, writer and educator, widely known for her contribution to the progressive development of feminist art.Faith Wilding immigrated to the United States from Paraguay in 1961...

, both participants in all the early programs, Martha Rosler

Martha Rosler

Martha Rosler is an American artist. She was born in Brooklyn, New York, where she now lives. She graduated from Brooklyn College and the University of California, San Diego . Rosler works in video, photo-text, installation, and performance, as well as writing about art and culture...

, Mary Kelly

Mary Kelly

Mary Kelly may refer to:*Mary Jane Kelly , widely believed to be the fifth and final victim of Jack the Ripper*Mary Kelly , Scottish writer*Mary Kelly , American artist and writer...

, Kate Millett

Kate Millett

Kate Millett is an American lesbian feminist writer and activist. A seminal influence on second-wave feminism, Millet is best known for her 1970 book Sexual Politics.-Career:...

, Nancy Spero

Nancy Spero

Nancy Spero was an American visual artist.-Life and work:Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Spero lived for much of her life in New York City. She was married to, and collaborated with artist Leon Golub....

, Faith Ringgold

Faith Ringgold

Faith Ringgold is an African American artist, best known for her painted story quilts. She is professor emeritus in the University of California, San Diego visual art department.-Life and artwork:...

, June Wayne

June Wayne

June Claire Wayne was an American printmaker, designer, and educator. She founded the Tamarind Lithography Workshop.-Life:...

, art-world agitators The Guerrilla Girls

Guerrilla Girls

, and critics, historians, and curators Lucy Lippard, Griselda Pollock

Griselda Pollock

Griselda Pollock is a prominent art historian and cultural analyst, and a world-renowned scholar of international, post-colonial feminist studies in the visual arts. She is best known for her theoretical and methodological innovation, combined with deeply engaged readings of historical and...

, Arlene Raven

Arlene Raven

Arlene Raven was a feminist art historian, author, critic, educator, and curator...

Timeline of Feminist Art

1964: Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono
is a Japanese artist, musician, author and peace activist, known for her work in avant-garde art, music and filmmaking as well as her marriage to John Lennon...

, Cut Piece, (20 July 1964), Yamaichi Concert Hall, Kyoto, Japan. For Cut Piece Yoko Ono kneeled on stage in the traditional pose of Japanese women while audience members were invited to cut off her clothes one piece at a time. Cut Piece can be seen as part of a larger trend in feminist performance art which comments on violence against women and implicates the audience in the acceptance of such acts.
1967: Exhibition: Vivienne Binns
Vivienne Binns
Vivienne Joyce Binns OAM is an Australian artistBorn in Wyong, New South Wales, Binns studied art at East Sydney Technical College and the National Art School. Her first solo exhibition was in 1967 at Watters Gallery in Sydney. During the 1970s she worked in vitreous enamel, was active in the...

, Watters Gallery, Sydney. The exhibition of paintings and sculptures showing symbolic representations of genitalia was considered outrageous at the time.
1967: Carolee Schneemann
Carolee Schneemann
Carolee Schneemann is an American visual artist, known for her discourses on the body, sexuality and gender. She received a B.A. from Bard College and an M.F.A. from the University of Illinois. Her work is primarily characterized by research into visual traditions, taboos, and the body of the...

's film Fuses showed her and her then-boyfriend James Tenney having sex as recorded by a 16 mm Bolex camera. Schneemann then altered the film by staining, burning, and directly drawing on the celluloid itself, mixing the concepts of painting and collage; the segments were edited together at varying speeds and superimposed with photographs of nature, which she juxtaposed against her and Tenney's bodies and sexual actions. Fuses was motivated by Schneemann's desire to know if a woman's depiction of her own sexual acts was different from pornography and classical art, as well as a reaction to Stan Brakhage
Stan Brakhage
James Stanley Brakhage , better known as Stan Brakhage, was an American non-narrative filmmaker who is considered to be one of the most important figures in 20th century experimental film....

's Window Water Baby Moving
Window Water Baby Moving
Window Water Baby Moving is an experimental short film by Stan Brakhage, filmed in November 1958 and released in 1959. The film documents the birth of the director's first child, Myrrena.-Production:...

.
1967: Artwork: Vivienne Binns
Vivienne Binns
Vivienne Joyce Binns OAM is an Australian artistBorn in Wyong, New South Wales, Binns studied art at East Sydney Technical College and the National Art School. Her first solo exhibition was in 1967 at Watters Gallery in Sydney. During the 1970s she worked in vitreous enamel, was active in the...

, Vag dens, 1967, synthetic polymer paint and enamel on composition board. Collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
1968: In an act of street theater, the New York Radical Feminists
New York Radical Feminists
New York Radical Feminists was a radical feminist group founded by Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt in 1969, after they had left Redstockings and The Feminists, respectively. Firestone's and Koedt's desire to start this new group was aided by Vivian Gornick's 1969 Village Voice article, "The...

crowned a sheep as a beauty queen at the 1968 Miss America pageant. They also threw undergarments into a “freedom trash can,” but despite rumors otherwise did not set any bras on fire.
1969: Black Women of Africa Today (1969) was painted by teenage girls at The Alfred E. Smith housing project on the Lower East Side of New York. Process was an important feature; to develop the schema, scenes were acted out, photographed, projected, and traced.
1969: Mierle Laderman Ukeles
Mierle Laderman Ukeles
Mierle Laderman Ukeles is a New York City-based artist known for her feminist and service oriented artwork. In 1969 she wrote a manifesto entitled Maintenance Art—Proposal for an Exhibition, challenging the domestic role of women and proclaiming herself a "maintenance artist"...

, a Bronx resident, trying to reconcile her artist self with her role as a new mother, wrote a Dadaesque “Maintenance Art Manifesto,” positing housekeeping—or “maintenance”—as an embodiment of what she proposed was an unsung component of the creative process: "maintaining," in contrast to “producing.”
Late 1960s: Hannah Wilke
Hannah Wilke
Hannah Wilke was an American painter, sculptor, photographer, video artist and performance artist.-Biography:...

first gained renown with her "vulval" terra-cotta sculptures in the late 1960s. These sculptures, first exhibited in New York, are often mentioned as some of the first explicit vaginal imagery arising from the feminist movement, and they became her signature form which she made in various media, colors and sizes, including large floor installations, throughout her life.
Early 1970s: The Women's Video Festival was held yearly for a number of years in the early 1970s in New York City.
1970s: The Women's Interart Center in New York was founded in the 1970s in New York City, and is still in operation.
1970: A historic 1970 manifesto by a “small guerilla unit,” Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation (WSABAL), demanded equal exhibition representation for women, blacks, and students.
1970: A full page ad in the October 1970 Artforum
Artforum
Artforum is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art.-Publication:The magazine is published ten times a year, September through May, along with an annual summer issue...

announced feminist artist Judy Chicago
Judy Chicago
Judy Chicago is a feminist artist, author, and educator.Chicago has been creating artwork since the mid 1960s. Her earliest forays into the art world coincided with the rise of Minimalism, which she eventually abandoned in favor of art she believed to have greater content and relevance...

's name change from Judy Gerowitz. The ad said she made the change to divest "herself of all names imposed upon her through male social dominance..."
1970: America's first feminist art education program took place at California State University, Fresno
California State University, Fresno
California State University, Fresno, often referred to as Fresno State University and synonymously known in athletics as Fresno State , is one of the leading campuses of the California State University system, located at the northeast edge of Fresno, California, USA.The campus sits at the foot of...

in California in 1970 when fifteen female students and instructor Judy Chicago
Judy Chicago
Judy Chicago is a feminist artist, author, and educator.Chicago has been creating artwork since the mid 1960s. Her earliest forays into the art world coincided with the rise of Minimalism, which she eventually abandoned in favor of art she believed to have greater content and relevance...

helped pioneer key strategies of the early feminist art movement, including collaboration, the use of “female technologies” like costume, performance, and video, and early forms of media critique.
1971: Judy Chicago
Judy Chicago
Judy Chicago is a feminist artist, author, and educator.Chicago has been creating artwork since the mid 1960s. Her earliest forays into the art world coincided with the rise of Minimalism, which she eventually abandoned in favor of art she believed to have greater content and relevance...

, with abstract painter Miriam Schapiro
Miriam Schapiro
Miriam Schapiro is a Canadian-born artist based in America. She is a pioneer of feminist art. She is also considered part of the Pattern and Decoration art movement....

, cofounded the landmark Feminist Art Program at California Institute of the Arts, north of Los Angeles, which was the only such department in a major art school.
1971: An early feminist art coalition, WEB (West-East Bag), was founded in 1971 by Lucy Lippard, Judy Chicago
Judy Chicago
Judy Chicago is a feminist artist, author, and educator.Chicago has been creating artwork since the mid 1960s. Her earliest forays into the art world coincided with the rise of Minimalism, which she eventually abandoned in favor of art she believed to have greater content and relevance...

, and Miriam Schapiro
Miriam Schapiro
Miriam Schapiro is a Canadian-born artist based in America. She is a pioneer of feminist art. She is also considered part of the Pattern and Decoration art movement....

, to jump-start the new movement and stimulate cadres in North America and beyond. It advocated a shifting “center,” and its newsletter was produced each month by a group in a different region. (It continued successfully through the mid-seventies.)
1971: Linda Nochlin
Linda Nochlin
Linda Nochlin is an American art historian, university professor and writer. She is considered to be a leader in feminist art history studies. She is best known as a proponent of the question "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?"...

’s landmark 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” asked why women had been excluded from ideas of artistic greatness.
1972: The students of the feminist art program at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Los Angeles created a month-long feminist installation in an empty house, entitled Womanhouse
Womanhouse
Womanhouse was a feminist art installation and performance space organized by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, co-founders of the California Institute of the Arts Feminist Art Program. Chicago, Schapiro, their students and women artists from the local community participated...

.
1972: The AIR Gallery (named, in part, after Jane Eyre) was founded in New York. Twenty co-op members renovated the space themselves; it was then very unusual to exhibit in an all-female environment.
1973: In Los Angeles, the Womanspace Gallery opened in a former laundromat; decision-making was arrived at through a round-robin consensus consciousness raising format.
1972: Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
Sheila Levrant de Bretteville is a graphic designer, artist and educator whose work reflects her belief in the importance of feminist principles and user participation in graphic design...

founded a feminist design program at CalArts.
1973: Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Rape Scene), 1973. After the brutal rape and murder of a student on campus at the University of Iowa, Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta
Ana Mendieta
Ana Mendieta was a Cuban American performance artist, sculptor, painter and video artist who is known for her "earth-body" art work....

, who was also a student there, staged this performance. Viewers were invited to Mendieta's apartment where they saw Mendieta tied to a table surrounded by broken dishes and her body exposed and covered in fake blood from the waist down.
1973: The Woman's Building
Woman's Building
The Woman's Building was an non-profit arts and education center located in Los Angeles, California, in the United States. The Woman's Building focused on feminist art and served as a venue for the women's movement and was spearheaded by artist Judy Chicago, graphic designer Sheila Levrant de...

which included the Feminist Studio Workshop was founded by Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
Sheila Levrant de Bretteville is a graphic designer, artist and educator whose work reflects her belief in the importance of feminist principles and user participation in graphic design...

, art historian Arlene Raven
Arlene Raven
Arlene Raven was a feminist art historian, author, critic, educator, and curator...

, and Judy Chicago
Judy Chicago
Judy Chicago is a feminist artist, author, and educator.Chicago has been creating artwork since the mid 1960s. Her earliest forays into the art world coincided with the rise of Minimalism, which she eventually abandoned in favor of art she believed to have greater content and relevance...

, in Los Angeles. Inspired by a Woman’s Building at the 1893 Universal Exposition in Chicago, at its core was a two-year graduate art program, the Feminist Studio Workshop (FSW). “We had a theory of feminist education,” Raven has said, “which was a transition from a situation of oppression—where women related to one another through competition, isolation, and silence—to one of support, a process evolved through criticism, and self-criticism.”
1973: Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
Sheila Levrant de Bretteville is a graphic designer, artist and educator whose work reflects her belief in the importance of feminist principles and user participation in graphic design...

created a poster/wallwork titled Pink; she handed out pieces of pink paper to friends and to women on the street, asking them to describe what this color, somewhat maligned for its associations with femininity, meant to them. She assembled the results on a poster in a quilt-like format, including blank spaces for audience response. De Bretteville, a mother and wife as well as a noted graphic designer, remarked that the visual structure also expressed "the way I felt my day was broken up into three-hour segments, as much as its form was influenced by notions of de-centering, and the revaluing of women's work, such as quilting."
1974: Mother Art, which consisted of Feminist Studio Workshop students, was founded in 1974, in part to show that feminists--at the time predominantly young single women--could be wives and mothers, too.
1974: Exhibition: A Room of One's Own: Three Women Artists Ewing Gallery, University of Melbourne, co-curated by Kiffy Rubbo, Lynne Cooke
Lynne Cooke
Lynne Cooke is the curator at large for the Dia Art Foundation in New York, and chief curator at the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain. Born in Geelong, Australia, Ms. Cooke received a B.A. from Melbourne University and an M.A. and Ph.D...

and Janine Burke
Janine Burke
Janine Burke, is an author, art historian, biographer and novelist. She has also curated exhibitions of historical and contemporary art. Currently, Dr Burke holds a research fellowship at Monash University....

. Artists included Lesley Dumbrell, Julie Irving, and Ann Newmarch.
1974: Tomie Arai and the Cityarts Workshop created the mural known as the Wall of Respect for Women in New York City.
1975: The mural Women Hold Up Half the Sky was created under the direction of Tomie Arai.
1975: Exhibition: Australian Women Artists: 1840-1940, Ewing Gallery and George Paton Galleries, University of Melbourne; Art Gallery of NSW; Newcastle Region Art Gallery; Art Gallery of South Australia
Art Gallery of South Australia
The Art Gallery of South Australia , located on the cultural boulevard of North Terrace in Adelaide, is the premier visual arts museum in the Australian state of South Australia. It has a collection of over 35,000 works of art, making it, after the National Gallery of Victoria, the largest state...

, curated by Janine Burke
Janine Burke
Janine Burke, is an author, art historian, biographer and novelist. She has also curated exhibitions of historical and contemporary art. Currently, Dr Burke holds a research fellowship at Monash University....

.
1975: Victorian Women's Art Movement founded the Australian Women's Art Register.
1975: Women's Art Register established in Melbourne. One of the founders was painter Erica McGilchrist.
1975: Artwork: Ann Newmarch Vietnam Madonna
1975: Carolee Schneemann
Carolee Schneemann
Carolee Schneemann is an American visual artist, known for her discourses on the body, sexuality and gender. She received a B.A. from Bard College and an M.F.A. from the University of Illinois. Her work is primarily characterized by research into visual traditions, taboos, and the body of the...

performed Interior Scroll, a Fluxus-influenced piece featuring her use of text and body. In her performance, Schneemann entered wrapped in a sheet, under which she wore an apron. She disrobed and then got on a table where she outlined her body with dark paint. Several times, she would take "action poses", similar to those in figure drawing classes. Concurrently, she read from her book Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter. Following this, she dropped the book and slowly extracted from her vagina a scroll from which she read.
1975: Hecate: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Women's Liberation established, edited by Carole Ferrier
Carole Ferrier
Carole Ferrier is a Feminist Australian Academic. She is Professor in English at the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland. She has many published works about feminism, socialism, literature and culture...

(1975-present).
1975: The first performance of Spiderwoman Theater (named after the Hopi Spider Grandmother, Goddess of Creation, who taught her people to weave) was Woman in Violence (1975). This performance was full of bawdy satire, with the performers conceiving of themselves as “clowns,” using that metaphoric figure as a container to tell their stories of violence, battery, and shame. The style of Spiderwoman Theater, called “story weaving”, involved intertwining personal anecdotes, myths, and feminist insights chanted and repeated in poetic fragments, all with a touch of earthy humor.
1976: In I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day (1976), for two months Mierle Laderman Ukeles
Mierle Laderman Ukeles
Mierle Laderman Ukeles is a New York City-based artist known for her feminist and service oriented artwork. In 1969 she wrote a manifesto entitled Maintenance Art—Proposal for an Exhibition, challenging the domestic role of women and proclaiming herself a "maintenance artist"...

mopped offices and elevators in a Lower Manhattan building.
1976: Launch of Melbourne-based art journal LIP A Journal of Women in the Visual Arts (1975–1983).
1976: Women's Art Movement established, Adelaide, South Australia
1977: In August, working with the national group Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW), Leslie Labowitz crafted a media event, Record Company Executives Drag Their Feet. Beneath a Hollywood billboard advertising Kiss’s new album Love Gun, which was full of S&M overtones, with women writhing underfoot, a gold Cadillac arrived at the head of a motorcade, and “record executives” wearing rooster heads emerged from them, holding gold records. Behind a faux press conference table, a large-scale chart demonstrated correlations between the increasingly graphic marketing of sex and an increase in arrests for rape and spousal abuse—in contrast to a drop in other crimes. Invited local TV stations and newspapers were furnished with “shot sheets” directing the focus of their visual coverage.
1977: In Laundryworks, the members of Mother Art displayed artworks hung like wet clothing on lines in Los Angeles laundromats, in performances timed to the wash and dry cycle. California State gave them a $700 arts grant for this multi-event action--which ended up as a political football, however, with the funding used as an example by conservatives of “budgetary fat.”
1977: Chrysalis: A Magazine of Women’s Culture started publishing in 1977 out of the Woman’s Building. Editors were Kirsten Grimstad, Susan Rennie, Arlene Raven
Arlene Raven
Arlene Raven was a feminist art historian, author, critic, educator, and curator...

, Ruth Iskin, and Sheila de Bretteville.
1977: The first issue of the feminist art magazine Heresies was produced in 1977. The founding members of the Heresies Collective included Patsy Beckert, Joan Braderman, Mary Beth Edelson, Elizabeth Hess
Elizabeth Hess
Elizabeth Hess is a Canadian actress best known for playing mother Janet Darling on the long-running American sitcom Clarissa Explains It All. She has also appeared on an episode of Law & Order...

, Harmony Hammond
Harmony Hammond
Harmony Hammond is an American artist and writer.-Biography:Harmony Hammond earned a B.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1967. She co-founded the A.I.R. Gallery in 1972; it was the first women's cooperative art gallery in New York...

, Joyce Kozloff
Joyce Kozloff
Joyce Kozloff, b. 1942, is an American artist commonly associated with the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s - and with artists whose work is based on cartography since the early 1990s....

, Arlene Ladden, Lucy Lippard, Mary Miss, Marty Pottenger, Miriam Schapiro
Miriam Schapiro
Miriam Schapiro is a Canadian-born artist based in America. She is a pioneer of feminist art. She is also considered part of the Pattern and Decoration art movement....

, Joan Snyder
Joan Snyder
Joan Snyder is an American painter from New York. She is a MacArthur Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow. Her paintings have been exhibited at several museums, including the de Saisset Museum and the Jewish Museum.-Painting styles:...

, May Stevens
May Stevens
May Stevens is an American feminist artist, political activist, educator, and writer. Major works include: Freedom Riders , "Big Daddy" series , Ordinary/Extraordinary , and SoHo Women Artists . In 1977, she was one of the featured artists discussed in a seminar given by Jacqueline Moss at the...

, Michelle Stuart
Michelle Stuart
Michelle Stuart through her art has created complex, multifaceted investigations of the relationship between nature and culture for over four decades,. Her artworks range in scale from monumental earthworks to intimate talismanic sculptures...

, Susana Torre
Susana Torre
Feminist Architect, Susana Torre was born on November 2, 1944 in Puan, Argentina, but she has lived in the United States since 1968. Graduated with an architectural diploma from the University of Buenos Aires. Torre received her post graduate studies were at the University of Buenos Aires and...

, Elizabeth Weatherford, and Sally Webster
Sally Webster
Sally Webster is a fictional character in the UK television ITV soap opera, Coronation Street. Portrayed by actress Sally Dynevor, the character first appeared onscreen during the episode airing on 27 January 1986.-Casting:...

.
1977: In Lysistrata Numbah! (1977), using Aristophanes’s play Lysistrata
Lysistrata
Lysistrata is one of eleven surviving plays written by Aristophanes. Originally performed in classical Athens in 411 BC, it is a comic account of one woman's extraordinary mission to end The Peloponnesian War...

in which women refuse to have sex until a war was over, Spiderwoman Theater explored the issues of sex, power, and control.
1977: For the piece Three Weeks in May (1977), Suzanne Lacy
Suzanne Lacy
Suzanne Lacy is an internationally known artist, educator, writer, and former public servant. She describes her work, which includes "installations, video, and large-scale performances", as focusing on "social themes and urban issues." She also served in the education cabinet of Jerry Brown, then...

and Leslie Labowitz posted huge maps in a downtown mall and marked them with occurrences of rapes across the city the night before, alongside locations of rape crisis centers and battered women's shelters. The event combined a performance piece on the steps of Los Angeles City Hall with self-defense classes for women in an attempt to highlight sexual violence against women.
1978: Suzanne Lacy
Suzanne Lacy
Suzanne Lacy is an internationally known artist, educator, writer, and former public servant. She describes her work, which includes "installations, video, and large-scale performances", as focusing on "social themes and urban issues." She also served in the education cabinet of Jerry Brown, then...

's piece In Mourning and in Rage (1978) addressed the coverage given to the Hillside Strangler
Hillside Strangler
The Hillside Strangler is the media epithet for two men, cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, who were convicted of kidnapping, raping, torturing, and killing girls and women ranging in age from 12 to 28 years old during a four-month period from late 1977 to early 1978...

, a mass killer terrorizing women in the Hollywood Hills; the murders had been granted salacious attention by the media.
1978: Artwork: Ann Newmarch, Women hold up half the sky! 1978
1978: Exhibition: The Women's Show, Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide
1978: Suzanne Lacy
Suzanne Lacy
Suzanne Lacy is an internationally known artist, educator, writer, and former public servant. She describes her work, which includes "installations, video, and large-scale performances", as focusing on "social themes and urban issues." She also served in the education cabinet of Jerry Brown, then...

and Leslie Labowitz founded Ariadne: A Social Art Network. The group organized the ten-day event From Reverence to Rape to Respect (1978) in Las Vegas. One memorable installation there equated bejeweled sheep carcasses in headdresses with feathered Vegas showgirls.
1978: While on a bus on the way to the 1978 Las Vegas From Reverence to Rape event, The Feminist Art Workers (Nancy Angelo, Candace Compton, Laurel Klick, Cheri Gaulke, and Vanalyne Green) organized a structure of performance-related exercises, called Traffic in Women, in which they guided other passengers in a metaphoric journey from victimhood to self-realization; this involved storytelling, journal-writing, and self-reflection.
1978: For the event Take Back the Night (1978), the group Araidne organized a nighttime parade in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, notorious for vice and corruption. Centrally featured was a float carrying a carved Madonna in front; on its verso side was a devilish three-headed lamb carcass from whose belly pornographic texts spewed.
1978: In a 1978 piece by the Feminist Art Workers, “viewers” entered a city phone booth and dialed a specified number, as if to listen to an obscene phone call. Instead they heard messages of empowerment.
1978: The first project of a feminist group called The Waitresses, made up of people who had been in the Feminist Studio Workshop, was Ready to Order (1978), conceived as a seven-day conceptualstructure, which featured satiric skits. Millie Awards were given for categories such as longest inconsequential conversation and longest smile, and the event also involved community-oriented panel discussions and workshops along the lines of Three Weeks in May, to address issues such as job discrimination and to promote skills--for example, assertiveness training. The Waitresses group was founded in 1977 by Jerri Allyn and Anne Gauldin, and joined by Leslie Belt, Patti Nicklaus, Jamie Wildman, and Denise Yarfitz.
1978-80: Performance: Lyndal Jones, The At Home Series, performances in the series held at La Mama Theatre, Melbourne, George Paton Gallery, University of Melbourne, RMIT, Melbourne, 110 Chambers Street, New York
1979: The Dinner Party
The Dinner Party
The Dinner Party is an installation artwork by feminist artist Judy Chicago depicting place settings for 39 mythical and historical famous women. It was produced from 1974 to 1979 as a collaboration and was first exhibited in 1979. Subsequently, despite art world resistance, it toured to 16 venues...

, an installation artwork by feminist artist Judy Chicago
Judy Chicago
Judy Chicago is a feminist artist, author, and educator.Chicago has been creating artwork since the mid 1960s. Her earliest forays into the art world coincided with the rise of Minimalism, which she eventually abandoned in favor of art she believed to have greater content and relevance...

depicting place settings for 39 mythical and historical famous women, which was produced from 1974 to 1979 as a collaboration, was first exhibited in 1979.
Late 1970s: The New York Feminist Art Institute sponsored a workshop on collaboration in the late 1970s.
1980: Artwork: Davida Allen
Davida Allen
Davida Frances Allen , is an Australian painter, film maker and writer.-Career:Allen studied under Betty Churcher at the Stuartholme School, Brisbane and later under Roy Churcher at Brisbane Central Technical College...

painted her sexual fantasy pictures of actor Sam Neill
Sam Neill
Nigel John Dermot "Sam" Neill, DCNZM, OBE is a New Zealand actor. He is well known for his starring role as paleontologist Dr Alan Grant in Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park III....

. While the paintings followed in the tradition of the Burt Reynolds
Burt Reynolds
Burton Leon "Burt" Reynolds, Jr. is an American actor. Some of his memorable roles include Bo 'Bandit' Darville in Smokey and the Bandit, Lewis Medlock in Deliverance, Bobby "Gator" McCluskey in White Lightning and sequel Gator, Paul Crewe and Coach Nate Scarborough in The Longest Yard and its...

nude centerfold in Cosmopolitan in 1972, in 1980s Australia the artist raised eyebrows for depicting a man as a sex object.
1980: Performance: Bonita Ely, Bread Line, Anzart, Christchurch, New Zealand
1980: Performance: Bonita Ely, Murray River Punch, George Paton and Ewing Gallery, Melbourne University. Women at Work, a festival of women's performance art.
1980: Performance: Jill Orr, Split- Fragile Relationships, George Paton and Ewing Gallery, Melbourne University. Women at Work, a festival of women's performance art.
1980: Women at Work : a week of women's performance, June 1980. George Paton and Ewing Gallery, Melbourne University. Artists included Jill Orr and Bonita Ely.
1981: In an iconic photograph, Heaven or Hell? (1981), the Feminist Art Workers, dressed as cherubic hunters, fed each other from the tips of long arrows. This is a reference to a fable about a sumptuous banquet whose only dining utensils were forks so long diners were only able to eat if they fed one another--a metaphor for collaboration.
1981: Carnival Knowledge, a New York-based collective that explored issues related to women’s sexuality, staged a carnival with a pro-choice theme, called Bazaar Conceptions, in the New School’s Graduate Center. It featured more than 20 sculptures and games, drawing an estimated 2,500 participants.
1984: For the satiric Second Coming (1984), Carnival Knowledge, a New York-based collective that explored issues related to women’s sexuality, created a double collaboration with a recently formed support group of female porn stars, including the later infamous performance artist Annie Sprinkle. One aim was exploring whether a kind of pornography could exist that was not degrading “to women—or men or children.” However, the event brought punitive measures launched by conservative members of Congress against the producing venue Franklin Furnace, which had received federal grants.
1985: The Guerilla Girls, which rose to some renown, formed anonymously in 1985 in response to a Museum of Modern Art survey that included only 13 women alongside 166 white males. The group launched a highly effective street-postering campaign, simple statistics starkly revealing the lack of representation of women and people of color in galleries and museums. The signature gorilla mask apparently was inspired by one member’s mistake spelling “guerrilla.” However, it turned into a highly effective publicity tool, even as it served to mask participants’ identities, as some feared reprisals for being linked with feminism.
1985: Women of Sweetgrass, Cedar, and Sage is a major exhibition of female Native American art
Native American art
Visual arts by indigenous peoples of the Americas encompasses the visual artistic traditions of the indigenous peoples of the Americas from ancient times to the present...

ists, at the American Indian Community House in New York, curated by Harmony Hammond
Harmony Hammond
Harmony Hammond is an American artist and writer.-Biography:Harmony Hammond earned a B.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1967. She co-founded the A.I.R. Gallery in 1972; it was the first women's cooperative art gallery in New York...

and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
Jaune Quick-To-See Smith
Jaune Quick-To-See Smith is a Native American contemporary artist. Notably her work is held in the collections of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Museum of Modern Art in New York City.- Biography :Born in 1940...

.
1985-7: Suzanne Lacy
Suzanne Lacy
Suzanne Lacy is an internationally known artist, educator, writer, and former public servant. She describes her work, which includes "installations, video, and large-scale performances", as focusing on "social themes and urban issues." She also served in the education cabinet of Jerry Brown, then...

worked with The Whisper Minnesota Project to create Crystal Quilt, a living tableaux performed by 430 women over the age of 60 on Mother’s Day at the IDS Center’s Crystal Court in Minneapolis. The piece aimed to change public perceptions of older women by providing a creative outlet and an open forum. The performance was staged on an 82-foot rug with tables placed on it designed by Miriam Schapiro
Miriam Schapiro
Miriam Schapiro is a Canadian-born artist based in America. She is a pioneer of feminist art. She is also considered part of the Pattern and Decoration art movement....

to resemble a quilt. The women sat and discussed their lives, and every ten minutes they changed the placement of their arms on the tables thus altering the quilt’s pattern when seen from above. Snippets of their conversations were amplified on speakers and the entire event was broadcast live on public television.
1987: Exhibition: Feminist Narratives, George Paton Gallery, curated by Juliana Engberg. Artists: Pat Brassington, Debra Dawes, Leah MacKinnon, Andrea Paton, Ann Wulf.
1988: Exhibition: Judy Chicago
Judy Chicago
Judy Chicago is a feminist artist, author, and educator.Chicago has been creating artwork since the mid 1960s. Her earliest forays into the art world coincided with the rise of Minimalism, which she eventually abandoned in favor of art she believed to have greater content and relevance...

(American) The Dinner Party
The Dinner Party
The Dinner Party is an installation artwork by feminist artist Judy Chicago depicting place settings for 39 mythical and historical famous women. It was produced from 1974 to 1979 as a collaboration and was first exhibited in 1979. Subsequently, despite art world resistance, it toured to 16 venues...

(1979), Melbourne Exhibition Buildings.
1989: Artwork: Something More by Tracey Moffatt
Tracey Moffatt
Tracey Moffatt is an Australian artist who primarily uses photography and video.Born in Brisbane in 1960, she holds a degree in visual communications from the Queensland College of Art, graduating in 1982....

.
1991: Exhibition: Frames of Reference: Aspects of Feminism and Art, Artspace, Sydney, curated by Sally Couacaud.
Artists: Kathy Temin, Susan Norrie, Vivienne Binns, Rebecca Cummins, Anne MacDonald
1991: Manifesto: VNS Matrix
VNS Matrix
VNS Matrix was an artist collective founded in Adelaide, Australia, in 1991, by Josephine Starrs, Julianne Pierce, Francesca da Rimini and Virginia Barratt...

(Virginia Barratt, Francesca da Rimini, Juliane Pierce, Josephine Starrs), Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century, Adelaide. http://www.sysx.org/gashgirl/VNS/TEXT/PINKMANI.HTM The manifesto was distributed on street posters around Adelaide. VNS Matrix was an artist collective founded in Adelaide and active 1991-1997. VNS Matrix is pronounced 'Venus Matrix'.
1992: Exhibition: Feminisms: An Exhibition of 27 Women Artists, PICA
Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts
Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts is a contemporary visual and performance arts venue located in Perth, Western Australia.-History:...

, Perth, curated by Nikki Miller.
1994: Exhibition: The Women's Show, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne
1994: Marcia Tucker
Marcia Tucker
Marcia Tucker was the founding director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art from 1977 to 1999, a museum located in New York City, dedicated to innovative art and artistic practice...

organized the exhibition, Bad Girls at the New Museum and Marcia Tanner a companion show at the Wight Art Gallery at UCLA.
1995: Exhibition WWWO : Wollongong Worlds Women Online, first national Australian online women's group exhibition, featuring the first or early digital works from 30 women including Francis Dyson and Mez Breeze
Mez Breeze
Mez Breeze is an Australian-based artist who works with net.art. Born Mary-Anne Breeze she uses a number of avatar nicknames. She received degrees in both Applied Social Science [Psychology] at the Charles Sturt University in Bathurst, Australia in 1991 and Creative Arts at the Wollongong...

. Curators Melinda Rackham
Melinda Rackham
Melinda Rackham is an Australian Networked Media Artist, Writer and Curator, and founder and producer the influential -empyre- online media arts forum, which she initiated as part of her Doctoral thesis on Art and Identity in Virtual Reality Environments.Rackham studied sculpture and performance...

, Louise Manner, Ali Smith, Sandy Indlekofer-O’Sullivan.
1995: National Women's Art Exhibition, simultaneous exhibitions in over 147 galleries, museums and libraries.
1995: Exhibition: VNS Matrix: ALL NEW GEN, (VNS Matrix
VNS Matrix
VNS Matrix was an artist collective founded in Adelaide, Australia, in 1991, by Josephine Starrs, Julianne Pierce, Francesca da Rimini and Virginia Barratt...

: Virginia Barratt, Francesca da Rimini, Juliane Pierce, Josephine Starrs), ACCA, Melbourne. Part of the National Women's Art Exhibition.
1995: Exhibition: In the Company of Women: 100 years of Australian women's art from the Cruthers Collection, PICA
Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts
Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts is a contemporary visual and performance arts venue located in Perth, Western Australia.-History:...

, Perth, curated by Sarah Miller. Part of the National Women's Art Exhibition.
1995: Exhibition: Bur-ran-gur ang (court out): Women and the law, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Perth, curated by Annette Pedersen. Part of the National Women's Art Exhibition.
1995: Exhibition: Out of the Void: Mad and Bad Women, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, touring Queensland. Part of the National Women's Art Exhibition.
1995: Exhibition: Girls Girls Girls, Annandale Galleries, Sydney, also Orange Regional Gallery. Women's show to mark the 20th Anniversary of the United Nations, Year of the Woman.
1995: Beyond the Picket Fence: Australian women's art in the National Library of Australia, National Library of Australia
National Library of Australia
The National Library of Australia is the largest reference library of Australia, responsible under the terms of the National Library Act for "maintaining and developing a national collection of library material, including a comprehensive collection of library material relating to Australia and the...
1996: "Inside the Visible," organized by Belgian curator Catherine de Zegher at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (ICA), exhibited works by 35 international women artists from the 1930s, 1970s, and 1990s and presented a new theoretical interpretation for the art of the twentieth century (Inside the Visible, MIT press). This exhibition subsequently traveled to the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth
Perth, Western Australia
Perth is the capital and largest city of the Australian state of Western Australia and the fourth most populous city in Australia. The Perth metropolitan area has an estimated population of almost 1,700,000....

.
1996: Manifesto: VNS Matrix
VNS Matrix
VNS Matrix was an artist collective founded in Adelaide, Australia, in 1991, by Josephine Starrs, Julianne Pierce, Francesca da Rimini and Virginia Barratt...

(Virginia Barratt, Francesca da Rimini, Juliane Pierce, Josephine Starrs) Bitch Mutant Manifesto, Adelaide.
1996: Exhibition: Women Hold Up Half the Sky: the Orientation of Art in the Post-War Pacific, Monash University Gallery, Melbourne, curated by Roger Butler.
Artists: Micky Allan, Vivienne Binns, Kate Daw, eX de Medici, Diena Georgetti, Joan Grounds, Helga Groves, Indulkana Community, Emily Kame Kngwarreye
Emily Kngwarreye
Emily Kame Kngwarreye was an Australian Aboriginal artist from the Utopia community in the Northern Territory. She is one of the most prominent and successful artists in the history of contemporary Indigenous Australian art.-Life:Born in 1910, Kngwarreye did not take up painting seriously until...

, Narell Jubelin, Maningrida Arts, Banduk Marika, Ann Newmarch, Margaret Preston
Margaret Preston
Margaret Preston was a well-known Australian artist. She was highly influential during the 1920s to 1940s for her modernist works as a painter and printmaker and for introducing Aboriginal motifs into contemporary art.-Early life:...

, Thancoupie, Kelly Thompson, Utopia Batik, Toni Warburton, Judy Watson, Robin White
1996: Exhibition: Inside the Visible, Boston: ICA/ MIT: Kanaal Art Foundation, and Touring to Whitechapel, London, and PICA, Perth, Australia, curated by Catherine de Zegher (USA)
1997: Exhibition: Difficult Territory: a postfeminist project, Artspace, Sydney, curated by Kristen Elsby
1999: Guerrilla Girls
Guerrilla Girls
Guerrilla Girls are an anonymous group of feminists devoted to fighting against sexism within the visual fine art world internationally. Started in New York City in 1985 to protest gender and racial inequality in the art world, members are known for the gorilla masks they wear to keep their...

brought to Melbourne by RedPlanet for screenprinting workshops and lectures.
1999 Australian feminist art historians Joan Kerr & Jo Holder publish Past present : the national women's art anthology
2002: The exhibit Personal & Political: The Women’s Art Movement, 1969 –1975 was held at the Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, NY, from August 10th until October 20th, 2002.
2002: The exhibit Gloria: Another Look at Feminist Art in the 1970s was held at White Columns, New York from September 13th until October 20th, 2002.
2003: Australian feminist academic Germaine Greer
Germaine Greer
Germaine Greer is an Australian writer, academic, journalist and scholar of early modern English literature, widely regarded as one of the most significant feminist voices of the later 20th century....

publishes The Beautiful Boy.
2004: Artwork: Mary Lou Pavlovic Liar! Public Art, Melbourne.
2005: In December 2005, Serbian artist Tanja Ostojić
Tanja Ostojic
Tanja Ostojić is a Serbian feminist performance artist.-The "EU Panties":In December 2005, Ostojić became well known in Europe as a result of the "EU Panties" poster, a satire of Gustave Courbet's L'Origine du monde. Ostojić's version displayed her own crotch, clothed in blue underwear complete...

became well-known in Europe as a result of the "EU Panties" poster, a satire of Gustave Courbet's L'Origine du monde. Ostojić's version displayed her own crotch, clothed in blue underwear complete with EU stars. The image was meant as an ironic suggestion that foreign women are only welcome in Europe when they drop their underwear.
2006: Exhibition: Feminist Actions, Spacement, Melbourne, curated by Veronica Tello.
Artists: Andrew Atchison, Pia de Bruyn, Sue Dodd, Sarah Lynch, Alex Martinis Roe, Ali Sanderson, Jessie Scott
2007: Exhibition: Bird Girls, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, VCA, curated by Kate Daw and Vikki McInnes.
Artists: Fiona Abicare, Jessie Angwin, Cate Consandine, Danielle Freakley, Kate Just, Simone Slee, Andrea Tu
2007: Forum: Feminism Never Happened, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne.
Panelists included: Julie Rrap, Alex Martinus Roe, Ann Marsh, Lily Hibberd, Felicity Coleman, Lyndall Walker, Emily Cormack
2007: Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, curated by Connie Butler for Los Angeles' Geffen Center or Museum of Contemporary Art
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles is a contemporary art museum with three locations in greater Los Angeles, California. The main branch is located on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, near Walt Disney Concert Hall...

, MOCA
MOCA
-Museums:* Museum of Chinese in America, a museum in New York City which exhibits Chinese American history* Museum of Contemporary Art , any of several museums with this title...

, was the comprehensive, historical exhibition, examining the international foundations and legacy of feminist art, focusing on the period of 1965–1980, during which the majority of feminist activism and art-making occurred. The exhibition, traveled to the National Museum of Women in the Arts
National Museum of Women in the Arts
The National Museum of Women in the Arts , located in Washington, D.C. is the only museum solely dedicated to celebrating women’s achievements in the visual, performing, and literary arts. NMWA was incorporated in 1981 by Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay...

in Washington, D.C, at the PS1 satellite of the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...

in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

, and at the Vancouver Art Gallery
Vancouver Art Gallery
The Vancouver Art Gallery is the fifth-largest art gallery in Canada and the largest in Western Canada. It is located at 750 Hornby Street in Vancouver, British Columbia...

, focused heavily on artists from the United States but also included the work of a number of women from Central
Central Europe
Central Europe or alternatively Middle Europe is a region of the European continent lying between the variously defined areas of Eastern and Western Europe...

and Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...

, Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

, Latin America
Latin America
Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...

, Asia
Asia
Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area and with approximately 3.879 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population...

, Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

, and New Zealand
New Zealand
New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...

.
2007-2008: The exhibit Claiming Space: Some American Feminist Originators, at the American University Museum in Washington, D.C., was held from November 6th, 2007 until January 27th, 2008.
2007-2008: Exhibition: Julie Rrap
Julie Rrap
Julie Rrap is a contemporary Australian artist. Born in the regional town of Lismore, New South Wales, in 1950. Rrap is the sibling of well established performance artist and photographer Mike Parr. Her surname Rrap, is her actual surname Parr in reverse...

: Body Double, MCA, Sydney, curated by Victoria Lynn http://www.mca.com.au/default.asp?page_id=10&content_id=2977
2008: Exhibition: Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye developed by the National Museum of Australia and shown at the National Museum of Art in Osaka
Osaka
is a city in the Kansai region of Japan's main island of Honshu, a designated city under the Local Autonomy Law, the capital city of Osaka Prefecture and also the biggest part of Keihanshin area, which is represented by three major cities of Japan, Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe...

, Japan.
2008: Exhibition: Lauren Berkowitz/ Starlie Geikie, Neon Parc, Melbourne, curated by Rebecca Coates.
2008: Exhibition: A Time Like This, VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne.
Curated by Samantha Comte, Jirra Lulla Harvey, Kate Rhodes and Meredith Turnbull.
Artists: Louisa Bufardeci, Bindi Cole, Lorraine Connelly-Northey, Eliza Hutchison, Wietske Maas, Kate Smith, Salote Tawale, Annie Wu.
2008: Exhibition: Emily Floyd, Temple of the Female Eunuch, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne.
2008: Exhibition: Girls, Girls, Girls, Carlton Hotel, Melbourne, curated by Lyndal Walker and Nat Thomas.
2008: Australian feminist academic Elizabeth Grosz
Elizabeth Grosz
Elizabeth A. Grosz is an Australian feminist academic living and working in the USA. She is known for philosophical interpretations of the work of French philosophers Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, as well as her readings of the works of French feminists, Luce...

publishes Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth.
2008: Essay: On Rage by Germaine Greer
Germaine Greer
Germaine Greer is an Australian writer, academic, journalist and scholar of early modern English literature, widely regarded as one of the most significant feminist voices of the later 20th century....

, academic, social commentator and collector of Aboriginal art.
2008: Carey Lovelace
Carey Lovelace
Carey Lovelace is an American art journalist, playwright, curator, and producer based in New York.She was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Whittier, California. She studied theatre at Interlochen Arts Academy...

organized "Making It Together: Women’s Collaborative Art + Community" at the Bronx Museum of the Arts
Bronx Museum of the Arts
The Bronx Museum of the Arts is a cultural institution located in the New York City borough of The Bronx. The museum focuses on contemporary and 20th century works created by American artists, and it has hosted exhibitions of art and design from Latin America, Africa and Asia...

which featured women artists, inspired by the 1970s Feminist Movement, who worked collectively in ways that engaged communities and addressed social issues. The essay is available online.
2008: CoUNTess blog launched. Blog compiles and reviews gender equality in the Australian art-world.
2010: Exhibition: Feminism Never Happened, IMA, Brisbane.
Artists: Del Kathryn Barton
Del Kathryn Barton
Del Kathryn Barton is an Australian artist, who won the 2008 Archibald Prize. She is represented by Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne, Australia and , Sydney, Australia....

, Pat Brassington, Kirsty Bruce, Jacqueline Fraser, Anastasia Klose
Anastasia Klose
Anastasia Klose is an Australian contemporary artist. Her work has received much attention in the art world due to the personal nature of her subject matter, often putting herself in humiliating situations. She is a graduate of both the Victorian College of the Arts and the University of Melbourne...

, Fiona Lowry, Fiona Pardington, Yvonne Todd, and Jemima Wyman http://www.ima.org.au/pages/exhibitions.php
2010: Exhibition: The View From Here: 19 Perspectives on Feminism, West Space, Melbourne. Curated by Clare Rae and Victoria Bennett.
Artists: Jessie Angwin, Kiera Brew Kurec, Brown Council, Madeleine Donovan, Mariam Haji, Hannah Raisin, Jessie Scott, Hayley Forward and Jessica Olivieri with the Parachutes for Ladies.
Writers: Emilie Zoey Baker, Laura Castagnini, Tamsin Green, Anna Greer, Rachel Fuller, Jo Latham, Dunja Rmandic, Daine Singer, Nella Themelios.
2010: Exhibition: The Feminist Salon Group, The Envelope Residency, The West Wing, West Space Project Site, Melbourne. Coordinated by Caroline Phillips and Sarah Lynch. A week long residency by a group of artists and writers engaged with reading and discussing feminist texts, in particular the work of Luce Irigaray. The residency included performance, film, visual art, sound, reading, discussion and a lecture by Dr. Louise Burchill. Participants included Sharon Billinge, Dr. Louise Burchill, Victoria Duckett, Catherine Evans, Janice Gobey, Kate Hodgetts, Kate Just, Anastasia Klose, Angie de Latour, Sarah Lynch, Valentina Palonen, Caroline Phillips, Hannah Raisin, Caroline Thew, Inez de Vega and Jane Whitfid.
2011 Exhibition: Doin' It In Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman's Building organized by Otis College of Art and Design not only includes the exhibition, but also two scholarly books, and several public events that document, contextualize and pay tribute to the groundbreaking work of feminist artists and cooperatives that were centered around the Los Angeles Woman's Building
Woman's Building
The Woman's Building was an non-profit arts and education center located in Los Angeles, California, in the United States. The Woman's Building focused on feminist art and served as a venue for the women's movement and was spearheaded by artist Judy Chicago, graphic designer Sheila Levrant de...

in the 1970s and 1980s. Doin' It In Public is part of Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA 1945-1980, an unprecedented collaboration, initiated by the Getty, that brings together more than sixty cultural institutions from across Southern California for six months beginning October 2011 to tell the story of the birth of the L.A. art scene.
2011: !Women Art Revolution, a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson
Lynn Hershman Leeson
Lynn Hershman Leeson is an award-winning American artist and filmmaker. She was Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis, and an A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University...

about feminist art, is released. An extensive archive of the additional footage shot for the film is available at Stanford.

Major exhibitions

1976: Women Artists: 1550-1950 curated by Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin at Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is an art museum in Los Angeles, California. It is located on Wilshire Boulevard along Museum Row in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles, adjacent to the George C. Page Museum and La Brea Tar Pits....

, the first major museum survey of the subject of women in the arts and a result of the 1971 protests.
1979: The Dinner Party
The Dinner Party
The Dinner Party is an installation artwork by feminist artist Judy Chicago depicting place settings for 39 mythical and historical famous women. It was produced from 1974 to 1979 as a collaboration and was first exhibited in 1979. Subsequently, despite art world resistance, it toured to 16 venues...

, the installation/artwork by Judy Chicago
Judy Chicago
Judy Chicago is a feminist artist, author, and educator.Chicago has been creating artwork since the mid 1960s. Her earliest forays into the art world coincided with the rise of Minimalism, which she eventually abandoned in favor of art she believed to have greater content and relevance...

that depicts place settings for 39 mythical and historical famous women, was produced from 1974 to 1979 as a collaboration. It now has a permanent home at the Brooklyn Museum.
1994: Bad Girls, organized by Marcia Tucker
Marcia Tucker
Marcia Tucker was the founding director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art from 1977 to 1999, a museum located in New York City, dedicated to innovative art and artistic practice...

at the New Museum and Marcia Tanner, a companion show at the Wight Art Gallery at UCLA.
2007: Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, curated by Connie Butler for Los Angeles' Geffen Center or Museum of Contemporary Art, MOCA
MOCA
-Museums:* Museum of Chinese in America, a museum in New York City which exhibits Chinese American history* Museum of Contemporary Art , any of several museums with this title...

, was a comprehensive, historical exhibition, examining the international foundations and legacy of feminist art, and focusing on the period of 1965–1980, during which the majority of feminist activism and art-making occurred. The exhibition traveled to the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C, to the PS1 satellite of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and to the Vancouver Art Gallery. It focused heavily on artists from the United States but also included the work of a number of women from Central and Eastern Europe, Canada, Latin America, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand.
2007: Global Feminisms curated by Linda Nochlin and Maura Reilly at the Brooklyn Museum
Brooklyn Museum
The Brooklyn Museum is an encyclopedia art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At 560,000 square feet, the museum holds New York City's second largest art collection with roughly 1.5 million works....

.
2008: Making It Together curated by Carey Lovelace at the Bronx Museum of the Arts
Bronx Museum of the Arts
The Bronx Museum of the Arts is a cultural institution located in the New York City borough of The Bronx. The museum focuses on contemporary and 20th century works created by American artists, and it has hosted exhibitions of art and design from Latin America, Africa and Asia...

in New York City explored women artists and collectivity in ways that engage communities and address social issues.
2009: A Studio of Their Own: The Legacy of the Fresno Feminist Experiment curated by Laura Meyer showcased the influence and work of artists from the first feminist art program in the world.
2011: Doin' It In Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman's Building organized by Otis College of Art and Design not only includes the exhibition, but also two scholarly books, and several public events that document, contextualize and pay tribute to the groundbreaking work of feminist artists and cooperatives that were centered around the Los Angeles Woman's Building in the 1970s and 1980s. Doin' It In Public is part of Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA 1945-1980, an unprecedented collaboration, initiated by the Getty, that brings together more than sixty cultural institutions from across Southern California for six months beginning October 2011 to tell the story of the birth of the L.A. art scene.

Journals about feminist art

Chrysalis Magazine (1977–80), was organized out of the Los Angeles Woman's Building
Woman's Building
The Woman's Building was an non-profit arts and education center located in Los Angeles, California, in the United States. The Woman's Building focused on feminist art and served as a venue for the women's movement and was spearheaded by artist Judy Chicago, graphic designer Sheila Levrant de...

.
Feminist Art Journal (Available on JStor).
Genders: Feminist Art and (Post)Modern Anxieties
Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics(1977–92), is now the subject of a documentary film, The Heretics.
N.paradoxa is an international feminist art journal that explores the work of contemporary women artists and feminist theory founded in December 1996.
Woman's Art Journal

Online archives

The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum

Brooklyn Museum

The Brooklyn Museum is an encyclopedia art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At 560,000 square feet, the museum holds New York City's second largest art collection with roughly 1.5 million works....

is an exhibition and education facility dedicated to feminist art and to raising awareness of feminism's cultural contributions. The Dinner Party

The Dinner Party

The Dinner Party is an installation artwork by feminist artist Judy Chicago depicting place settings for 39 mythical and historical famous women. It was produced from 1974 to 1979 as a collaboration and was first exhibited in 1979. Subsequently, despite art world resistance, it toured to 16 venues...

(1974–79) by Judy Chicago

Judy Chicago

, is housed there along with a biographical gallery highlighting the women represented in "The Dinner Party".

!W.A.R.: Voices of a Movement, video interviews with artists and critics’ chronicling the founding years of the feminist art movement in the 1970s from Stanford University Digital Collections.

Woman's Building Herstories, a collection or video interviews about early feminist art and artists active within the Southern California area during the 1970s.

Origins

Timeline of Feminist Art

Major exhibitions

Journals about feminist art

Online archives

Further readings

External links

See also