Feminist art is an art category associated with the feminist movement of the late 60's and 70's. Feminist art highlights the social and political differences that women experience in their lives. The goal of this art form is to bring positive and comprehensive change to the world, leading to equality or liberation. Starting in the 1970s, feminists began to question the lack of women in art history studies and in museums.
There was no shortage of depictions of women in art made by men, but little attention had been paid to women artists themselves. There was a new urgency to review the historical canon of traditional art and to accommodate women who had been ignored, disparaged, or who had not been given credit for their work. While, as always, much remains to be done to account for women artists around the world, there have been significant advances in this field over the past five decades. This introductory reading list, while not exhaustive, will provide an idea of how feminist art history developed as a field, including its main, critical questions and debates.
Feminist art as a movement, a relatively new concept in the field of art history, did not become a reality until the 1960s and 1970s. Many women who considered themselves feminists set out to create a work that would challenge the patriarchal status quo in the art world. One of my favorite things in art history is when something or someone comes along that completely changes my perspective. Old search habits are changed and the values I took for granted are revalued.
Feminist art developed simultaneously with the feminist movement. Its origins date back to the 1960s and to the second wave of feminism. Feminist art was inspired by the works of protofeminist artists such as Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois, whose pieces focused on issues of domesticity, the female body and women's lives. Feminist artists set out to rewrite the history of art dominated by men and the tradition of seeing women as objects of pleasure for men.
The fight for gender equality and equal opportunities, led by the feminist art movement, helped female artists gain greater recognition, in an art world dominated by men. The author takes examples from prehistoric, Renaissance and post-Renaissance art to show the extent to which the representation of gender-based activities in art history is real. However, the most important thing is that it centralizes the place occupied by the art education classroom in the dissemination of a revised and expanded historical canon of art. So how did the artists of the 1960s and 1970s expand the idea of feminist art? Although many great female painters had appeared before, the feminist artistic movement of this time was born out of this enormous cultural upheaval of the season.
The authors point out that art history has been a conservative and slow to change (or “monolithic”) discipline, especially compared to fields such as literary studies, and that in 1987 there were very few feminist art historians holding professorships. Oven-San, by Yayoi Kusama, is considered a fundamental work in this regard, since it represented a specifically feminine object in a specific and feminine way, with bright colors and soft materials. Coinciding with third-wave feminism, her art satirizes gender stereotypes and deconstructs femininity and masculinity. While the women's movement of the 1970s encouraged both female artists and feminist art historians and critics to “change the art world so that it functions in a more socially responsible and non-elitist way”, while demanding equal opportunities and recognition for women in the arts, this progress was not without controversy.
