Feminism and art

Feminist art is by women artists made consciously in the light of developments in feminist art theory in the early 1970's. The movement emerged in the late 1960's amidst the fervour of anti war demonstrations as well as civil and queer rights movements.

Key ideas
Feminist artists sought to create a dialogue between the viewer and the artwork through the inclusion of women's perspective. Art was to merely an object for aesthetic admiration, but could also incite the viewer to question the social and political landscape, and through this questioning, possibly affect the world and incite change towards equality.

Before feminism, the majority of women artists were denied exhibitions and gallery representation based on the sole fact of their gender. Feminist artists created alternate venues as well as worked to changed established institutions' policies to promote women artists visibility within the art world.

Feminist artists often embraced alternative media, incorporating fabric, fibre, performance and video as these materials did not have the same historical male dominated precedent that painting and sculpture carried. By using these non traditional media, they sought to expand the definition of fine arts to include a wider variety of media and artistic perspectives.

Mary Kelly

Mary Kelly has contributed extensively to the discourse of feminism and post-modernism through her large-scale narrative installations and theoretical writings. Kelly’s work mediates between conceptual art and the more intimate interests of artists of the 1980's. Her work has been exhibited internationally and she is considered among the most influential contemporary artists working today.



Linda Sterling

Linda Sterling is a visual artist who creates photo montages. Taking one image as base image and adding another / part of another picture/ maybe an object on top to hide a key part of the image underneath. Her artistic work is very media related and was mainly vexed in the idea of glamour / sinister lure or spell. Sterling's images are mainly of people but recently are of food, objects and surfaces.
 

Cindy Sherman 

Cindy Sherman is an American photographer, she studied art at Buffalo State College, concentrating on photography, which she maintained is the appropriate medium of expression in our media dominated civilisation. Her photography are portraits of herself in various scenarios that parody stereotypes of woman. A panoply of characters and settings is drawn from sources of popular culture: old movies, television soaps and pulp magazines. She rapidly rose to celebrity status in the international art world during the early 1980's with the presentation of a series of untitled 'film stills' in various group and solo exhibitions.



Suzanne Lacy

She declared that  the goal of feminist art was to 'influence cultural attitudes and transform stereotypes'. There is no singular medium or styles that unites feminist artists, as they often combined aspects from various movements and media, including conceptual art, body art, and video art into works that presented a message about women's experience and the need for gender equality.

Conceptual Art

The term conceptual art came into use in the late 1960s to describe artwork in which the concept (idea) behind the artwork is more important than traditional aesthetic and materials concerns (what it looks like or how it is made).
Conceptual artists do not set out to make a painting or a sculpture and then fit their ideas to that existing from. Instead they think beyond the limits of those traditional media, and then work out their concept or idea in any materials and whatever form is appropriate.

Land Art
Land art was usually documented in artworks using photographs and maps which the artists could exhibit in galleries. Land artists also made land art in galleries by bringing in materials from the landscape and using it to create their piece.

Robert Smithson
He was an American artist famous for his use in photography in relation to sculpture and land art. His earliest pieces were paintings and collages, but he soon came to focus on sculpture; he responded to the Minimalism and Conceptualism of the early 1960s and he started to expand his work out of galleries and into the landscape. In 1970, he produced the Earthwork, or Land art, for which he is best known, 'Spiral Jetty', a remarkable coil of rock composed in the colored waters of the shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

Andrew Goldsworthy

is a British sculptor, photographer and environmentalist producing site-specific sculpture and land art situated in natural and urban settings, and collaborates with nature to make his creations. His creations are transient, or ephemeral. He photographs each piece once right after he makes it. His goal is to understand nature by directly participating in nature as intimately as he can. He generally works with whatever comes to hand: twigs, leaves, stones, snow and ice, reeds and thorns. 

Richard Long

He is an English sculptor and one of the best known British land artists.

Long is the only artist to have been short-listed four times for the Turner Prize. He was nominated in 1984, 1987 and 1988, and then won the award in 1989 for White Water Line. Within a year of his departure from St Martin's, Long was closely associated with the emergence of a new art form, Land art, having already produced such works as 'A Line Made by Walking' this is made by a trail left in the grass by walking back and forth in a straight line.

Performance 

Its origins began in 'Dada' and 'Futurism' with Salvador Dali and Marcel Duchamp. Its influence later inspired the likes of Jackson Pollock and the 'abstract expressionists'. It later goes on to inform  'Actionism' and digital artists such as Stelarc and Bruce Nauman.

Photography and Film

Most artist documented the conceptual practice as an artifact to the event using the new form of art photography. This later in the 60s moves onto film and now into a digital world.

Arte Povera

Translated to 'poor art'. It was a move away from traditional materials such as oil paints, bronze and plaster and move towards no conventional materials such as everyday liquids, soil, rags, redundant objects. Basically anything you can find that no longer has its original purpose.

Found Object

  A found object is natural or man made ( or fragment of an object) found ( or sometimes bought) by an artist and kept because of some intrinsic interest the artist sees in it. 

Art History Evaluation

At the beginning of the art history project we created a blog which then we would publish what we had learnt about different art movements including The Renaissance, The Bauhaus, Pop Art, Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, Social Realism, Postmodernism, Conceptual Art and The Young British Artists. After we had finished our 10 sessions we had to then choose a movement to research into more detail for our final piece. 

For my final project I chose to focus on The Renaissance into more detail. 

The Renaissance was a period of European history at the end of the Middle Ages and the rise of the Modernist World, during the 14th century throught to the 17th. It started as a cultural movement in Italy in the late Medieval Period. Its intellectual basis was humanism, derived from the rediscovery of classical Greek philosophy. 

I chose the Renaissance because of some of the major artists involved in this movement. I also like how this period of art is more historical and how each artist have their own influences in their work. 

One of the artists that I liked was Sandro Botticelli, he was an Italian printer and painter, he painted many portraits and many of his works were influenced by religion and religious subjects like the panels of Madonna and churches. 

I like his work as each piece has its own theme with it either being religious or influenced by Venus. In the painting 'Venus And Mars' it shows the Gods in an allegory of beauty and valour. It shows the couple in a forest setting, surrounded by playful satyrs. This painting is typically held as an ideal of sensuous love of pleasure and play. There is a romantic and love theme in some of Botticelli's work especially the ones that include the God Venus. 

Another artist i liked was Leonardo da Vinci. He was also an Italian artist, but was famous for other areas of work. As well as being a painter da Vinci was also a sculptor, architect, engineer and a scientist. One of thr many paintings I like is 'The Mona Lisa', i like it because of the many theories behind this painting. The many theories like the hidden smile but also that the painting is actually of a man dressed as a woman, this was suggested 

because of the big hands but also because of the line across the forehead maybe suggesting a wig is being worn. 

I also like Michelangelo. He was an Italian artist but also was a sculptor, architect, poet and engineer and was one of the high Renaissance artists who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western Art. His work shows a theme of religion like in 'The Creation Of Adam' this is implying Adam touching the hand of God who is surrounded by angelic figures. The shape around the angelic figures looks like the shape of a heart. I also like Michelangelo's paintings he did for the Sistine Chapel and how all his work relate with having a similar theme of religion. 

Lastly i like Jan Van Eyck. He was a Neverlandish painter of the late Middle Ages. He painted both secular and religious subject matter paintings including commissioned portraits and also oil paintings. One of his art works I liked was 'The Arnolfini Wedding'. In this picture it shows a young girl who is possibly pregnant, however the colour green suggests innocence and the red in the background suggests romance and love, but also danger. 

I chose this art movement because I particularly liked the artists. However I didnt really like the Surrealism art movement as some of the work that was produced by the artist didn't really make much sense. 

Young British Artists

Also referred to as Brit artists and Britart, it s the name given to a loose group of visual artists who first began to exhibit together in London, in 1988. They were known for their openness to materials and processes, shock tactics and entrepreneurial attitude. Many of the artists graduated from the BA Fine Art course at Goldsmiths in the late 1980's.

Goldsmiths college of Art played an important role in the development of the movement. It had for some years been fostering new forms of creativity through its courses which abolished the traditional separation of media into painting, sculpture, printmaking etc. In the late 1980's British Art entered what was quickly recognised as a new and excitingly distinctive phase, the era of what became known as the YBA's.

Young British Art can be seen to have a convenient starting point in the exhibition Freeze organised in 1988 by Damien Hirst while he was still a student at Goldsmiths College of Art. Freeze included the work of fellow Goldsmiths students, many of whom also became leading artists associated with the YBAs, such as Sarah Lucas, Angus Fairhurst and Michael Landy.

Michael Craig- Martin

Craig- Martin is a contemporary conceptual artist and painter. He is noted for fostering the Young British Artists, many of whom he taught, and for his conceptual artwork, An Oak Tree. He is Emeritus Professor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths.

In 1973, he exhibited the seminal piece An Oak Tree. The work consists of a glass of water standing on a shelf attached to the gallery wall next to which is a text using a semiotic argument to explain why it is in fact an oak tree.

                 An Oak Tree 1973

Sarah Lucas

  Self portrait with cigarettes 

Au Naturel 1994 Mattress, water bucket, melons, oranges and cucumber

The Bauhaus

The Bauhaus, a German word meaning ' House of building' was a school founded in 1919 in Weimar, Germany by architect Walter Gropius.

Gropius called for the school to show a new respect for craft and technique in all artistic media and suggested a return to attitudes to art and craft once characteristics of the medieval age, before art and manufacturing had drifted apart.
Gropius envisioned the Bauhaus encompassing the totality of all artistic media, including fine art, industrial design, graphic design, typography, interior design and architecture.


Lyonel Feininger (Illustrator), Walter Gropius (Author) manifesto and programme of the state Bauhaus, 1919.

This is woodcut by Lyonel Feininger. It shows a cathedral with a tower whose tip is surrounded by three stars, standing for the three arts of painting, sculpture and architecture, with the rays from them interlaced symbolically.

Paul Klee

Klee was a German water colourist, painter and etcher of fantastic works, mostly small in scale, and is one of the most inventive artists of the 20th Century.
He taught his theory of design in a component of the preliminary course. He supervised the bookbinding, glass painting and weaving workshops at various times at the Bauhaus. Some of his work includes:


                                  Cat and Bird 1928


                         Senecio 1922


Wassily Kandinsky

Kandinsky was a Russian painter,wood engraver, lithographer, teacher and theorist and also a pioneer of abstract art.
He viewed music as the most transcendent form of non objective art - musicians could evoke images in listeners' minds merely with sounds. He strove to produce similarly object free, spiritually rich paintings that alluded to sounds and emotions through a unity of sensation. Kandinsky sought to convey profound spiritually and the depth of human emotion through a universal visual language of abstract forms and colours that transcended cultural and physical boundaries.
Some of his work:


       Squares with Concentric Circles, 1913


                            Composition VIII, 1923

Conceptual Art

The term came into use in the late 1960's to describe artworks in which the concept (or idea) behind the artwork is more important than traditional aesthetic and material concerns.

Land Art

This is usually documented in artworks using photographs and maps. Land artists would also made land art in the galleries by bringing in material from the landscape and use that to recreate their artwork. 

Some land artists include Robert Smithson, Andrew Goldsworthy and Richard Long. 

Robert Smithson

Smithson was an American artist, famous for his use of photography for his sculptures and land art. He exhibited in many galleries around the world including the Galleria George Lester in Rome, Italy, the John Weber Gallery in New York.
His early exhibited artworks were collage works influenced by "homoerotic drawings and clippings from beefcake magazines", science fiction, and early Pop Art.
In 1967 Smithson began exploring industrial areas around New Jersey and was fascinated by the sight of dump trucks excavating tons of earth and rock that he described in an essay as the equivalents of the monuments of antiquity. This resulted in the series of 'non-sites' in which earth and rocks collected from a specific area are installed in the gallery as sculptures, often combined with mirrors or glass.


                     Spiral Jetty 1970


                  Broken Circle 1971


                 Amarillo Ramp 1973


Andrew Goldsworthy

Goldsworthy is a British sculptor, photographer and environmentalist producing site-specific sculpture and land art situated in natural and urban settings. The materials used in Andy Goldsworthy's art often include brightly coloured flowers, icicles, leaves, mud, pine cones, snow, stone, twigs, and thorns.
Goldsworthy produced a commissioned work for the entry courtyard of San Francisco's De Young Museum called "Drawn Stone", which echoes San Francisco's frequent earthquakes and their effects. His installation included a giant crack in the pavement that broke off into smaller cracks, and broken limestone, which could be used for benches. The smaller cracks were made with a hammer adding unpredictability to the work as he created it.


                                                   Autumn Cherry Leaves


                                               Icicle Star, joined with saliva


                      Goose Feathers


                                                     Rowan Leaves & Hole

Richard Long

 Long is an English sculptor and one of the best known British land artists. Several of his works were based around walks that he has made, and as well as land based natural sculpture, he uses the mediums of photography, text and maps of the landscape he has walked over.
In his work, often cited as a response to the environments he walked in, the landscape would be deliberately changed in some way, as in A Line Made by Walking (1967), and sometimes sculptures were made in the landscape from rocks or similar found materials and then photographed. Other pieces consist of photographs or maps of unaltered landscapes accompanied by texts detailing the location and time of the walk it indicates.

His piece Delabole Slate Circle, acquired from the Tate Modern in 1997, is a central piece in Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery.


                                      Delabole Slate Circle


Small White Pebble Circles 1987


     South Bank Circle 1991


       White Water Falls 2012

Social Realism

Social realism was an international art movement, it refers to the work of painters, printmakers, photographers and film makers who draw attention to the everyday conditions of the working class and the poor. 

While the movement's characteristics vary from nation to nation, it almost always utilises a form of descriptive or critical realism. 

This became an important art movement during the Great Depression in the United States in the 1930's. 

Ben Shahn

Shahn was an Lithuanian born American artist. He was best known for his works of social realism. 

Shahn mixed different genres of art. His body of art is distinctive for its lack of traditional landscapes, still lifes, and portraits Shahn used both expressive and precise visual languages, which he coalesced through the consistency of his authoritative line.

His background in lithography contributed to his detail-oriented look Shahn is also noted for his use of unique symbolism, which is often compared to the imagery in Paul Klee's drawings. While Shahn's "love for exactitude" is apparent in his graphics, so too is his creativity. In fact, many of his paintings are inventive adaptations of his photography. 

         Freedom Of The Press 1939

              McCarthy Peace 1968

              Register To Vote 1946

John Augustus Walker

Walker was a well known Alabama artist of the Depression era. 

His paintings reflect a passion for bright colours, heavy dark outlines and painterly brushwork characterized both his commercial and public works. Walker’s preferred subject matter ranged from Mardi Gras, fantasy and historical themes to landscapes and portraiture. 

Maxine Albro

Albro was an American painter, muralist, lithographer, mosaic artist, and sculptor. She was one of America's leading female artists, and one of the few women commissioned under the New Deal's Federal Art Project. 

Albro's artistic style is described as "clean, bright and clear with the strong rounded forms of this era, often depicting the women of Mexico, in particular those of the Tehuantepec region in Oaxaca. 

Albro was most recognized for her frescoes and her characteristic treatment of Mexican and Spanish subject matter. The influence of Mexican art is visible throughout her paintings, murals and lithographs. 

                     Mexico - 1933

                    California - 1934