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Through an international cohort of contributors, this book examines the rich and diverse strands of artistic and cultural production from the nineteenth century to the present day that contribute to elastic and ever-expanding histories of feminist art.
The contributions facilitate an understanding of the complex histories of feminist art, material, and cultural production both for new and inveterate students and scholars, while complicating feminist art's canonisation by engaging questions and issues of history-writing itself. An implicit concern throughout the volume is how feminist art history has both addressed and, at times, been complicit in its own systems of exclusion. Foregrounding political and social movements and developments in related fields such as critical race studies, Indigenous studies, trans studies, disability studies, and critical ethnic studies in recent decades, this volume looks beyond the canonical lineage of feminist art history toward an expansive view to feminist art's pasts, pitfalls, and potentials. The book also goes beyond the traditional visual arts to consider vernacular and material cultures in our increasingly visually oriented world (which encompasses the social media and citizen journalism accelerated in the COVID era).
The book will be of interest to scholars and students working in art history and gender studies.
List of contents
Introduction 1. A Letter to Onyeka Igwe (notes on a Black sense of aesthetics) 2. The end of the creative genius: women artists and critics in postwar Italy 3. "And Others" - building intersectional feminist methodologies of collectivity: gender, labour, value 4. Under the
Tightwire: an interview with Heather Evans 5. Cross-cultural (dis)encounters with Latin American feminist art, Mexico 1970s and Vancouver 1980s 6. Gender and maternity in Barbara Chase-Riboud's early sculpture 7. Unfolding material conditions in the nylon works of Senga Nengudi 8. Tears, stitches & transition: feminist textiles and a birth of QueerCrip aesthetics 9. "Not Necessarily Not There": dark energy in Dionne Simpson and Denyse Thomasos's paintings 10. The invisible manifesto: art, agency, and implicit resistance in the GDR's Second Public Sphere, 1974-1989 11. The dancing ghazals of Mah Laqa Bai "Chanda" 12. Women in print: feminism's collective artist's book spaces 13. Landless: ecological relationships in Puerto Rican and Afro-Caribbean feminisms 14. Feminist archiving: a critical look at methodologies of (re)membering South African Black women artists from the twentieth century 15. Excavating Lesbian Legacies: Millie Wilson and Fauve Semblant: Peter (A Young English Girl) 16. "Living in the earth-deposits of our history": archival fabulations and feminist art history 17. Women and difference in feminism and feminist Art: Korea's Women's Art Festival '99: A Parade of Ugly Sisters 18. Miss Chief Eagle Testickle: Kent Monkman's feminist decolonizing of art history 19. Intersectional transfeminism as methodology in global contemporary art history 20. Feminism in cyberspace
About the author
Erin Silver is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory at The University of British Columbia.
