A Cock in the System: How The Feminist Revolutionized the

by Madeleine Dugan

At the end of my senior year of high school, I was voted as “Future Picasso” for a superlative in the yearbook, meaning I was most likely to become a famous after I graduated. I thought this name was strange because I went to an all- school and I didn’t understand why a female artist’s name was not chosen for the superlative to better relate to us as women. When I approached the head of the yearbook committee and asked to change the superlative to a female artist like Frida Kahlo, she said it wouldn’t make sense because Khalo is not a household name like Picasso is and it would not be recognizable to viewers. So why is

Frida Kahlo not a household name and why does everyone know the male “canonical” , but not their female counterparts?

When we talk about “,” the first pictures that pop into our minds tend to be the

Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, Picasso’s cubist representations of women, The Starry Night ​ ​ by Van Gogh, or a handful of other Western, male artists. Unless you are an art student, you probably wouldn’t recognize the names: Artemisia Genteleschi, Marina Abramović, or Eva ​ Hesse--three individuals who were essential to pushing the boundaries of the art of their times.

So why don’t you know their names? Women have always made art, but in order to make what is dubbed by the art world as “fine art” like or , you need an education in .

Especially in times like the Renaissance when women were barely educated as it was, artistic education was even more scarce for women, and was often provided by their fathers or husbands if at all. Pile on top of this misfortune the responsibility of marriage and motherhood as the

“norm” forced upon women up until the recent century: it made the creation of art fairly difficult on the part of female artists. In the midst of the 1960s, with both the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Rights Movement, women were inspired to start meaningful conversations about their place in society, and female artists began to question what their place in the art world was.

Tired of the historical erasure and lack of representation in history and museums, female artists decided to take matters into their own hands.

In order to address this problem of artistic inequality, artists and art scholars began to produce artworks and criticism inquiring into the patriarchal structures of the art world like those in galleries and museums. In 1971, , a prominent historian and

Professor Emerita of Modern Art at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts, dared to ask

“Why Are There No Great ?,” and it sparked a conversation that is still ongoing today. How do we as feminists and artists change the patriarchal ideals that have stunted female artistic success? And how can we combat the social and political reasons that there are no “great” women artists? These questions are still present in conversations today because, unfortunately, the reign of the Western, male view of art is still in place and serves as a dominating factor in what, as well as who, is represented in the “canon” of art. Art is a means of defining culture and identity for society, and the human race as a whole. If there is nobody to question the lack of representation for female artists, the same boring and misogynistic lens will be worn to look at art and our history as people throughout time. We cannot stand to allow this erasure of people and culture in favor of a stagnant and ancient way of viewing life itself. This is where feminist artists come in, to counteract this old-fashioned way of thinking and bring in a new age of art that allows for self-expression and representation for minorities like women and LGBT+ people,

which is how the came into light. Through the collaboration of feminists creating controversial artworks, female-run organizations, and propaganda to question the patriarchal control of the art world, the Feminist Art Movement succeeded, and continues to ​ succeed, in gaining female artists recognition in the male-dominated art industry.

In the late 1960s, the Feminist Art Movement emerged as a reaction to anti-war sentiments, and coincided with Civil Rights and LGBT+ Rights movements. The goal was to make art that represented women’s shared suffering of patriarchal oppression in the form of erasure of female-produced art and gain recognition for their work. Feminist artists banded together to bring awareness to modern and past female artists and sought to retell the stories of those forgotten or covered up by male artists and historians. The movement also strove to highlight minority groups and raise their art to a higher status than just “folkart” or being defined solely by their race or sexuality instead of their artform. The Feminist Art Movement was a means of both gaining respect and elevated status for female artists, as well as creating platforms and galleries where their art could be viewed in a scholarly and serious way instead of being ignored as they had previously been by their male counterparts.

By including women’s perspectives in art, female artists sought to create productive and progressive conversations about women’s status in not just the art world, but in society and politics as well. The increased support between women in the art world helped to create galleries that allowed women to express themselves in an uncensored environment, which, in turn, allowed women to gain more public recognition in society and influence the masses through their artistic expression.

Part I: Bodies versus Boys

In order to fight against the taboo status of female sexual desire and bring this double-standard of nudes made by men into a conversation, feminist artists created provocative and explicit art about sexuality, which spurred conversation through mixed reactions of shock and awe. Women attempted to thwart male power by creating works of male eroticism as a form of artistic protest. According to professor of Rachel Middleman’s (2010) dissertation,

A New Eros: Sexuality in Women's Art before the Feminist Art Movement, women sought to ​ create art that would emphasize women’s perspectives despite the disproval of “the creation of erotic art with a ‘female view’” (p. 289). This was meant to force critics to consider the double-standard created when men are allowed to paint nude women in sexual scenes, versus virtually the same works created by women being viewed as taboo and inappropriate simply because the artist is female. Dr. Jill Fields, an art historian in women’s studies, argues in her ​ 2012 article in the journal Frontiers that, while 's Big OX No. 2 (1968) was a ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ phallic piece of art that made art critics reel back in disgust, it also promoted a conversation about the taboo of female versus male nude imagery (p. 2). Judith K. Brodsky and Ferris Olin

(2008), co-authors of Junctures in Women’s Leadership: The Arts, provide another example: ​ ​ ’s Antonio and I is a painting of two nude figures, which is sensual but challenges ​ ​ the viewer to question how they perceive the female figure and why she is sexualized while the male is not, as well as how the skin tones are portrayed in relation to race (p. 330). Author and art historian Cassandra L. Langer (1991) claims that, “Women’s criticism of their sexist victimization within has expressed itself in a progressive movement toward self-definition that affirms the importance of feeling and will as a basis for action” (p. 21). This

can be seen through Nancy Spero’s Torture of Women, which comments on the sexual violence ​ ​ women suffer under the treatment of men by portraying a nude scene of a man raping a

(p. 21). The creation of provocative works like these was intended to evoke any kind of reaction, no matter if these reactions were positive or negative, because either viewpoint would still spark a conversation, leading to change and to recognition on behalf of the artist whose work was talked about.

Female aritsts “negotiated their personal identities as heterosexual women who addressed sex and desire in their art, while simultaneously contending with their diminished status as women in the art world” by daring male viewers to look at their works without a sexual lens

(Middleman, 2010, p. 292). The works created by feminist artists were intended to challenge the , which before the 1960s had hardly been questsioned despite the overt sexualization of women in art and media. By creating art that was overtly erotic, female artists highlighted the need for a conversation about why it was okay for men to make sexual works but not for women to do the same. The increased production of sexual imagery challenged viewers’ opinions about female subjects in art and how they were represented with respect to whoever’s gaze met with the work. Though the topics of sexuality and the female nude were often portrayed by men in all forms of art, the idea of women producing their own sexualized work was thought to be taboo, which led female artists to counteract this idea by creating explicit works of art about men and women in order to make the subject a conversation-worthy topic. Middleman’s (2010) dissertation asserts that the way women chose to represent themselves and others through the lens of female ‘eroticism’ is one of the primary factors in how contemporary art is made today and that it is women who shaped the modern and contemporary art worlds through the Feminist

Art Movement. Because of the portrayal of men and women in pornographic or highly sexual works of art, women were able to make men question their own creation of female nudes and created discussions that would bring the taboo topics out into the open air.

Large installations of feminist artworks were a way to protest the male-dominated art community and promote conversations about projected on not just women but also people of color and LGBT+ individuals. ’s The Dinner Party challenged the ​ ​ patriarchy’s hold on the art world through the creation of highly sexualized female genitalia as a dinner experience. The sarcastic interpretation of a woman’s “place at the table” is biting commentary and another example of how female artists would create artwork to highlight the prejudice of the male-run art world. According to a 2009 article by artist and for

ArtCritical, Maureen Mullarkey, due to the lack of publicity and representation for women, ​ people of color, and LGBT+ individuals, “the was indicted as the history of Male

Art—and until the late twentieth century, largely heterosexual male art” (p. 489). Women began blatantly making fun of the bourgeois culture in the art world and upper-class society and instead made art that was seen as more “salty” and sarcastic as a way to counteract the prejudice the rest of the art world had against their female counterparts. Like all other languages throughout history, the classification of ‘fine art’ is an “artificial category promoted by the bipolar gender trap” that men have controlled for centuries (Mullarkey, 2009, p.488). Feminist artists banded together to contradict the way men defined the canon of art and counteracted the preset standards for ‘fine art’ by creating crude, explicit, and sarcastic works of art.

Another way that women questioned the male-dominated industry and promoted themselves as artists was through creating artwork that spoke out against the predominately

white, cisgender, and straight culture of the canon of the art world. Amelia Jones (1995), Vice

Dean of Research at USC, Roski, discusses how female art critics would claim that “white feminists need to interrogate (white) ’s general blindness to race and the implicit, unquestioned whiteness of the vast majority of work by Anglo-feminist artists and theorists” (p.

436). This conversation brought to light an issue that was ignored for so long, which was how work created by non-white artists, especially non-white women’s work, was largely overlooked and often times labeled as ‘folkart,’ which was a derogatory term for art with a non-western origin. Female art critics argued the necessity to develop a “feminist cultural consciousness--not least for the fact that it enabled, through its problematically universalizing tendency, the opening up of debates about the narrowness of the (particularly its implicit whiteness and myopia about class and sexual orientation)” in order to promote all female artists and not just white women of higher social standings (Jones, 1995, p. 441). The goal of these conversations about art by critics, as well as work made by women of color and people on the LGBT+ spectrum, was to open up more opportunities for those female artists whose ability to gain recognition for their work was made even more difficult than that of white women simply because of their race or sexual orientation.

Part II: Putting the ‘Gal’ in Galleries

Activists in the Feminist Art Movement created female-run galleries and organizations to fund and house their own artistic endeavors separate from male-dominated galleries. Because ​ ​ most artistic forums that allowed for the scholarly discussion and display of art were typically male-dominated and overshadowed the few female artists that were gathered in collections, women created different ways to promote their work in an environment free of patriarchal

structure. According to her 2014 dissertation, Deoritha Waters, an art history professor at

Northwest Florida State College, one way that art feminist activists promoted female artists was through slide registeries (p. 16). The West East Bag (WEB), an international organization of female artists, created slide registries, which were lists of women artists with their CVs and resumes “as a means to increase the visibility of women artists and consciousness-raising” in the eyes of prominent galleries (Waters, 2014, p. 16). These slide registeries were not only a good way of connecting women with galleries and other female artists with the same experiences as themselves, but it also provided galleries with absolutely no excuse not to have works made by female artists in their collections because they now had plenty of access to the feminist art network.

In support of Waters’ claim, Fields (2012) affirms that by creating organizations that only showed female artists’ works, “[f]eminist artists challenged the exclusion of women artists from ​ galleries and museums; created new aesthetic practices; and developed innovative forms, styles, and subjects of representation to portray female experiences and critique a range of gendered restraints on women's agency from trivialization to violence” (p. 2). One such organization was the Sackler Center for Feminist Art, which promoted women’s art by displaying only ​ female-made artworks without male input or patriarchal leadership. Women-run organizations ​ ​ were safe havens for female artists and provided platforms for women to create their art and talk about the oppression they faced in everyday life as well as in the art world. Providing a space for only female-produced art to be displayed gave women a more confident voice and allowed feminist artists to be more true to themselves with less fear about receiving criticism because of their gender.

In a less anti-male way, Womanart, another essential network created to promote both women and LGBT+ artists, was created as an organization that was aggressively gay and sexual, and full of amateur artists without a defined label or style. Women and gay men in Womanart produced works that were seen as vulgar and were intended to fight against the norms that had been established by heterosexual men: they sought to show how “heterosexuality itself [was] an ​ agent of sexist domination” (Mullarkey, 2009, p.489). By creating art that spoke to the ​ oppression of any artists other than cisgender, straight, male artists, groups like Womanart succeeded in creating a conversational platform that was able to contradict the way history had represented both women and LGBT+ artists.

Organizations like Womanart promoted female and LGBT+ artists through the support of these artists’ work and the loud voice they used to publicly display controversial pieces of art that forced critics to take a look at how the world of art was being run. Many organizations like

Womanart popped up around the same time as the emergence of the Feminist Art Movement. A similar organiaztion to Womanart was , a feminist art installation and performance space created by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. This was an actual gallery meant to empower female artists to show their own work and be recognized for it in a formal setting with constructive criticism, without fear of or being compared to male counterparts. Professor of Art History at the University of Arts in London, Deborah Cherry (1995), argues in “Pleasure and Politics” for the positive impact of Womanhouse and its founders, Judy Chicago and Miriam

Schapiro, who provided art education to women who sought to pursue art in a field dominated by men. In California, the Los Angeles Woman’s Building was created as a nonprofit that supported female artists by displaying their works in a serious and scholarly environment free from the

criticism of male counterparts. Soon afterwards, the Feminist Art Project followed. In agreement with Cherry (1995), author and art history professor Kathleen Desmond (2011) argues in her book Feminist Art, Aesthetics, and that these organizations in collaboration with ​ ​ the Feminist Art Project were a “strategic intervention against ongoing erasure of women from the cultural record and [a] re-focusing [of] public attention on the achievements of the Feminist

Art Movement” (p. 129). The culmination of all of these artistic platforms gave women different ways to publicize their work and their politics, which allowed for female artists to gain recognition in the public eye.

In protest of museums ignoring the lack of female-produced art in their collections, women also founded their own exclusively feminist galleries to display their works. One such venue was the Artemisia Gallery, which opened across the street from the Museum of Modern

Art as a challenge to the MOMA’s neglect of female artists, as well as a taunt to the organization itself. Fields (2012) writes: “Artemisia became a place where women first encountered a feeling ​ of sisterhood and felt that they had truly engaged with feminism” (p. 11). Here, women were ​ ​ free to create and display their own work without fear of a sexist and demeaning audience

(Fields, 2012). By creating a space where women were comfortable to be themselves and were able to hold scholarly discussions void of the presence of pompous men who claimed to be the authorities of the art world, feminist artists were able to gain support through each other and were then given the opportunities to have their work recognized by a more enlightened and less descriminatory eye. Through the construction of a simple gallery space, a gesture used as an outright protest to its corrupt and sexist neighbor, the MOMA, Artemisia Gallery was successful in providing a safe space for feminist artists, as well as a more diverse art scene for art lovers. By ​

separating themselves from the male-dominated art industry, feminist artists encouraged artistic freedom and helped to promote themselves through their work without the oppressive control of the patriarchal ‘high art’ world.

Part III: Props for Propaganda

Feminist art groups also countered the sexism and oppression in the art community by creating artistic propaganda, which questioned the patriarchy present in prominent artistic authorities like the MOMA. Propaganda was created in a multitude of ways, either through performance, posters, social media posts, or installations of artwork in public spaces. Groups like

Fight Censorship, founded by Anita Steckel, reacted to male power by creating works about male eroticism as a form of artistic protest, and the point of the group was “to advocate for women’s sexual expression and to protest restrictions on phallic imagery in museums” (Middleman, 2010, p. 6). Fight Censorship was a means of both promoting and defending explicit art made by women and also served as a protector of the women making the art. This group emphasized the importance of allowing women to express their sexuality instead of stifling it. Due to the presence of the group and its tactical argumentative protests through the creation of explicit art,

“museum exhibitions and published articles publicly recognized the significance of such work as feminist art” and allowed explicit works to be shown in galleries and exhibitions (Middleman,

2010, 36). The form of protest through the means of creating art was just one of the ways that women continued to push the boundaries and eventually broke down galleries, forcing them to display their work in favor of freedom of speech and sexual expression.

Similarly to the example given by Middleman, Brodsky and Olin (2008) talk about a separate instance where an artist created public works to enact a conversation. Judy Baca, an

American artist and a professor at the University of California in Los Angeles, created political propaganda about race by painting enormous in impoverished neighborhoods that spoke to young men of color. Kids of Survival was a prominent series in impoverished communities in ​ ​ Los Angeles and by placing these pictorial messages in a public setting, Baca gained publicity for her cause (Brodsky and Olin, 2008, p. 337). The public creation of prominently placed artworks that deal with hard-to-talk-about subjects is another form of propaganda that forces communities to deal with descrimination towards minorities and women.

Another group well known for their activism is the , who dress up in gorilla masks as anonymous protesters who picket galleries with comedic signs that provide biting commentary on the male-dominated art world. Still active today, this contemporary group seeks to be the “conscience of the art world” and pickets outside galleries and museums with extensively researched statistics “about the representation of women and people of color in museum and gallery exhibitions” that they then put on posters for the general public to see

(Desmond, 2011, p. 127). Publicized protests like these make it hard for museumgoers and passers-by to ignore as colorful, bold-fonted posters wave in the face of the masses. Activist groups like the National Organization for Women (NOW) and the West East Bag (WEB) were also prominent groups of feminist artists that picketed in front of museums in protest of “the ​ absence of art by women exhibited by the museum” (Fields, 2012, p. 10). In spite of the prominently male-dominated Art Workers’ Coalition, Women Artists in Revolution (WAR) and the Ad Hoc Women Artists’ Coalition were also prominent artist groups that acted similarly by protesting through public posters and picketing as a means of gaining attention from the higher forces in the art world. This propaganda also served to force museums and galleries to change ​

their exhibits and representational strategies for fear of tarnished reputations and loss of from visitors and sponsors.

Part IV: Contemplating the Contemporary Impact

Through public displays of their dissatisfaction with the art world’s oppressive tendencies and its canon, feminist artists were able to highlight the importance of representation for not just women, but also LGBT+ people and individuals of color. Though feminist artworks and protests had a seemingly subtle impact on the art industry as a whole, they have suceeded in promoting the efforts of the Feminist Art Movement to increase awareness of female artists and their works.

Protesting galleries and museums brought the public into the conversation and sparked interest and support from different activists and movements. This was especially successful when social networking platforms became popular and connected organizations and individual feminist artists worldwide, growing a support network that would discuss and bring awareness to the movement in a more visible way. Creating women-run gallery spaces and organizations encouraged the production of controversial art and enabled feminist artists to express themselves freely without fear of censorship or oppression from unsupportive male artists. Though some critics might argue that the Feminist Art Movement has been slow to achieve their goals, the movement itself has helped to shape the way that contemporary art is created. The subject matter produced today is much more conversation-based and diverse because of the movement’s efforts.

With the newfound exposure of controversies in the art world thanks to social media platforms like Twitter, protesting corrupt artistic organizations and supporting wholesome galleries have become more accessible and supported. Though protesting galleries through the physical act of picketing in front of galleries might not prevent patrons from entering museums,

other forms of protest like social media postings about the hypocrisy of institutions can serve to be more progressive in these modern times. Providing alternative venues to view art created by more diverse artists also gives artlovers a larger variety of choices to avoid supporting corrupt establishments. The continued support from female-run organizations that promote women making art is one of the best and most effective ways of highlighting individual female artists as important parts of the art world. By supporting progressive organizations and gallery spaces that allow female artists to grow as an alternative to stagnant museums that choose old male artists, we can succeed in continuing to promote the Feminist Art Movement’s goal of gaining female artists equal representation and recognition as their male counterparts.

Despite the persistence of certain oppressive ways of viewing the history of art like the still-established “canon” of art revolving around straight, white men, the Feminist Art Movement has sought and continues to seek methods of fighting this set norm. The culmination of strategies like protests, group formations, and the creation of discussion-based artwork allow for forward motion towards an art world where women, LGBT+ individuals, and all races are equally represented to the same extent as the heterosexual, caucasian, male, dominating artists. Thanks to the Feminist Art Movement, this goal of equality and exposure continues to be met in the face of adversity when inequality presents itself. As artists, critics, and art lovers, we are responsible for promoting this forward way of thinking and through positive action towards a common goal of recognition for feminist artists, we can continue to succeed.

References

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Author bio:

Madeleine Dugan is currently a second-year student at VCU, majoring in Craft and Material Studies, and minoring in Art History and Criminal Justice. She wrote “A Cock in the System: How The Feminist Art Movement Revolutionized the Art World” for Professor Jessica Gordon’s UNIV 200 last fall (2019). She is currently working for the VMFA, where she applies her studies in her work as a research assistant for an upcoming exhibition.