Artl@s Bulletin Volume 6 Issue 3 Visualizing Networks: Approaches to Network Article 5 Analysis in Art History 2017 Network Analysis and Feminist Artists Michelle Moravec Rosemont College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/artlas Part of the Contemporary Art Commons, Digital Humanities Commons, and the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons Recommended Citation Moravec, Michelle. "Network Analysis and Feminist Artists." Artl@s Bulletin 6, no. 3 (2017): Article 5. This document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries. Please contact [email protected] for additional information. This is an Open Access journal. This means that it uses a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access. Readers may freely read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of articles. This journal is covered under the CC BY-NC-ND license. Visualizing Networks Network Analysis and Feminist Artists Michelle Moravec * Rosemont College Abstract This article, based on two of the author’s digital humanities projects, explores the systemic and structural barriers that limit the utility of social network analysis for feminist artists. The first project analyzed the artist Carolee Schneemann’s female circles through a correspondence network. The second project traced the circulation of feminist art manifestos in the US. Three factors are identified as constraining network analysis: lack of feminist artists’ archives, an insufficient amount of machine-readable material, and the limited availability of metadata pertaining to them. Network analysis therefore is best viewed as supplemental to other digital approaches for studying this group. Résumé S’appuyant sur deux projets numériques de l'auteur, cet article examine les problèmes systémiques et structurels qui limitent l'utilité de l'analyse de réseaux sociaux pour l’étude des artistes féministes. Le premier projet consistait à analyser les réseaux féminins de l'artiste Carolee Schneemann à travers sa correspondance. Le deuxième projet retraçait la circulation des manifestes d'art féministe aux États-Unis. Trois facteurs viennent limiter ces analyses des réseaux : le manque d'archives d'artistes féministes, une quantité insuffisante de documents pouvant être automatiquement analysés, et le manque de métadonnées concernant ce matériel. L'analyse de réseau ne peut donc servir que de complément à d'autres approches numériques pour l'étude de ce groupe. * Michelle Moravec is an Associate Professor of History at Rosemont College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Dr. Moravec sits on the American Historical Association’s Digital History Standards committee and serves as the digital history editor for Women and Social Movements. She also writes about the methodological implications of doing humanities research digitally. 66 ARTL@S BULLETIN, Vol. 6, Issue 3 (Fall 2017) Moravec – Network Analysis and Feminist Artists So this network fine webbery how concentratedly movement of the 1970s, but also argued that it had inwardly can I be pulling in following tug filaments “ transformed the art world.”5 In the early twenty- of what or who arrives from without? first century, several influential anthologies —Carolee Schneemann to Margaret Fisher collected and disseminated feminist art movement 17 July 19741 texts to a wide audience.6 7 Dedicated scholars also offered much-needed correctives that more Networks, even when invoked metaphorically, thoroughly incorporated the contributions of black offer an appealing way to characterize connections feminist artists to our understanding of movements between people. The artist Carolee Schneemann's for women’s liberation.8 The first decade of the poetic reference to a “fine webbery” captures the twenty-first century saw a spate of international conceptual resonance that led many digital feminist art exhibits.9 WACK! Art and the Feminist humanities scholars to adopt social network Revolution offered a sweeping re-assessment of the analysis, a method of modeling relationships impact of feminism on the art world that connected between individuals.2 In this brief research note, I the US movement internationally. 10 The exhibition share the difficulties I confronted when using catalog included Marsha Meskimmon’s challenge to network analysis to study marginalized artists.3 feminist cartographies that envisioned feminism as Ultimately, I relied on alternative methods, emanating outward from North America and abandoning anything that could be termed a Europe. 11 That same year Global Feminisms: New rigorous use of network analysis. Directions in Contemporary Art looked “beyond the Since the 1980s, art historians and critics have borders of North America and Europe” to the thoroughly documented the significance of the transnational future of feminist art. 12 feminist art movement. Craig Owens’s early essay The two projects I share here contribute to this credited the movement with playing a leading role revised feminist art historiography using digital in the transition from modernism to post- approaches. The first, “Visualizing Schneemann,” modernism, a point later amplified by Brodksy and explores the artist’s world through an edited Olin.4 Broude and Garrard’s The Power of Feminist volume of her correspondence.13 A subsequent Art not only “celebrated” the feminist art 1 Kristine Stiles, ed., Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Bay Press, 1983), 57–82; Judith K. Brodsky and Ferris Olin, “Stepping out of the Schneemann and Her Circle, annotated edition (Durham NC: Duke University Press, Beaten Path: Reassessing the Feminist Art Movement,” Signs: Journal of Women in 2010), 361. Culture and Society 33, no. 2 (2008): 329–42. 2 For an excellent explanation of how network analysis works in practice see Laura 5 Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, “Preface,” in Power of Feminist Art, ed. Norma Mandell, “How to Read a Literary Visualisation: Network Effects in the Lake School of Broude and Mary D. Garrard (Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 8. Romantic Poetry,” Digital Studies / Le Champ Numérique 3, no. 2 (2013), 6 Lisa Gail Collins, The Art of History: African American Women Artists Engage the Past https://www.digitalstudies.org/ojs/index.php/digital_studies/article/view/236. A (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002); Lisa E. Farrington, Creating very early effort at visualizing feminist art networks focused on the art world center Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists (New York: Oxford of New York and only secondarily Los Angeles. [Meredith A. Brown, “‘The Enemies of University Press, 2005); Uri McMillan, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Women’s Liberation in the Arts Will Be Crushed’: A.I.R. Gallery’s Role in the Feminist Art and Performance (New York: NYU Press, 2015); Catherine Morris and American Feminist Art Movement,” Text, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Rujeko Hockley, eds., We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85 Institution,2, (2012), http://www.aaa.si.edu/essay/meredith-brown.] Nancy Ross (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). created an innovative pedagogical project that visualized relationships between 7 Hilary Robinson, ed., Feminism Art Theory: An Anthology 1968-2000 (Malden, MA: twentieth-century women artists. [Nancy Ross, “Teaching Twentieth Century Art Wiley-Blackwell, 2001); Helena Reckitt and Peggy Phelan, eds., Art and Feminism History with Gender and Data Visualizations,” Journal of Interactive Technology and (London: Phaidon Press, 2012). Pedagogy, no. 4 (2013), https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/teaching-twentieth- 8 Collins, The Art of History; Farrington, Creating Their Own Image. century-art-history-with-gender-and-data-visualizations/.] 9 Deepwell has compiled an invaluable comprehensive list of such exhibitions. Katy More recent approaches involve spatial networks as reflected in the panel “Mapping Deepwell, “Feminist Exhibition Catalogues, List by N.paradoxa : International Feminist Art Networks” organizing by Joanna Gardner-Huggett, which offered a Feminist Art Journal (ISSN: 1461_0434), KT Press,” accessed September 4, 2017, broad range of temporal and topical approaches including Amy Tobin’s efforts to http://www.ktpress.co.uk/feminist-art-exhibitions.asp. map international feminist connections. [“Mapping Feminist Art Networks,” College 10 Cornelia H. Butler, WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution (Museum of Art Association, February 4, 2016, Contemporary Art, 2007). http://conference2016.collegeart.org/programs/mapping-feminist-art-networks/.] 11 Marsha Meskimmon, “Chronology through Cartography: Mapping 1970s Feminist Gardner-Huggett is working to visualize hundreds of contributors to a single Art Globally”,” in WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution, ed. Cornelia Butler and Lisa exhibition “What is Feminist Art,” which holds intriguing possibilities for moving Gabrielle Mark (Los Angeles : Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2007), 326–29. beyond the New York/Los Angeles axis that has dominated US art historical research 12 Maura Reilly, “Introduction,” in Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary and may reveal international participants as well. Art, ed. Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin (London; New York : Brooklyn, NY: Merrell 3 See for example the fine overview by Drucker et al, which describes many projects Publishers, 2007), 15. including networks of art markets in nineteenth-century London and Gothic France, 13 Stiles,