Feminist art

Description

The feminist art movement refers to the efforts and accomplishments of feminists internationally to produce art that reflects women's lives and experiences, as well as to change the foundation for the production and perception of contemporary art. It also seeks to bring more visibility to women within art history and art practice. The movement challenges the traditional hierarchy of arts over crafts, which views hard sculpture and painting as superior to the narrowly perceived 'women's work' of arts and crafts such as weaving, sewing, quilting and ceramics. Women artists have overturned the traditional view by, for example, using unconventional materials in soft sculptures, new techniques such as stuffing, hanging and draping, and for new purposes such as telling stories of their own life experiences. Read more ↗

Key Artists

Judy Chicago
Pioneer of the Feminist Art Movement who established the first college-level Feminist Art Program at Fresno State in 1970 and created the monumental collaborative masterpiece The Dinner Party.
Miriam Schapiro
Co-founded the CalArts Feminist Art Program with Judy Chicago, co-directed Womanhouse (1972), and championed 'femmage' to elevate traditional women's domestic crafts into fine art.
Cindy Sherman
Key feminist and Pictures Generation artist whose photographic Untitled Film Stills deconstructed male gaze cinematic stereotypes and societal constructions of female identity.
Barbara Kruger
Feminist conceptual artist whose bold red, white, and black graphic photomontages (Your body is a battleground) critique patriarchal power, mass media, and bodily autonomy.
Martha Rosler
Feminist video and photomontage artist whose Semiotics of the Kitchen and House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home dissected domesticity, media consumption, and geopolitical violence.
Guerrilla Girls
Anonymous feminist art collective formed in New York in 1985 wearing gorilla masks and deploying statistical billboards to expose sexism and racism in major art museums.

Famous Artworks

The Dinner Party
The Dinner Party
Judy Chicago · 1974
Brooklyn Museum, New York (Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art) - Ceramic, porcelain, and embroidered textile installation on triangular table
Credit: Photo: Donald Woodman. Work of art: Judy Chicago. - CC BY-SA 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons)
Womanhouse
Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, and CalArts Feminist Art Program students · 1972
Hollywood, California (Documented by MoMA/Smithsonian) - Collaborative house-scale feminist art installation and performance space
Untitled Film Still #21
Cindy Sherman · 1978
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York - Gelatin silver print
Untitled (Your body is a battleground)
Barbara Kruger · 1989
The Broad, Los Angeles / MoMA Collection - Photographic silkscreen on vinyl
Semiotics of the Kitchen
Martha Rosler · 1975
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York - Video (black and white, sound, 6 minutes)

Fun Facts

When Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro opened Womanhouse in Los Angeles in January 1972, over 10,000 visitors toured the installation during its single-month run before the building was demolished.
↗ Source: moma.org
The Guerrilla Girls famously posed the question on their 1989 poster: 'Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female.'
↗ Source: tate.org.uk

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