feminist art in 1970s
Although women's art has been present throughout the whole history of art, feminist art as a political and art movement has emerged in late 1960s and established itself in 1970s. Several countercultural movements arose simultaneously with feminism in the 1960s as part of postmodernism. At this time the United States has experienced social upheaval coming with the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, economic prosperity, the arrival of oral contraceptives, reforms in the Catholic Church, assassination of the president John F. Kennedy, and experimentation with psychotropic drugs. Political, scientific, and cultural tumult has greatly influenced the emergence of feminist movement, thus feminist artists. Social politics have been a great part and a reason for art. The key principle was consciousness raising, defined by women's movement theorists as a method of using one's own experience as the most valid way of formulating political analysis (Bronde). Feminist artists point out that throughout most of recorded history males have imposed patriarchal social systems in which they have dominated females. The goal of feminism, said early spokeswoman, was to change the nature of art itself, to transform the culture in sweeping and perman
Feminism created a new theoretical position and a new aesthetic category-the position of female experience. Throughout Europe and United States feminists came together to organize women-only exhibitions and formed groups dedicated to consciousness raising, activism, and research. Two of Schapiro's femmages have been exhibited in 1976-"Cabinet for all Seasons" and "Anatomy of Kimono", a fifty foot wide painting-femmage in which scale has been used to "reinvest what has previously been dismissed as modest with the scope of history painting" (Chadwick). The two manequinns are: a bride dressed in an elaborate bridesdress (Kathy Huberland, "Bridal Staircase) and a naked housewife literally installed in between the shelves of her clean laundry closet (Sandy Orgel, "Linen Closet"). Same woman, who squeezed herself into a cultural identity which finally dictated that, in the words of Betty Friedan, "fulfillment of a woman after 1949-the housewife mother" (Reckitt). The first women's liberation movement group exhibition was held in London; the Ad Hoc women artists' committee was established in New York, Judy Chicago led women-only studio classes at Fresno state University and with Miriam Schapiro instigated the Feminist Art program at the California institute of arts. Miriam SchapiroMiriam Schapiro has contributed greatly to feminist art collaborating with Judy Chicago as well as on her own. Here, the forms of the obi and the kick variously flank the stylized form of a kimono in four repetitions, which Schapiro conceived she said as "a symphony" of colour, moving from "pale" to "neutral" to "dark and sonorous, and finally the red crescendo" of the last triumphant kick, chosen to end the painting so that it "would walk on street its way into the 1980s" (Reckitt). The movement known as Pattern and Decoration held its first exhibition "Ten Approaches to the Decorative" at a SoHo gallery in 1976. A 17 room, uninhabited house in Hollywood has been selected to be remodeled into what became the realities and aspirations of participating women. The installation or rather the reaction of the audience to it, implies that woman's blood is a taboo and a sign of womanhood that must be disguised and locked behind the door. I wanted her to be dressed with the power of her own office, her inner strength. Each student has been asked to imagine the environment and eventually to choose one of the spaces in the house for "her" room and create own installation environment. Private, everyday actions and objects, including artists' own bodies became both the subject and often the medium itself of women's art. One by one, the rooms became clean white cubes and rectangles for the presentation of a radical and complex contemporary art.
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Acceptance Essays
