These invigorating reference volumes chart the influence of key ideas, discourses, and theories on art, and the way that it is taught, thought of, and talked about throughout the English‐speaking world. Each volume brings together a team of respected international scholars to debate the state of research within traditional subfields of art history as well as in more innovative, thematic configurations. Representing the best of the scholarship governing the field and pointing toward future trends and across disciplines, the Wiley Blackwell Companions to Art History series provides a magisterial, state‐of‐the‐art synthesis of art history.
edited by Amelia Jones
edited by Rebecca M. Brown and Deborah S. Hutton
edited by Babette Bohn and James M. Saslow
edited by Dana Arnold and David Peters Corbett
edited by Gitti Salami and Monica Blackmun Visonà
edited by John Davis, Jennifer A. Greenhill and Jason D. LaFountain
edited by Martin J. Powers and Katherine R. Tsiang
edited by Christiane Paul
edited by David Hopkins
edited by Cher Krause Knight and Harriet F. Senie
edited by Finbarr Flood and Gulru Necipoglu
edited by Pam Meecham
edited by Michelle Facos
edited by Conrad Rudolph
edited by Anne Massey
edited by Alan Male
edited by Hilary Robinson, Maria Elena Buszek
Forthcoming
edited by Alejandro Anreus, Robin Greeley and Megan Sullivan
edited by Brad Buckley and John Conomos
Edited by
This edition first published 2019
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Robinson, Hilary, 1956– editor. | Buszek, Maria Elena, 1971– editor.
Title: A companion to feminist art / editors, Hilary Robinson, Maria Elena Buszek.
Description: Chichester, West Sussex ; Hoboken, NJ : Wiley, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2018061403 (print) | LCCN 2019000212 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118929186 (Adobe Pdf) | ISBN 9781118929193 (ePub) | ISBN 9781118929155 (cloth)
Subjects: LCSH: Feminism in art. | Feminism–Political aspects. | Feminist art criticism.
Classification: LCC N72.F45 (ebook) | LCC N72.F45 C67 2019 (print) | DDC 700.1/03–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018061403
Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Images: Reproduced by permission of Mira Schor
For our companionista Alanna Lockward (1961–2019)
Blackwell Companions to Art History is a series of edited collections designed to cover the discipline of art history in all its complexities. Each volume is edited by specialists who lead a team of essayists, representing the best of leading scholarship, in mapping the state of research within the sub‐field under review, as well as pointing toward future trends in research.
This Companion to Feminist Art focuses on the recent history of and current discussions within feminist art history, theory and practice. The wide‐ranging chapters include contributions that address questions such as configurations of feminism and gender in post‐Cold War Europe, to more focused conversations with women artists on Afropean decoloniality.
This volume is divided into five sections that signal the variety of voices that articulate feminist thought and art. Together the sections and essays challenge and expand our understanding of feminist art beyond the canonical definitions that are rooted in the 1960s. Through the chapters we encounter feminist art as dynamic and fluid, sitting at the intersection between culture, politics and practice.
As series editor, I was delighted to receive the proposal for this volume, which was both timely and thought provoking. As the editors note, the book’s evolution over a number of years has in part been a product of the differences of thought and experience of the editorial team. The volume has benefitted from this creative friction as the thematic sections and the essays they contain recognise and celebrate the diversity of feminist thinkers and practitioners. This collection of essays will be essential reading for students, researchers and teachers working on the histories, theories and practices of feminism and art, and in related fields. I have no doubt that A Companion to Feminist Art will make a very welcome addition to the series.
Hilary Robinson is Professor of Feminism, Art, and Theory at Loughborough University. Her publications include Visibly Female: Women and Art Today (1987), Reading Art, Reading Irigaray: The Politics of Art by Women (2006), Feminism–Art–Theory 1968–2014 (2015). Initially she trained as a painter, at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne; she also has an MA in Cultural History from the Royal College of Art, London and a PhD in Art Theory from the University of Leeds. Hilary’s academic career has been in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, and London, England. At the University of Ulster (1992–2005) she taught the history and theory of contemporary art to studio Fine and Applied Art students, at BA, MFA, and PhD levels. In 2005, she was appointed Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. While in Pittsburgh her board memberships included The Andy Warhol Museum; Silver Eye Centre for Photography and The Mattress Factory Museum. She headed the Creative Entrepreneurs project, to retain artists in post‐industrial Pittsburgh. She moved back to the UK in 2012 to take up the position of Professor and Dean of the School of Art and Design at Middlesex University for a four‐year term before taking up her present research professorship. Her current book project is ReSisters: Art, Activism and Feminist Resistance.
Maria Elena Buszek is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Colorado Denver. Her publications include the books Pin‐Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture (2006) and Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art (2011). She has also contributed writing to numerous, international exhibition catalogues: most recently, essays in Dorothy Iannone: Censorship and the Irrepressible Drive Toward Divinity (2014), Andrea Bowers (2014), Mark Mothersbaugh: Myopia (2014), and In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States (2012). Her scholarship and art criticism have appeared in such publications as Art Journal, TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies, and Art in America, and (with Kirsty Robertson) she edited a special issue of Utopian Studies on the subject of “craftivism.” Dr. Buszek is also a prolific independent curator, whose most recent exhibitions include the 2016 exhibition Danger Came Smiling: Feminist Art and Popular Music and the traveling exhibition Raised in Craftivity. Before coming to CU‐Denver, she was Assistant Professor of Art History at the Kansas City Art Institute and served as a curatorial assistant at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Her current book project, Art of Noise, explores the ties between contemporary activist art and popular music.
Felicity Allen is an artist, writer, and educator. Her career’s work is a model of The Disoeuvre, the neologism she coined to describe the contingent and adaptable practices that she has developed (like many other artists), in contrast to a conventional ‘oeuvre’. In the last decade she has made five series of Dialogic Portraits projects, producing paintings, films, and artists books (included in Tate’s and Getty’s artists’ books collections). She has written numerous articles on gallery education, published poetry, and sustained a long‐term project with a Syrian artist based in Damascus.
Tanya Augsburg is a humanities‐trained, interdisciplinary feminist performance scholar, critic, and curator who can be occasionally persuaded to perform. She teaches at San Francisco State University, where she is Professor of Humanities. Her current projects include completing a book‐length manuscript on the interdisciplinary arts and a book‐length manuscript on what she is calling “feminist ars erotica.”
Jill Bennett is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and Professor of Experimental Arts at the University of New South Wales. She leads a transdisciplinary research team investigating the experience of ageing and neurological/mental health, and producing 3D immersive visualization of subjective experience. She is Founding Director of The Big Anxiety: Festival of Arts + Science + People. Her books include Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art and Practical Aesthetics, as well as monographs on media arts and curating.
Susan Best is Professor of Art History and Theory and Deputy Director (research and postgraduate) at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. She is the author of Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant‐Garde (2011) and Reparative Aesthetics: Witnessing in Contemporary Art Photography (2016).
Lucy Day is a lecturer, writer, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Alongside her 30‐year curating career, Day has supported artists and arts organizers through mentoring, workshops, and organizational change. For over 10 years as part of the independent curatorial partnership Day + Gluckman, she has collaborated with a variety of organizations, and in 2015 founded A Woman’s Place Project CIC, which takes equality as its starting point, exploring it creatively through contemporary‐art exhibitions, projects, and events.
Angela Dimitrakaki is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art History and Theory, University of Edinburgh. She has co‐edited Economy: Art, Production and the Subject in the 21st Century (2015, with Kirsten Lloyd) and Politics in a Glass Case: Feminism, Exhibition Cultures, and Curatorial Transgressions (2013, with Lara Perry), and special issues on social reproduction for the journals Historical Materialism (2016) and Third Text (2017), and on antifascist art theory for Third Text (2019). She has authored Gender, ArtWork and the Global Imperative (2013), and Art and Globalisation: From the Postmodern Sign to the Biopolitical Arena (2013, in Greek). Her forthcoming book is Feminism, Art, Capitalism. She has received an Academy of Athens award for fiction writing (2017).
Julie Ewington is a writer and curator based in Sydney, Australia. Between 2001 and 2014 she was Head of Australian Art at Queensland Art Gallery|Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. She has written numerous catalogue essays and reviews for journals, including The Monthly, Art Monthly Australasia, and Artforum. Major publications include monographs on Fiona Hall (2005) and Del Kathryn Barton (2014). In 2016 Ewington curated The Sculpture of Bronwyn Oliver for TarraWarra Museum of Art, and in 2017 was a curatorium member for Unfinished Business: Perspectives on Art and Feminism, at ACCA, Melbourne.
Maria Fernandez teaches at Cornell University. She works on the history and theory of digital art, postcolonial and gender studies, Latin American art and architecture, and the intersections of these fields. She is the author of Cosmopolitanism in Mexican Visual Culture (2014) for which she was awarded the Arvey Prize by the Association for Latin American Art in 2015. She edited Latin American Modernisms and Technology (2018) and with Faith Wilding and Michelle Wright coedited Domain Errors: Cyberfeminist Practices (2002).
Eliza Gluckman was Curator of the New Hall Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, the largest collection of works by women in Europe, from 2015 to 2018, and is currently Senior Curator and Deputy Director of the Government Art Collection (UK). For over 10 years as part of the independent curatorial partnership Day + Gluckman, she has collaborated with a variety of organizations, and in 2015 founded A Woman’s Place Project CIC, which takes equality as its starting point, exploring it creatively through contemporary‐art exhibitions, projects, and events.
Lubaina Himid is an artist, curator, and Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancaster. She was awarded the Turner Prize (2017), and an MBE for services to Black women’s art (2010). Recent exhibitions include Invisible Strategies, Modern Art Oxford, 2017, and Navigation Charts, Spike Island, 2017. Other exhibitions include the Studio Museum, New York, 1997, Tate Britain, 2011, and the Badischer Kunstverein, 2017. She represented Britain at the Gwangju Biennial, 2014 and the Berlin Biennial, 2018. She curated Five Black Women, Africa Centre, London 1983, The Thin Black Line, ICA London, 1985, and Thin Black Line(s), Tate Britain 2011.
Amelia Jones is Robert A. Day Professor, Roski School of Art & Design, USC, and is a curator and scholar of contemporary art, performance, and feminist/sexuality studies. Recent publications include Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (2012), co‐edited with Erin Silver, Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories (2016), and the edited special issue “On Trans/Performance” of Performance Research (2016). Jones is currently working on a retrospective of the work of Ron Athey and a book tentatively entitled In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance.
Alexandra Kokoli is Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture, Middlesex University, London, and Research Associate at VIAD, University of Johannesburg. A writer and curator, she has published widely on feminism, art, and visual culture in journals including Art Journal, Women and Performance, n.paradoxa, Performance Research, Oxford Art Journal, and Hypatia. Her books include The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice (2016, paperback 2017), and (as editor) Feminism Reframed: Reflections on Art and Difference (2008), and The Provisional Texture of Reality: Selected Talks and Texts by Susan Hiller, 1977–2007 (2008).
Tirza Latimer earned her PhD in Art History at Stanford University. Professor in Visual Studies at California College of the Arts, Oakland/San Francisco, her teaching, publications, and curatorial projects reflect on visual culture and visual politics from queer feminist perspectives. Her latest book, Eccentric Modernisms: Making Differences in the History of American Art, was released by University of California Press in 2016.
Alanna Lockward was a Dominican‐German writer, journalist, filmmaker and founding director of Art Labour Archives. Lockward conceptualized and curated the groundbreaking transdisciplinary meeting BE.BOP. BLACK EUROPE BODY POLITICS (2012–2018). She was the author of several books, including Apremio: apuntes sobre el pensamiento y la creación contemporánea desde el Caribe (2006) and Un Haití Dominicano: Tatuajes fantasmas y narrativas bilaterales (2014), and editor of BE.BOP 2012–2014. El cuerpo en el continente de la conciencia Negra (2016). She was research professor at the Center of Caribbean Studies, Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra. Dr Lockward passed away in January 2019.
Natalie Loveless is an associate professor in the Department of Art and Design (History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture) at the University of Alberta, Canada, where she also directs the Research‐Creation and Social Justice CoLABoratory. Recent projects include New Maternalisms and Immune Nations. Current work includes a forthcoming book, Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research‐Creation, and a collaborative project on art and ecology called Speculative Energy Futures.
Jaleh Mansoor is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of British Columbia. She coedited the anthology Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics (2010), and her monograph Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia was published in September 2016. She has contributed to October, Texte Zur Kunst, and Artforum. Mansoor’s current project traces the historical and structural entwinement of aesthetic and real (or concrete) abstraction, the latter understood as the extraction of surplus labor valorized on and by the market.
Michelle Meagher is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, where she teaches courses in the area of popular culture, feminist body studies, and art and activism. Her current research project, titled Art, Feminism, and the Periodical Press, considers the ways that feminist art was produced, defined, and circulated by periodical communities of the late 1970s and through the 1980s in the US context.
Marsha Meskimmon is Professor of Art History and Theory at Loughborough University (UK). Her publications include: The Art of Reflection: Women Artists' Self‐Portraiture in the Twentieth Century (1996), Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics (2003), Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination (2010), Women, the Arts and Globalization: Eccentric Experience (coedited, Dorothy Rowe, 2013), Drawing Difference: Connections between Gender and Drawing (coauthored, Phil Sawdon, 2016), and Home/Land: Women, Citizenship, Photographies (coedited, Marion Arnold, 2016). She is currently writing a trilogy, Transnational Feminism and the Arts for Routledge.
Richard Meyer is Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor of Art History at Stanford University, where he teaches courses on twentieth‐century American art, censorship, feminism, and queer studies. He is the author of What Was Contemporary Art? (2013) and, with Catherine Lord, Art and Queer Culture (2013). A new edition of Meyer’s first book, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth‐Century American Art, has just been published with a preface by the author that considers the book’s relevance to the cultural and political landscape of Trump’s America.
Martina Pachmanová is an Associate Professor at the Department of Theory and History of Art at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. As a researcher, writer, and curator she specializes in gender, sexual politics, and feminism in modern, post‐war and contemporary art and visual culture. She is an author, editor, and coeditor of numerous books and exhibition catalogues, including monographs of forgotten Czech female modernists related to their retrospective exhibitions.
Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director, Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (CentreCATH) at the University of Leeds, UK. Committed to an international, postcolonial, queer feminist analysis of the visual arts, visual culture, and cultural theory, one major publication is Charlotte Salomon in the Theatre of Memory (2018). Forthcoming publications included Is Feminism a Bad Memory? (2019) and Monroe’s Mov(i)es: Class, Gender and Nation in the Work, Image‐Making and Agency of “Marilyn Monroe” (2020).
Harriet Riches is an art historian whose current research focuses on issues of gender and the language of femininity in the historiography of photography. She has published widely on this subject in journals such as Oxford Art Journal, and writes regularly on contemporary photography for several international magazines including Afterimage: Journal of Media Arts & Cultural Criticism and Source Photographic Review. She is currently Director of postgraduate programs at Cambridge School of Visual & Performing Arts.
María Laura Rosa is a researcher at CONICET (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas, Argentina) and the Interdisciplinary Institute for Gender Studies at the University of Buenos Aires, Professor of Aesthetics, Department of Arts, Philosophy and Literature Faculty University of Buenos Aires, and Lecturer of Latin‐American Arts at ESEADE University, Buenos Aires. Dr. Rosa is the editor (with Soledad Novoa Donoso) of Share the World: The Experience of Women and Art (2017) and the author of Legacies of Freedom: Feminist Art in Democratic Effervescence (2014).
Mira Schor is a New York‐based painter and writer. Schor has been the recipient of awards in painting from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Pollock‐Krasner Foundations, as well as the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism, a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and an AICA‐USA award for her blog A Year of Positive Thinking. She is the author of two books of collected essays, Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture and A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life and coeditor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory, and Criticism and M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online.
Gayatri Sinha is an art critic and curator whose primary areas of interest are gender and iconography, media, economics, and social history. She has curated and lectured extensively in India, Europe, and the United States. Sinha is the founder and director of Critical Collective, an initiative to build knowledge in the visual arts in India. Sinha’s publications include Voices of Change: 20 Indian Artists (2010), Art and Visual Culture in India 1857–2007 (2009), and Indian Art: An Overview (2003), among others. She was the recipient of the Tate Asia Research fellowship in 2017.
Eliza Steinbock is Assistant Professor of Film and Literary Studies at Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, and former “Veni” Talent Scheme postdoctoral researcher awarded for “Vital Art: Transgender Portraiture as Visual Activism” (NWO 2014–2018). In addition to coediting four special journal issues, their articles have been published in the Photography and Culture, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Spectator, Feminist Media Studies, and in over fifteen edited volumes. Their forthcoming first book, Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment and the Aesthetics of Change, is with Duke University Press (Spring 2019).
Amy Tobin is a lecturer in the History of Art Department at the University of Cambridge and Curator of Events, Exhibitions and Research at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge. She completed her PhD at the University of York in 2017 with a thesis on feminism, art, and collaboration in the 1970s. Her research on art, film, and feminism has been published in the journals Tate Papers and MIRAJ, as well as in Sue Clayton and Laura Mulvey’s edited collection Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and Experimental Film in the 1970s (2017). She is also coeditor of London Art Worlds: Mobile, Contingent and Ephemeral Networks 1960–1980 (2018) with Jo Applin and Catherine Spencer, and the author of 14 Radnor Terrace: A Woman’s Place (2017).
Karen von Veh is Associate Professor of Art History and Head of Department in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Her research interests include contemporary South African Art, the transgressive use of Christian iconography, postcolonial studies, and gender studies. She has written several articles in academic journals and chapters in books on these subjects, as well as two monographs on South African artist Diane Victor. Karen is a past president and long‐term membership secretary of the South African Visual Arts Historians Association, has served on the board of directors of Arts Council of the African Studies Association, and currently serves on the international board of AICA (International Association of Art Critics).
Siona Wilson is Associate Professor of Art History at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center, the City University of New York. She is the author of Art Labor, Sex Politics: Feminist Effects in 1970s British Art and Performance (2015) and has published on topics including feminist politics of war imaging, documentary photography and film and video art, and the gendering of sound. She is currently working on a book addressing episodes in the history of documentary from the 1930s to the present and the figure of the female insurgent.
Ebru Yetişkin is an independent curator and media theorist. She works on the interaction of science, technology, politics, and art. She works as a full‐time researcher at Istanbul Technical University. She has curated media art related exhibitions entitled Cacophony (2013), Code Unknown (2014), Waves (2015), Contagious Bodies (2015), X‐CHANGE (2015), Illusionoscope (2016), and Interfaces (2017). In 2016, she edited a book of poetry, Like The Others written by a robot named Deniz Yılmaz, and curated an autograph session at the Istanbul Art and Book Fair.