Post IIII

Wilfredo Jimenez

Post #4

My mission in this class was to learn about women art and artist of which I may have never heard of, I spent years studying art and art history and was never able to pin pointing female artist out of a crowd or know which movements they worked under. My goal was knowledge about the artist, about the periods and about the struggles that my previous professors lightly touched upon on my many lectures. Throughout the semester we not only learned about women artist, we learned about their opinions, aspirations and motives for creating artwork in the style and manner in which they did. Coming from this background I would like to focus on five isms and the messages, aesthetics, and background of each female artist.

Modern day women artist are beginning to receive the recognition they disserve but equality in the arts are still ways down the horizon. The artistic market is made up of 90% men and 10% women, there is just as many women artist as men but they are not recognized.

Eunice Golden

Born in New York city, Eunice began her artwork at the university of Wisconsin were she focused on figurative expressionism. Through this style she sought to explore the sexuality of the male nude. Her work often also focused on pop and minimal art and at times the combination of all three style to convey emotions and opinions to the audience. From the 70s till now Golden has focused on topics such as the women’s liberation movement, Male Landscapes, the feminist movement, and many others. Her artistic drive was based around what it meant to be a women artist and all of the implications and assumptions that came along with the idea of pursuing art from a time of denial to a time of understanding and growth.

“My artistic intention was not political. In retrospect, I saw that I had unwittingly addressed, on a subliminal level, ideologies, experiences, and perceptions of a broad audience. Suddenly I was engaged in dialogue, thrust against a backdrop of controversy and censorship. I catapulted into the women’s movement, wrestling with the salient socio-political issues regarding cultural and political change. Many feminist artists were asserting their experiences by creating “central core imagery” which was decidedly autoerotic. My work, “Male Landscapes”, addressed the “phallacy” of male power.”

"Rape"

"Adam and Eve"

Marina Abramovic

         Born in PR Serbia, Marina is a women artist who focuses on the relationship of the audience with the artist, the limits of the human body and the possible growth f the human mind. She is known worldwide because of her MOMA exhibition in which she sat in the middle of the room and allowed for people to sit in silence with her, this exhibition was called “The Artist is present”. She focuses on performance art because she believes that her art destroys the boundary between her and the audience creating a direct message. She follows the modernist approach of the unconventional and making the most out of he least, in this case she focuses on the people; without the people the work has no meaning.

“Once, Picasso was asked what his paintings meant. He said, “Do you ever

know what the birds are singing? You don’t. But you listen to them anyway.” So, sometimes with art, it is important just to look.”

"Rest energy with Ulay"

"Imponderabilia"

Alyssa Monks

Born in New Jersey, Alyssa’s goal was to blur the lines between abstraction and realism, she sought to achieve this by collaging different space and intimate moments in her work. Her work was not only living on the walls but in the gallery itself by adding various effects that brought the viewer into the environment of the painting. She is able to capture the intimacy, vulnerability, and fragile demeanor of the subjects. I believe that this focus on the intimacy of a person is a way to tackle and address the stereotypes and judgment we give people on a daily basis, specially women. Her work can be considered criticism of the male gaze and the portrayal of the subjects.

“Painting for a living is so unnatural,” she says. “If I think about painting for a living, I don’t want to do it. I have to forget about the end result, the possible sale, the possible feedback – then I can play, explore, get excited and really paint.”

Wangechi Mutu

Born in Nairobi Kenya, Mutu is an artist and sculpture who lives in Brooklyn NY. She creates contemporary African art that explores the beauty, strangeness and uniqueness of African culture. She uses collages, video, performance, and sculpture as the medium of deliverance of her messages that focus on gender, race, and colonialism. I choose her because with her paintings she wants to destroy the boundaries in our brain that tie us to the media and the beliefs that we’ve spoon fed our own lives. The complexity of her work is meant to push the imagination which in return will allow the person to have a wider field of understanding for the new ideas of the new world. She continues to think about the complications of being and how one's physical body plays such a huge role in determining their experiences, survival, and ability to understand what that is. Her characters have the appearance of cyborgs or hybrid-species, often altered and enhanced, while positioned to imply power, knowableness, and inherently vulnerable femaleness. In their very creation is a questioning of the role each and every one of us plays in our self-determination, in the well being of other humans, and the awareness of multiple cultural perspectives and the health of our ailing planet.

"Art allows you to imbue the truth with a sort of magic... so it can infiltrate the psyches of more people, including those who don't believe the same things as you."

Kara Walker

Kara Walker creates works that focus on African American racial identity and the importance of women in the context of history. Her illustrations are created in traditional African and Pre-Civil War united states, by doing so her focus is directed towards this earlier cultural periods. The implementation of animation, shadows and sound create a direct connection between her and the audience; furthermore