Shani Ketema
Art & Women
Professor Cacoilo
April 17, 2017
Art & Women
I once saw a video where people were asked to name 5 women artists. Easy right? Wrong. No one got past 3. I imagine that Artemisia Gentileschi and Hanna Hoch were probably shaking their heads and looking down in disgust from the artistic heavens. It has taken and still takes so much work for women artists to be recognized the way that male artists are. In my social experiment, I don't allow certain people to participate on purpose to show what women artists have to go through when their art is rejected because of who they are, or even what they stand for. Even when female artists got their shine, female artists of color still continued to go unnoticed. The following will display 5 non white woman artists, what they stood for and a significant piece of work.
Ana Mendieta
“My art is grounded in the belief of one universal energy which runs through everything: from insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre to plant, from plant to galaxy,” Mendieta wrote, according to the Feminist Art Archive at the University of Washington."
Cuban born Ana Mendieta was best known for her earth body/ silhouette artwork. She had a difficult childhood- her dad was arrested for treason by Fidel Castro. She based all, if not most of her work off of her body. Her photos and films all included deep and bold earthy colors, as well as natural hues. She even used blood and earthly elements such as sticks dirt and plants. Her works are described as life affirming yet haunting. The ironic thing about her work however was that even her death reflected her earth body concept. She fell from the 34th floor of apartment in greenwich village NY. Her fall was so hard that her body was imprinted into the concrete of the bodega roof which she fell on. Her husband , Carl Andre was accused and sent to trial for her death but never sentenced. They argued, prior to her fall, maybe because he was a minimalist sculptor and she was on the rise to fame without him. One of her pieces called "Alma, Silueta en fuego" which translates to soul, silhouette on fire is a silhouette of her lined in white and on fire.
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| Alma, Silueta en fuego |
Kara Walker is an African American contemporary painter, silhouettist, print-maker, installation artist, and film-maker who explores race, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity in her work. Like Ana Mendieta, Kara is known for her silhouette work that usually shows scenes of racial identity. She works in collage most of the time, putting black figures on white papers. She relies on humor and viewer interaction.
“I didn’t want a completely passive viewer,” Walker has said. “I wanted to make work where the viewer wouldn’t walk away; he would either giggle nervously, get pulled into history, into fiction, into something totally demeaning and possibly very beautiful.”
In her controversial, yet very popular piece called "A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby", a massaive sphinx/woman made of sugar was very...made up. It's subtitle reads "an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant". The sphinx/woman has all the features of a black woman- a round backside, thick lips, wide nose, large breasts and even a headscarf. The sugar sphinx was a prodigious representation of the many Black women who worked under deadly and forced labor conditions all while remaining nameless and barely known. The back view clearly outlines the labia and anal area, so it could even hint to what Rewire had to say about it "Black women have lived with and continue to live with, from the forced sterilization of many Black women and women of color in the past and today, and Black women and women of color having birth control tested on them." Someone noticed the similarity between the position of the sugar sphinx and *Dr. J. Marion Sims’ enslaved Black female victims.
*Dr J. Marion Sims was the founder of gynecology. He used enslaved black women as test subjects.
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| Molasses laborers that accompanied the Sugar baby |
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| Sugar Baby, front |
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| Sugar Baby , back |
Hung Li
“I hope to wash my subjects of their ‘otherness’ and reveal them as dignified, even mythic figures on the grander scale of history painting.”
Hung Liu was born in Changchun, China in 1948, growing up under the Maoist regime. She's most known for her traditional Chinese paintings. According to the bio on her website , "[As a painter], Liu challenges the documentary authority of historical Chinese photographs by subjecting them to the more reflective process of painting. Much of the meaning of Liu’s painting comes from the way the washes and drips dissolve the documentary images, suggesting the passage of memory into history, while working to uncover the cultural and personal narratives fixed – but often concealed – in the photographic instant." She got her inspiration from after finding herself fascinated by the shifting meanings that comes from taking a historical photograph away from its origin.
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| Lady & Gentleman, 1994 |
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| Mu Nu (mother & daughter), 1997 |
Faith Ringgold is a painter, writer, speaker, mixed media sculptor and performance artist. She expressed herself though a series of quilts and paintings. Later on in her career she uses some of these same quilts and paintings in her children's books. Faith has also contributed to the art civil rights world in her own way. She advocated for the integration of races in the art world. She is still heavily known for her strides in the womens movement. Almost all of her art features people of color or references to the such. Like many other female artists, Faith had issues getting her art recognized, not just because she was a woman, but because she was a black woman. At first she didn't agree with feminism because the rationale was that black women were already liberated , but that was far from true. Eventually she began to see feminism as something necessary.
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"Woman Freedom Now" (1971) |
"I became a feminist because I wanted to help my daughters, other women and myself aspire to something more than a place behind a good man."
The piece "Woman Freedom Now" is in quilt pattern, almost like a bed comforter. It has the words "Woman freedom now" twisted at different angles which makes the message very clear. It's also in red, black and green. Those were the colors that black people used to represent themselves.
Tamara Natalie Madden
Tamara Natalie Madden is a contemporary visual artist whose work explores freedom, nature, consciousness, and African ancestral influences of the black individual in the western world. Her primary focus is on spiritual and psychological aspects of black female consciousness and perceptions. Her Jamaican culture influences her art. She makes the connections between the Caribbean and Africa and portrays that imagery through her art. Madden actually started doing art while she was sick. In 2001 she had a crucial organ transplant. Art became her lifeline through her dark times so she decided to make it the center of her life after she got better.
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| The Jezebel Effect (2017) |
Conclusion
As time progresses, we can only hope that women will continue to progress with the time. In a perfect world, there will be no issue with women getting into the MET ...and they won't have to be naked. We'll be able to make art about our vaginas without being slut shamed, and be as equal as men. Unfortunately , it's 2017 and we still have to hear about the opinions of arrogant men who want to 'grab her by the pussy'. The good thing is, women are strong. We've been doing this equity dance for years. We can dance all night.
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