Hannah Wilke And Jessica Ledwich

In the 1970s, Hannah began using her body as a canvas for performance pieces. She called this her “performalist self-portraits,” (Smith, 1993) and they were documented by either video or by photographs. These particular performances, according to Hannah “confront erotic stereotypes by calling attention to and making ironic the conventional gestures, poses, and attributes of the female body” (Hannah Wilke Collection, 2015). In 1974, Hannah began working on S.O.S. or Starification Object Series, a fifty self-portrait installation,

In 1971, Linda Nochlin issued her article “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? This idea of aesthetic genius, says Nochlin, is fiction. Art is rarely produced entirely by the artist for the idea of personal expression. Few identifiers in contemporary art have been as fraught as the term feminist art. What does it mean, who defines it, and how does it relate to past accomplishments of the feminist movement?

The goal for feminist artists all along has been the gender-blind interpretation of art, allowing women equal opportunity for success. Feminists have long cried for museum curators and art collectors to see more than just “male” or “female” in a work. However, politics tend to get in the way, and it may be argued that, by clamoring for equality, women have isolated themselves further, making female art a socially-conscious fad rather than a respectable institution. In Women, Art and Society, Whitney Chadwick elaborates: “Feminist critics remain sensitive to the dangers of confusing tokenism with equal representation” (1990). Fear of such tokenism, and perhaps too much emphasis placed on inequalities, has made feminism somewhat of a “dirty word” to some artists today.

Inspired by the women's movement and rebelling against the male-dominated art scene of the 1960s,

(Millhouse, 2011) In the 1980’s Pollock’s Feminism “critiqued the essential myths of individualism, the artist, and the social constructions of femininity and masculinity that define bourgeois culture”. While the 70’s feminism movement aim was to stand next to the existing masculine dominated culture. “Feminism's encounter with the canon has been complexed and many-leveled: political ,ideology,mythological,methodological and psycho-symbolic” (Pollock, 1999). The 1970’s movement was followed by the immediate task which was “the need to rectify the gaps in historical knowledge created by the consistent omission of women of all cultures from the history of art” (Pollock, 1999). The only art that was put on display was significantly male dominated work, if you wanted to see work created by women, you would have to view them “in a basement or storeroom of a national gallery” (Pollock, 1999). Female artists are only known in their own category of female artists while male artists don’t require a separate category . Art that is created by females have been historically dismissed from the art historical canon as craft, as opposed to fine art. The evident of

Adopting a tongue-in-cheek tone, they list the so called ‘advantages’ faced by women artists in the 1980’s, such as “working without the pressure of success” and “knowing your career might pick up after you’re eighty”. The Guerrilla Girls demonstrate their strategy of using humour and sarcasm to break down discrimination within the art industry through this artwork. It reflects how discrimination is experienced by all kinds of women, both within and outside the art industry. The poster highlights not only the difficulties of being recognised as a female artist, but also the difficulties of balancing a career and personal life in a society that undervalues women’s contribution. The Guerrilla Girls wanted female artists to recognise that they are not the only ones being discriminated against, women all over the world, not only artists, can identify with this. The public are confronted with the hard truth that it isn’t just women artist being targeted, but all women in the world are discriminated against, and it isn’t right. The audience are supposed to look at this piece and feel challenged. They are supposed to tell the Guerrilla Girls what they are writing is wrong, but they can’t, because what is said in this piece is what is really happening in their society. The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist is successful

A person feels cultural conflict when they experience something different that doesn’t fit their cultural identity. In the news article by Hannah Allam and Javaria Khan, they discuss the conflict produced when radical muslims carry out a terrorists attack, it makes others believe all muslims are radicalists. The muslims that aren’t radicalist are embarrassed of their religion and scared to wear their headscarves. The muslims are also often victims of hate crimes because they are presumed to be terrorists, “some people around the world expressed hatred toward Muslims, frightening Muslims in the United States.” Non radicalist are upset with “militants who distort mainstream Islamic teachings to justify heinous acts.” In the essay, “By Any Other

No other artist has ever made as extended or complex career of presenting herself to the camera as has Cindy Sherman. Yet, while all of her photographs are taken of Cindy Sherman, it is impossible to class call her works self-portraits. She has transformed and staged herself into as unnamed actresses in undefined B movies, make-believe television characters, pretend porn stars, undifferentiated young women in ambivalent emotional states, fashion mannequins, monsters form fairly tales and those which she has created, bodies with deformities, and numbers of grotesqueries. Her work as been praised and embraced by both feminist political groups and apolitical mainstream art. Essentially, Sherman's photography is part of the culture and

Judy Chicago (artist, author, feminist and educator) has a career that now spans five decades. In the late 1960s, her inquiry into the history of women began a result of her desire to expose the truth of women’s experiences, both past and present. She still continues on a crusade to change the perception of women from our history, “Women’s history and women’s art need to become part of our cultural and intellectual heritage.” (Chicago, 2011) Through our history women - their struggles, accomplishments and contribution to history, have been overlooked, downplayed and even completely written out of a male dominated society and culture. In anthropologist Sherry Ortner’s 1974 essay “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” she supports this view, writing “…woman is being identified with—or, if you will, seems to be a symbol of—something that every culture devalues,” (Ortner, 1974) Where Mendieta's work primarily came from a striving to belong and an understanding of where she came from, I feel that Chicago's aim was to find a place for all women, past and present in this world, starting with herself in the art world. Chicago did explore her peronal heritage in later works entitled 'Birth Project' and 'Holocaust Project'.

The study of why women artists have systematically been erased from history and why currently the exhibition of women's art is not valued as much as the male artists' continues. There have been many theories behind the eradication of women artists from history. At the beginning of the Women's Liberation Movement, an art historian by the name of Linda Nochlin published an article called, "Why have there been no great women artists?" In here article, she addressed her own question offering one of the first consciously feminist challenges to the established canons of art history. Her query proved to be a rallying cry for women artists in the fervent days of the Women's Liberation movement and offered fragments of a manifesto to women artists, and others, intent on reexamining and ultimately restructuring the discipline (Morse, 1992). Nochlin argues that contemporary feminists contend that there is a different "greatness" between men's art and women's art. This view of art undermines the general discipline. It categorizes its value in order to give it a higher classification among gender. Many women are trying to delve back into history and recapture any trace of artistic women in order to document and arrange their

In the today’s society, it may appear that women’s rights have been propelled forward by equal opportunity sanctions. However, taking a more concise look at different spectrums, such as the art world, it appears that many women are still being snubbed despite their artistic abilities. In

The Guerilla Girls are a women’s activist art group. They are masked women who came together to make change in the world of art and women’s involvement in society. GG emerged in 1985 and still are active today in New York after 30 years of the emergence of the group. The Guerilla Girls used posters with real statistics to show awareness of sexism in the art world and the discrimination of women in politics as well as in the mass media. The Guerrilla Girls spread awareness of sexism in art, discrimination in politics and the mass media through their workshops, performances, and posters.

Barbara Kruger, artist and theorist, has directed and informed much of the curatorial project. Kruger’s perspectives on feminism speak to

Chinese Feminist Art is not only different from traditional Chinese female art as it clearly emphasises on female characteristics, but also distinctive from western feminist art in the way that it embraces Chinese culture to the greatest extent. Unlike Western Feminist Art which is tightly

There is some disparity between the way critics and philosophers like Judith Butler view Cindy Sherman's work and the way that Cindy Sherman speaks of her photographs. It may be the disparity that exists between many modern artists, who often operate on an intuitive level, and the philosopher critics who comment upon them from a theoretical perspective or a pre-established framework. On one level, Cindy Sherman may only be playing "dress-up" (as she herself admits) in her famous History Portraits (1989-90) (Berne, 2003). On another level, however, her "dressing-up" may be indicative of a deeper problem in modern gender identity theory which is the problem of "becoming" woman (Butler, 1994) or, as Judith Butler sees it, the problem of performativity. In the History Portraits, Sherman may certainly be said to be "performing" and perhaps even attempting to "become" the male and female characters she represents in her work. Indeed, it is upon such a premise that philosopher critics and gender theorists find her work so engaging. This paper will examine Cindy Sherman and her History Portraits in relation to Judith Butler's gender theory, the portrayal of the self, and how gender identity has changed throughout the course of modern history. It will examine representations of womanhood from Romantic Idealism to Post-Modernism and will also