Embroidery and Textiles: A Novel Perspective on Women Artists’ Art Practice

The manuscript focuses on the autobiographical artistic practice of women artists and feminist expression in visual art, particularly those women artists who use embroidery and textiles as mediums, techniques, processes, styles, subjects, and themes. Women artists often use a variety of unique materials and techniques to create artwork which are primarily related to them and show a feminist identity. The research explores the mediums, tools and techniques applied by women artists in their artworks and the reasons behind choosing that particular medium and methods. In addition, women artists when, where, and how these diverse creation strategies have been adopted and developed over time are examined and analysed with the help of earlier literature, articles, research papers, art exhibitions, and artworks created by women artists. This manuscript discusses the chronological development of embroidery and textiles in the context of women’s art practice, the efforts and achievements of the “Feminist Art Movement” and the cause and concept of “Entangled: Threads & Making”, a contemporary woman artist art exhibition at Turner. Embroidery and textiles are associated with women’s art practice; women artists used embroidery, needlework, and textiles as a powerful symbolic medium of expression and resistance against the male-dominated art society. They began to use feminist expressions, forms, and materials to present their new characteristics. Women artists use embroidery, textiles and needlework as feminist traditional materials and techniques, and continue to struggle to blend them with other new contemporary mediums.

Black Gold: A Black Feminist Art History of 1920s Montréal

The 1920s have been touted as the golden era of jazz and Black history in Montréal. Similarly, the decade is well known for the Harlem Renaissance, a key moment in African American art history. Yet this period in Black Canadian art histories remains largely unknown. As a first step toward shedding some light on this period in Black Canadian art history, I propose to use what I term a Black feminist art-historical (bfah) praxis to discuss some visual art practices undoubtedly active alongside well-known jazz musicians and cultural producers in 1920s Montréal. This paper presents an overview of critical race art history and feminist art history, as well as Black feminist approaches to visual representation, to outline what might be considered four tenets of bfah praxis. Applying these tenets, I propose that a new art history may emerge from well-known art objects and practices as well as lesser-known ones. I posit that through a deliberately bfah approach, new meanings emerge and the voices of Black women, even when obstructed by mainstream white narratives, may begin to stand out and shed light upon a variety of histories. This praxis aims to underline the subtext lurking at the edges of these images and to make intangible presences visible in the archive and in art history. I propose bfah as a strategy for more nuanced discussion of the work of Black Canadian artists and histories that have by and large been left out of official records.

Inhabiting the threshold: the Women's Gallery as liminal space in New Zealand's feminist art history

<p>In the four years between January 1980 and January 1984, a gallery was run in Wellington by a collective of women to display the work of female artists only. This feminist space sought to provide an educational, supportive and inclusive environment, free from the obstacles which were perceived to prohibit women from displaying their work in mainstream art spaces. This thesis tackles the history of this gallery’s reception and seeks to address its absence in the writing of New Zealand’s art history. In reassessing its history, I assert the Women’s Gallery deserves a place within critical accounts of art in New Zealand. Chapter one locates the Women’s Gallery within the cultural and political context of New Zealand society by tracing the development of the women’s art movement, and feminism as a grassroots political movement. An examination of the gallery’s Opening Show serves as an example of the way in which the ideology of the Women’s Gallery shaped its organisational structure. Chapter two pinpoints the time of the gallery’s existence at a point of transformation within feminist thinking. This chapter problematises the evolution of feminist thought from ‘essentialism’ to a critique informed by poststructuralist strategies. A close analysis of artworks demonstrates that the Women’s Gallery was simultaneously occupied by artists who exhibited both tendencies. By proposing Victor Turner’s model of liminality as a framework upon which to base a discussion of the Women’s Gallery, chapter three reframes the gallery as a liminal space. I argue the temporary existence of the gallery allowed women a space – removed from patriarchal power structures – in which to experiment both politically and creatively.</p>

Christ, Santa Claus, Doctor Deliverer: For Carolee Schneemann

This essay attends to the force of aggression in Carolee Schneemann's work, emphasizing the conflicts in the artist's representation of enjoyment, knowledge, and truth in her own body, with a focus on Up To and Including Her Limits (1973–76) and the underexplored text “Anti-Demeter: The More I Give the More You Steal” (1994). Addressing how the latter presents an origin myth for the artist, the essay underscores Schneemann's struggle over questions of genealogy, alliance, influence, and debt. On the question of debt, particular attention is given to its quality of ambivalence on terms of sexual difference, especially for father figures perceived as models of artistic expressivity, and the mothering body as a body of prohibition, labor, illness, and death. Examining the negation of the body, the role of aggression and violence, and the critique of the bind of “male fantasies” in Schneemann's work, the essay proposes a shift in feminist art historiography and its projections on Schneemann the artist. The essay asserts Schneemann's tale as a cautionary and self-reflexive one for those who come after, the would-be-daughters, who would negate the body, the struggle, the art yet again for the myth, in a time ripe for myth, in the wake of the artist's passing.

Agential realism meets feminist art. A diffractive dialogue between writers, theories and art

This article invites readers to follow our diffractive dialogue, which reflects on our interdisciplinary collaboration in thinking and writing with Karen Barad. Working with Barad’s diffractive methodology, we bring her agential realism, insights from quantum physics and feminist theories to contemporary feminist art. The aesthetic practices of three art works are discussed, and we argue that these call for an understanding of eco-, capitalist-, colonialist- and feminist critique as interrelated phenomena in the sense of agential realism. This is because it is not only the art works themselves that create encounter-moments of being-entangled with the bodies and discourses that surround them. From a methodological perspective, we are also interested in marking diffractive moments of encounter with the art works and between us, given our different disciplinary backgrounds. So, we intend to open up a space of encounters between Barad’s work, the work of the three artists and the work of ourselves as writers.

Twórczość feministyczna a kobieca podmiotowość: ujęcie monstrualne

The article shows the relationship between philosophical thought and feminist art in terms of searching for subjectivity in women’s creations. This is a review of the theories proposed by Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and by Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and Rosi Braidotti, which, as this article proves, manifest themselves in the art that defines itself as feminist. Monstrosity is an important prospect here. The author presents écriture féminine and women’s literature, namely Charlotte Roche’s Wet Places and Izabela Filipiak’s Total Amnesia. Moreover, visual arts by Cindy Sherman, Chili Kumari Burman, Jo Spece, as well as a performance by Carolee Schneemann and ORLAN are discussed.