<p> "Subtle Resistance: How Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Martha Jackson Resisted Post-World War II Gender Constructions" explores the careers of three women in postwar New York City&mdash;artists commonly referred to as "second generation" Abstract Expressionist painters, Grace Hartigan and Joan Mitchell, and gallerist Martha Jackson. Following the Second World War, the distinctions between men and women, and masculinity and femininity grew. It is in this polarized social field that Hartigan and Mitchell were able to carve out success, claim agency over the formation of their artistic identities, and overall resist the gender constructions that were so pervasive to postwar American culture. Martha Jackson, a Buffalo native who opened the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York City in 1953, played an important role in the careers of Hartigan and Mitchell and ensured continued progress in their careers during the tumultuous 1960s. </p><p> Chapter 1 examines the gendered construction of postwar American culture and the exemplary career of Martha Jackson, an independent woman who challenged traditional notions of a woman's role in society. Chapter 2 explores how Hartigan and Mitchell navigated the gendered tensions of the New York School. Chapter 3 studies how Hartigan and Mitchell's artistic styles reflect their construction of identity in relation to art historical tradition and the use of a controlled expressivity in their work. </p><p> Archival materials from the Martha Jackson Gallery Archives at the UB Anderson Gallery and the Grace Hartigan Papers at the Special Collections Research Center at Syracuse University, as well as periodicals, oral history interviews and other primary sources provide a new perspective of the social history of the time. With this new perspective, the challenges Hartigan, Mitchell, and Jackson faced become clearer, as do their means of resistance.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of British Columbia, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 366-392).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Art History, August 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

This thesis brings together women artists art practices situated in five key periods of Cyprus socio-political history: British colonial rule, anti-colonial struggle, 1960 Independent, the 1974 Turkish invasion and its aftermath of a divided Cyprus, which remains the case in the present day. Such study has not been done before, and for this, the current thesis aims to provide a critical knowledge of the richness and diversity of Greek Cypriot women's art practices that have frequently been marginalised and rarely been written about or researched. As the title suggests, this thesis engages in rethinking the history of Cypriot art by focusing on the art produced by women artists in Cyprus. By focusing primarily on the work of Greek Cypriot women artists I am interested to explore the conditions within which, through which and against which, women negotiate political processes in Cyprus while making art that is predominantly engaged in specific politicised patterns. The meeting point for the artists is their awareness of being women artists living in a colonised, patriarchal country under Greek Cypriot nationality. While these artists assumed very different positions in their experience of the several phases of Cyprus history, they all negotiate in their practice territorial boundaries and specific identity patterns. Significant to my thesis are a number of questions that I discuss in relation to women artists professional careers and private lives: nationalism, militarism, patriarchy, male dominance, social and cultural codes, ethnic conflict, trauma, imposed displacement through war, memory and women's roles, especially as mothers, in modern and contemporary Cyprus. Thus, I address questions of how women artists in Cyprus experienced such phenomena and how these phenomena affected both their lives and their art practices.

This thesis discusses the cultural contributions – artistic patronage, art theory, art satire - of four Ladies-in-Waiting employed at the early eighteenth-century century British court: Mary, Countess Cowper; Charlotte Clayton, Baroness Sundon; Henrietta Howard, Countess of Suffolk; and Mary Hervey, Baroness Hervey of Ickworth. Through a close reading of archival manuscripts, published correspondences and art historical treatises, I explore the cultural milieu, historical legacy and historiographic reception of these individuals. I argue that their writing reveals fresh insight on the switch from Baroque to Rococo modes of portraiture in Britain, as it does critical attitudes to sex, religion and politics among aristocratic women. Through the use of satire, these courtiers comment on extramarital affairs, rape, homosexuality and divorce among their peer group. They also show an interest in issues of feminist education, literature, political and religious patronage, and contemporary news events, which they reference through allusions to painting, architecture, sculpture, engravings, ceramics, textiles and book illustrations. Many of the artists patronized by the court in this period were foreign-born, peripatetic, and stylistically unusual. Partly due to the transnational nature of these artist’s careers, and partly due to the reluctance of later historians to admit the extent of foreign socio-cultural influence, biased judgements about the quality of these émigré painters’ work continue to predominate in art historical scholarship. While little-studied themselves, these Ladies-in-waiting were at the center of political, social and cultural life in Britain. Their letters therefore have much of value in reclaiming, not only their own contributions to the development of British cultural life, but those of the French or Francophile émigré artists patronized at court. By studying the work of these artists and the lives of their patrons, I examine the intersection between biography and artistic practice at the early eighteenth-century British court. / Thesis (Ph.D, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2013-04-29 03:14:47.731

This thesis employs the bodily wound as a metaphor for exploring HIV/AIDS in visual culture. In particular it connects issues of bodily penetration, sexuality and mortality with pre-existing anxieties around the integrity of the male body and identity. The thesis is structured around four case studies, none of which can be said to be ‘about’ HIV/AIDS in any straightforward way, and a theoretical and historical overview in the introduction. In doing so it demonstrates that our understanding of HIV/AIDS is always connected to highly entrenched ways of thinking, particularly around gender and embodiment. The introduction sets out the issues around HIV/AIDS particularly as they relate to visual culture and promotes the work of Georges Bataille and Jacques Derrida as philosophical antecedents of queer theory, a body of ideas that emerges alongside HIV/AIDS and is intimately connected with it. Chapter one continues to engage with Bataille through the work of Ron Athey. Athey’s work uses religious and sacrificial imagery, wounding and bodily penetration to explore living in the world as an HIV-positive man. The work of Mary Douglas, who argued that the individual body could stand in for the social body, along with Leo Bersani, who argues that male penetration is tantamount to subjective dissolution are instructive in this regard. The second chapter examines how Bataille’s work has been incorporated into the discourse of art history but subject to strategic exclusions that masked its engagement with sexuality, corporeality and politics at the height of the AIDS crisis in the western world. It argues that the work of David Wojnarowicz addresses similar concerns but in an embodied, activist form. The third chapter looks at a film by François Ozon from 2005 and argues that, through photography and trauma discourse, it returns viewers to a time when HIV infection was invariably terminal and fatal. The film, therefore, is an engagement with mortality on the part of a young man. The final chapter looks at the films of Pedro Almodóvar to argue that his films simultaneously undercut our expectations around gender and sexuality while promoting an understanding of sexual difference as the originary experience of loss in our lives. The work of Judith Butler is instructive in this regard and also draws out its connections and implications to HIV/AIDS. In conclusion the thesis argues that HIV/AIDS, understood as a wound to the idea of an integral, stable and sacrosanct body, has made such an understanding of the body untenable and that this has enabling and productive consequences for our understanding of gender and sexuality.

This thesis is based on the belief that representations of women in contemporary Ugandan art serve cultural and political purposes. The premise is that the autonomous woman (seen as the new woman in this study), emerging in Uganda in the mid-1980s, agitated for the social, economic and political emancipation of women in Uganda. It has been demonstrated that the patriarchy attempted to subordinate, confine and regulate this new woman. The press, drama, music and film became powerful tools to force her into silence. This study posits that contemporary Ugandan art was part of this cultural discourse. Adopting a feminist art historical stance, it examines and assesses the gendered content of Uganda’s contemporary art masked as aesthetics. On the one hand, the study exposes the view that some men artists in Uganda use their works to construct men’s power and superiority as the necessary ingredients of gender difference. I demonstrate that some artists have engaged themes through which they have constructed women as being materialistic, gold-diggers, erotic and domesticated. I argue that this has been a strategy to tame Uganda’s new woman. On the other hand, the thesis attempts to show that some women artists have used visual discourse to challenge their marginalisation and to reclaim their ‘agency’ while revising some negative stereotypes about the new woman. This study makes an interdisciplinary contribution to Uganda’s art history, cultural studies and gender studies. / Art History, Visual Arts & Musicology / D. Litt. et Phil. (Art History)

This thesis is based on the belief that representations of women in contemporary Ugandan art serve cultural and political purposes. The premise is that the autonomous woman (seen as the new woman in this study), emerging in Uganda in the mid-1980s, agitated for the social, economic and political emancipation of women in Uganda. It has been demonstrated that the patriarchy attempted to subordinate, confine and regulate this new woman. The press, drama, music and film became powerful tools to force her into silence. This study posits that contemporary Ugandan art was part of this cultural discourse. Adopting a feminist art historical stance, it examines and assesses the gendered content of Uganda’s contemporary art masked as aesthetics. On the one hand, the study exposes the view that some men artists in Uganda use their works to construct men’s power and superiority as the necessary ingredients of gender difference. I demonstrate that some artists have engaged themes through which they have constructed women as being materialistic, gold-diggers, erotic and domesticated. I argue that this has been a strategy to tame Uganda’s new woman. On the other hand, the thesis attempts to show that some women artists have used visual discourse to challenge their marginalisation and to reclaim their ‘agency’ while revising some negative stereotypes about the new woman. This study makes an interdisciplinary contribution to Uganda’s art history, cultural studies and gender studies. / Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology / D. Litt. et Phil. (Art History)

Drawing on the methods of feminist art history and my own knowledge of the field, this PhD gives an overview of “Russian” (Russian Empire, Soviet, post-Soviet) art history with women at its center. Starting in the late 18th century and spanning to the present-day, I critically examine women’s artworks, the social contexts in which those women find themselves, as well as their biographies. Thus, this thesis extends beyond strict media analysis as a central concern of feminist criticism. This text consist of five chapters. Chapter One begins at the end of the 18th century and covers women artists working throughout the Russian Empire up through the beginning of the 20th century. Thesis looks at specific women artists and how the path to professionalization opened up new doors while women were still largely excluded from elite artistic circles. This overview demonstrates how this occurred both in explicit social exclusion as well as implicitly – specifically in the ways that the portrayals of women in professional art shifted throughout the 19th century. The ambivalent nature of women’s simultaneous inclusion and exclusion from leading art institutions and groups serves as a defining feature of the art world of the Russian Empire. Chapter Two examines women’s roles in the avant-garde at the beginning of the 20th century. As has been recognized in much popular scholarship, women served as key players in the so-called “Russian Avant-Garde”. For instance, while many Western European artists at the time turned to the colonies of their respective empires for stimulation, many Russian avant-garde artists turned to local peasants. Precisely because of their more differentiated relationships, Chapter Two argues that these women artists produced very dissimilar work from their Western European counterparts. This was due both to questions of gender as well as power and colonialism. From there, thesis shows the ways in which women avant-garde artists made use of various media – especially textiles, porcelain, and book design. Chapter Three revolves around women artists in the Soviet Union. At first it examines how women were portrayed in Socialist Realism, which followed largely three archetypes: the collective farm woman, the sportswoman, and the ballerina. In this chapter focus is on how women navigated the slippery terrain of the social world of Socialist Realism by highlighting the role of its most successful example – Vera Mukhina. Tracing through Mukhina’s path from the avant-garde to Socialist Realism’s most famous female artists, the text reveals continuities between the two genres that have typically been overlooked in the literature. Indeed, Mukhina’s development suggests much more in common between the avant-garde and Socialist Realism than most male artists’ careers would indicate. Finally, this chapter discusses women artists who rejected Socialist Realism and produced so-called “unofficial” art – focusing on the (in)famous Bulldozer Exhibition of 1974. Chapter Four illuminates how women artists negotiated the enormous socio-political changes during Perestroika through past the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In the 1990’s, three prominent all-women art collectives emerged: the Factory of Found Clothes, the Cyber-Femin Club, and the Fourth Height. Based largely on interviews with the women who participated in the groups, text sketches out a general history of how they formed, produced art, and confronted questions of gender and society. Then, chapter four turns to women artists who worked mostly individually throughout the same period. In this thesis women artists from the 90’s are categorized based on their concepts of gender – women who flipped gender dynamics through their art, women who took radical stances toward gender through their art, and women who did not clearly challenge ideas of gender. In the text they are called the “flip-floppers”, the “radicals”, and the “quietists”, respectively. In Chapter Five, there is a break with the chronological approach of the previous chapters. Instead, first part compares the trial of Iuliia Tsvetkova in 2019 and the trial of Natalia Goncharova in 1910. Both women were accused of producing pornography and thus subject to prosecution. Through this comparison, one can see the continuities and ruptures of the gender dynamics in broader society then and now, particularly in relationship to art and art production. Second part of the chapter five, compares the so-called “Leningrad Feminists” of the 1970’s and Pussy Riot from the 2010’s. By highlighting how these two collectives used the imagery of the Virgin Mary in their work, the text draws out parallels between the two that have gone unnoticed, even by the artists themselves. This dissertation is thus fundamentally about connections. Connections, both visible and invisible, define the social constellations in which women artists participate. By drawing out these connections, this thesis reimagines Russian art history and propose new, albeit imperfect, in the words of Amelia Jones, genealogies. Such genealogies open the space for a deep reckoning with the canon.:Table of Contents Introduction But What is a Russian Woman Artist Anyway? Literature Review & Methodology Chapter Outline Chapter 1: Woman as Artist in the Russian Empire Imperialism and Internal Colonization Bridging Art Histories: Between the Russian Empire and the Western Empires The “Russian Empire” periods of Marie-Anne Collot, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, and Kristina Robertson Independent Foreign Women Artists, Operating Beyond Royal Patronage: Maria Gomion and Julie Hagen-Schwarz Representations of Local and European Women Artists in the Russian Empire: Comparing article “Russkie Khudozhnitsy” [Russian Women Artists] and Somov’s article “Zhenshchiny Khudozhnitsy” [Women Artists] Paths to Professional Art for Women Artists in the late Russian Empire Variety of Professional Strategies for Women Artists in the Russian Empire Challenges Faced by Women in the Imperial Academy of Arts: Marfa Dovgaleva, Avdotia Mikhailovna Bakunina, Sofia Sukhovo-Kobylina, and Katerina Khilkova Women Artists from the Russian Empire in the Académie Julian: Maria Bashkirtseff, Princess Maria Tenisheva, Maria Iakunchikova, and Elizaveta Zvantseva Female and Male Paths to Becoming an Artist: The Cases of Elena Polenova and Vasilii Polenov Women in the Wanderers and the World of Art Two Women Wanderers: Emily Shanks and Antonina Rzhevskaia Women in the World of Art and Related Circles: Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, Elizaveta Kruglikova, Elena Polenova, Maria Yakunchikova, and Zinaida Serebriakova Between Artist, Mother, and Model: Self-Representations of Women Artists Insisting on the Professional Self: Katerina Dolgorukaia, Katerina Chikhacheva, Sofia Sukhovo-Kobylina, Maria Bashkirtseff, Elizaveta Kruglikova, Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, Marianne Werefkin, and Teresa Ries The Fe[male] Gaze: Ol’ga Della-Vos-Kardovskaia, Tamara de Lempicka, and Zinaida Serebriakova Chapter 2: Women Artists Shaping the Avant-Garde Conceptualizing Avant-Garde in the Russian Empire Framing the “Feminine”: Noble and Peasant Femininities Women Artists and Religion: Natalia Goncharova and Marianne Werefkin Women Artists and Lubok: Sofia Kalinkina, Elizaveta Bem, and Maria Siniakova The Case of Natalia Goncharova: Between Two Worlds Looking West: Goncharova and Gauguin Looking East: Goncharova and Peasant Culture Craft in the Foreground: Women in Textile, Porcelain, and Book Design Women in Textile Design, Embroidery, and Factory Production: Natalia Davidova, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Vera Pestel, Ol’ga Rozanova, Varvara Stepanova, and Lubov Popova Women in Costume Design in the Early Soviet Union: Natalia Goncharova, Nina Genke-Meller, Alexandra Exter, Nadezhda Lamanova, Varvara Stepanova, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, and Vera Mukhina Women Artists and Futurist Books: Elena Guro, Natalia Goncharova, and Ol’ga Rozanova Women Artists and Children’s Book Illustration: Vera Ermolaeva, Elena Safronova, Alisa Poret, Tatjana Glebova, Maria Siniakova, Galina and Ol’ga Chichagovy, and others Women artists and Small Sculptural Forms (porcelain and ceramics): Natalia Danko and Alexandra Shekotikhina-Potozkaia Chapter 3: Women Artists in Socialist Realism and Unofficial Art Aligning Art History of the Soviet Union and Gender Studies Official Images of Women in the Soviet Union Kolkhoznitsa [Collective Farm Woman] Sportsmenka [Sportswoman] Balerina [Ballet Dancer] Socialist Realist Women Painters Women Artists in the Moscow School of Socialist Realism: Vera Orlova, Ekaterina Zernova, and Serafima Riangina Women Artists and the Leningrad School of Painting: Nadezhda Steinmiller, Evgenia Antipova, Vera Nazina, and others Women Socialist Realist painters from the Soviet Republics: Tetiana Iablonska, Vaiiha Samadova, the Sisters Aslamazian, Elene Akhvlediani, and others Women Artists as Soviet Sculptors Women as Sculptors before the Soviet Union: Elena Luksch-Makovskii, Maria Dillon, Teresa Ries, and Anna Golubkina A Case Study: Vera Mukhina the Soviet Sculptor – Between the Street and the Household Women Artists in Unofficial Art Some Aspects of Canonization of Women Artists of the Bulldozer Exhibit: Nadezhda Elskaia and Lydia Masterkova Artistic Couples in Soviet Unofficial Art and Their Visions of Eden Chapter 4: Women Artists in the Late Soviet Union and after Its Dissolution The Emergence of Women-Only Groups in the Post-Soviet Space: the Factory of Found Clothes (FFC), Cyber-Femin Club, the Fourth Height The Factory of Found Clothes (FFC): Ol’ga Tsaplia-Egorova and Natalia Gluklia-Pershina-Yakimanskaia The Cyber-Femin-Club: Alla Mitrofanova, Irina Aktuganova, Lena Ivanova, and Ol’ga Levina Chetvertaia Vysota [The Fourth Height]: Ekaterina Kameneva, Dina Kim, and Galina Smirnskaia Resisting Erasure: Women Artists from the 1990’s The Mirror Game or the Flip-Floppers: Anna Alchuk and Tania Antoshina The Radicals: Alena Martynova and Elena Kovylina The Quietists: Marina Perchikhina and Liza Morozova Curating the “Gender Turn” in the post-Soviet art: Natalia Kamenetskaia and others Chapter 5: Creating Parallel Histories Unacceptable Bodies: Trials against Natalia Goncharova in 1910 and Iuliia Tsvetkova in 2019 Bogoroditsa stan’ Feministkoi? Comparing the Leningrad Feminists and Pussy Riot Conclusion Illustrations Bibliography Additional Materials. Interviews.