What is not discussed becomes veiled in denial. And as a woman, what becomes veiled in denial exists as oppression. And what exists as oppression, when confronted becomes taboo, irrational, and improper. This is my body, my mind and my drive. Fresh Expression: A Guide to Cultural Reclamation is a performative, installation that explores subversion, indulgence and the female lactating body in a sociological context; where the audience becomes active participants within a live and changing environment. This live event documents the extrication of my breast milk and recontextualizes the breast milk outside of my body. The event not only explores my personal investment in questioning my experience as a lactating woman in western culture, but also challenges the audience to reflect on topics related to lactation, bodily fluids, consumption, and sexuality.

This paper maps themes (e.g. family, beauty, femininity, gender, blackness, representation) and artists from the Black arts and Feminist art movement who have been very influential when planning this senior art project. I specifically look at the works of Black feminist artists such as Betye Saar, Faith Ringgold, Carrie Mae Weems, Kara Walker, and Mickalene Thomas who navigate themes from both movements. In my project I have painted a series of interpretive acrylic portraits of close friends and family members, all adapted from photographs.

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Rethinking the monumental suggests not only a reconsideration of Judy Chicago’s controversial installation The Dinner Party (1979)-- as displayed in the group feminist art exhibition, Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party in Feminist Art History --but also refers to an unfixing of the monumental position of power afforded the museum and a re-invigoration of the debate in feminist visual art regarding the use of the female body. I use the Sexual Politics exhibition, curated by Amelia Jones for the University of California at Los Angeles Armand Hammer Museum and Cultural Center (1996) as an indicator of the museum as feminist space. Sexual Politics’ controversial reception by both the feminist community and mainstream critics provokes discussion for how the exhibition’s contradictions are part of the exhibition’s success. I uncover that the museum has always been an important factor in the validity of The Dinner Party. Nevertheless, neither the curator nor critic (exemplified by the Christopher Knight’s 1996 review) of Sexual Politics goes far enough to exploit the museum factor as part of their re-readings of The Dinner Party . I note that the exhibition backdrop, the contemporary art museum, is experiencing a crisis in representation in regards to its audience. Guiding institutional models originally identified by Duncan Cameron (1971) in essay Museum: Temple or Forum? prove suspect as the museum embarks toward a more self-reflexive sense of power in the postmodern museum. Janet Wolff’s essay Reinstating Corporeality serves as a point of departure from which to explore the action of museum exhibition as the site suitable for corporeal reinstatement for feminism. Exhibition elements of artwork, audience and environment act as partners in a metaphoric postmodern dance. This view supposes foreclosure on the debate of essentialism in regards to the corporeal in the feminist visual arts through themes and criticisms associated with The Dinner Party. Jones sets out in her exhibition to contribute to the historicization of feminist art. This thesis looks at that initiative and suggests the museum exhibition, as the medium for this historicization, is an integral element to the success of the process.

Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2006. / Title from title screen. Susan Richmond, committee chair; Nancy Floyd, Maria P. Gindhart, committee members. Electronic text (127 p. : iil. (mostly col.)) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed June 20, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 121-127).

A pesquisa propõe uma revisitação da crítica feminista das políticas de representação considerando a intersecção de seus principais debates e premissas com as críticas contemporâneas às políticas de identidade, sugerindo perspectivas pós-identitárias nas estratégias representativas empregadas por Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons e Martha Rosler. Problematizando a tendência da representação de perpetuar na imagética feminista um sujeito fixo e uma categoria estável \"mulher\", atenta-se para a importância da formulação de estratégias artísticas representativas antiessencialistas que evoquem criticamente \"mulheridade\" evitando a reificação da categoria, do sujeito e das estruturas heteronormativas que sustentam o termo. Assim sendo, as análises propostas na pesquisa sugerem que, ao apropriarem-se de imagens de mulheres advindas do repertório dos mass media (revistas, cinema, televisão, anúncios publicitários etc.), as artistas selecionadas proporcionam um olhar crítico à imagética cultural e desestabilizam não somente as retóricas nela historicamente arriagadas, mas também a própria noção de \"mulheridade\" como categoria identitária estável, coerente, natural e universal. / This research provides an analysis based on the intersections between the feminist representational politics critique and the contemporary identity politics critique, suggesting that the strategies employed by Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons and Martha Rosler manifest post-identity perspectives. By exposing the representation\'s tendency to perpetuate, in feminist imagery, \"woman\" as a fixed subject and stable category, this research stresses the necessity to elaborate antiessentialist representational artistic strategies that might be able to critically summon \"womanliness\", though avoiding the reification of the same category, subject and heterosexual structures that sustain this term. Therefore, I will argue that by appropriating images of women provided by the cultural imagery (magazines, cinema, television, adds etc.) these artists enable a critical gaze towards this particular visual repertory, destabilizing not only their historically rooted rhetorics, but also the very idea of \"womanliness\" as a stable, coherent, natural and universal identity category.

De caráter político, feminista e autobiográfico, a ideia que conduz esta dissertação é a abordagem do percurso traçado desde a minha infância, passando pela relação problemática com minha mãe, pelas experiências com a pichação, pelo redescobrimento no graffiti, até chegar à produção artística atual, compondo, desta forma, a persona Anarkia Boladona. O processo de pesquisa foi ordenado por visitas, criadas ao acaso, por cidades do globo, onde as diferenças culturais chocam-se de forma a me fazer compreender quem sou, o porquê desta minha construção e como ela se reflete em meu processo artístico. São oito anos completos de graffiti, treze de pichação, quinze como professora e vinte dois de desenho, mas uma vida toda pensando e produzindo arte / This dissertation is driven by political, feminist, and autobiographical ideas. It proposes to address the path I followed since childhood beginning with my problematic relationship with my mother, experimentation with graffiti, and rediscovering graffiti, to my current work as an artist, thus forming the persona Anarkia Boladona. The research process was developed at random by visiting cities around the globe where cultural differences collide in order to understand who I am, why I built this, and how it is reflected in my artistic process. Eight years of graffiti, thirteen years of pichação, fifteen years as a professor, and twenty-two as a drawing teacher, but truly a lifetime of thinking about and producing art

abstract: Counter-Landscapes: Performative Actions from the 1970s – Now presents a group of artists working in both natural and urban environments whose work exploits the power of place to address issues of social, environmental, and personal transformation. Through a focused selection of key works made between 1970 and 2019, which extend beyond traditional categories, Counter-Landscapes illuminates how the methodologies created by women artists in the 1970s and 1980s are employed by artists today, both men and women alike. Developing a practice of performative actions, these artists countered the culture that surrounded and oppressed them by embodying the live elements of performance art in order to push for social change. Looking back to the 1960s and the counter-culture mindset of the times, I approach the histories of land, performance, and conceptual art through feminist studies. Then I apply the same feminist approach to philosophical histories of landscape, place, and space. Through a discussion of an extensive range of works by 25 artists, this research seeks to demonstrate the indelible influence of feminist art practice on contemporary art. It brings the work of an innovative generation of women artists—Marina Abramović, Eleanor Antin, Agnes Denes, VALIE EXPORT, Rebecca Horn, Leslie Labowitz, Suzanne Lacy, Ana Mendieta, Adrian Piper, Lotty Rosenfeld, Bonnie Ora Sherk, Beth Ames Swartz, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles—together with more recent work by artists who have adopted and extended their methods. These artists, both male and female, include Allora  &  Calzadilla, Francis  Alÿs, Angela Ellsworth, Ana Teresa Fernández, Maria  Hupfield, Saskia  Jordá, Christian Philipp Müller, Pope.L,  Sarah Cameron Sunde, Zhou Tao, and Antonia Wright. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Art History 2020

This study investigates the multiple occurrence of violent sacrificial imagery associated with animalistic and hunted bodies in the work of selected South African female artists as an articulation of the society in which the art was created. The theoretical framework of corporeal feminism is applied with reference to the postulations of George Bataille (1962), René Girard (1972) as well as Deleuze and Guattari (1984,1987), specifically with regard to the notion of becoming animal. This study shows how such imagery is used to act as a catalyst for social change by challenging Cartesian dualisms and forefronts certain issues applicable to women in a society that is patriarchal and violent. A comparison is made with the art of a selected group of Australian female artists who deal with similar themes and imagery from more or less the same timeframe. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2014. / tm2015 / Visual Arts / MA / Unrestricted

From 1945 onward, post-war artists in Japan encountered two interrelated challenges: to both adjust to the war’s aftermath, and also to create a new visual language which expressed new ideas and emotions. For women artists in Japan, this time of distinct culture change allowed for a re-defining of their role in the art community as well as society. However, there were strict boundaries surrounding the institutional and academic realm of art, one that was not inviting to women, or one that allowed opportunity or growth. Nevertheless, many women artists sought to explore gender roles, the idea of womanhood, sexuality, and expression of the self. These topics were not met willingly by male counterparts or art critics, which forced women artists to constantly engage with a society that did not openly support their work. It was a tumultuous environment; however, women artists of this era truly showcased some of the most influential, explorative, experimental, and exciting avant-garde pieces that deeply affected the history of art. In the artistic community, new conversations and ideas were challenging the rigidity of a traditional Japanese society. Women artists saw this as an opportunity to insert these challenges into their art. There was an ongoing exploration of ideas that critiqued the rigid structure that the establishment enforced upon artists. In the early ‘50s, many women produced artworks that explored ideas such as self-expression, gender norms and responsibilities of womanhood.