Thesis (M.A. (Hons.))--University of Western Sydney, Nepean, 1995. / Bibliography: leaves 59-66; includes bibliographical footnotes.

This thesis is based on an empirical study of forty-three contemporary women artists. The aim of this research was to explore how a number of factors impact on these women’s construction of their identity as artists. The women were selected through the East Midlands Arts register of artists, and therefore targeted women who had already identified themselves as practitioners. Although they all registered themselves as painters, their use of such terms as painter and artist, as my research revealed, was fluid, being dependent on changing perceptions of self. The research was conducted in line with feminist theories, which privilege gender as a defining characteristic of people’s experience. This is not to sanction notions of essentialism and therefore the research does not seek to universalise the position “woman”, but rather attempts to gain an understanding of the diversity of women’s experiences. To that end, the research data were collected through the use of both questionnaires and in-depth, semi-structured interviews. Five main categories emerged from the interviews, which formed the basis of the data analysis and interpretation. These were: issues concerning the conventional image of the artist and the limited availability of role models this provides for women artists; the relationship between women’s sense of their identity as females and its impact on their ability to combine that with an artist identity; the role of higher art education in constructing images of the artist; the part played by women artists’ social relations, including their relationships and roles within the family; and the models and realities of working practices, including the implications of the site of production and forms of dissemination. Two patterns emerged in my sample group regarding the various ways of constructing an artist identity. They largely reflected the impact of socialisation which, it would appear, requires women to adopt either a traditional female role around which the artist identity somehow has to be worked, or a traditional artist role which still challenges the adoption of a certain kind of female identity. The women in my sample group, however, showed signs of attempting to negotiate their own pathways towards complex and multiple identities; a process made more intricate for women with an additional identity of mother

Review of LIFE STORIES OF WOMEN ARTISTS, 1550–1800. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. 504p. bibl. index. $99.95, ISBN 978-0754654315.

The thesis contains a discussion of surrealism and the work of Meret Oppenheim and Leonora Carrington. In the thesis I also distinguish three groups of paintings in essays and describe my work and the way in which theory and practice have recommended one another. 'Salience and Surrealism' discusses how the features of collaboration, play and partnership involve women artists within the surrealist movement, and how their ideas of the feminine principle evolve and change. I also discuss the changing attitudes to imagination, creative inspiration and activity, and the understanding brought about by the meeting between surrealism and psychology. The salience of surrealism as an introverted urge and instinct toward individuation, is suggested by Kenneth Wack 'as the source of surrealism's most abiding success.' The contemporary use of salience applies to features, characteristics, and from architecture as protrusions or fortifications. The dictionary definition begins with extroverted examples like dancig, leaping about and jetting forth. The archaic meaning is origin or first beginning, hence in old medicine salience applies to the heart when it first shows in the embryo. In salience the anagram of, a silence, gave heed to the atmosphere of silence from creativity and in paintings. A silence, also corresponds with the middle part of Meret Oppenheim's life when she experienced an artisitc crisis and depression. This essay looks back fifty years of self-expression from this artist and finds prominent features to suggest the essential dichotomies which mark the artwork. Meret Oppenheim's ouevre includes painting, sculpture, poetry, books, and theatre costume and apparal. Her multiple talents in the arts and literature are like those of Leonora Carrington who has published several books and plays, in the visual arts she sculpted and painted. The salience of their creative and intellectual endeavours found realisation in the wisdom of the feminine, of animal spirits and of natural worlds. The principles of alchemy also inspired and informed their attitudes to creativity which emerges from the unification of opposites. Both artists called for a new alliance between male and female principles, and evolve concepts of androgyny, which for them lift creation to higher levels. These women as artists found a field of the arts that furnished them with both physical life and spiritual life / Master of Arts (Hons)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2009. / "Graduate Program in Art History." Includes bibliographical references (p. 304-331).

Illustrations not reproduced. The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file. Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on January 25, 2010). Thesis advisor: Dr. Kristin Schwain. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2001. Graduate Programme in Interdisciplinary Studies. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 146-154). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pMQ67721.

This thesis investigates the work of the Canadian artist and filmmaker Joyce Wieland (1930-1998) from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s in relation to its historical conditions of production and considers both her film and non-film work, including quilts, embroidery and prints. To examine these artistic media together not only provides a means to re-contextualize Wieland’s work, but rethinks disciplinary boundaries and contributes to a renovation of both art historical and filmic methods of critical inquiry. Wieland’s work from this period serves as an exemplary case study of the ways in which female artists have consistently had to negotiate contemporaneous constructions of femininity/feminism, modernity, and representation in relation to their art practice. I argue that Wieland consistently explored, through aesthetic means, the terms by which contemporary re-conceptualizations of gendered, classed, and raced identities were being defined as new national subjects within the Canadian nation-state. I begin by outlining the ways in which Wieland’s work as been constructed within the dominant narratives of Canadian art and film, and argue that the disciplines that generated them, with their formalist and textual foci, inhibit larger discussions of the historical, political and cultural contexts of Wieland’s art production. Each chapter subsequently examines an identity that emerged as a collective during the late 1960s in Canada –women, the working classes, French Canadians, and aboriginal peoples– that Wieland aesthetically explores. Through her engagement with second-wave feminism, the development of the New Left in English and French Canada, Québécois nationalism, and shifting notions of aboriginal identity, Wieland’s art production visually materializes the intersection of feminism and nationalism –discourses that were actively circulating in Canada during this period. / Thesis (Ph.D, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2007-12-21 06:48:06.423

Saartje BaartJnan was a South African woman who signed a contract in 1810 that effectively made her the property of two white men wishing to exhibit her in Europe because of the shape and color of her body. In this text 1 examine two very different categories of representations of Baartman. First, I discuss images that were produced during Baartman's lifetime that discursively transformed her from a black woman with an identity into a pathologized body known as the Hottentot Venus, and second, I discuss the contemporary black female artists who are producing art inspired by Baartman in order to problematize the racist and sexist assumptions that have been inscribed on the black female body. My research encompasses important scholarship done by white feminist art historians, as well as that by black feminist theorists, and my thoughts on this subject have also been informed tremendously by work that has been done on the visual culture of slavery and on racist stereotypes by post-colonial scholars.

This dissertation explores the gendered division of childcare in terms of concepts of the father and examines how these concepts have impacted on the production of women artists in the history of western art. The survey is restricted to western culture and is subdivided, according to changes in concepts of the father, into roughly three periods: the era of the pre-modern father, the era of the modern ideology regarding the mother, and the postmodern era, in which a new concept of the father was articulated. / Thesis (M.A.F.A.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2003.