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Module 13
"Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? "
"Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? "
"...as we all know, .....in the arts as in a hundred other areas, are stultifying, oppressive and discouraging to all those, women among them, who did not have the good fortune to be born white, preferably middle class and, above all, male. "
In a very quick nutshell, (throughout history) women have not had the time to make art. I know things are changing, we are sharing roles, we are appreciating gender equality, we are growing more and more every day. However, there is still work to be done.
Women Spinning Linen Yarn, About 1783. Hulton Archives/Getty Images
Most people, whatever gender certainly seem too overwhelmed today to eek out enough time to spend on their passions, unless they are lucky enough to be getting paid for their passion. The majority of male artists who made a living in their lifetimes from art, had family money, or patrons.
In December 1850, the writer Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote to her sister-in-law with a complaint that will sound familiar to anyone who has struggled to carve out time for a creative project. “Since I began this note,” Stowe wrote, “I have been called off at least a dozen times—once for the fish-man, to buy a codfish—once to see a man who had brought me some baskets of apples—once to see a book man…then to nurse the baby—then into the kitchen to make a chowder for dinner and now I am at it again, for nothing but deadly determination enables me to ever write—it is rowing against wind and tide.”
On February 28th, Russian Forces Burned Down a Museum Home to Dozens of Works by Ukrainian Folk Artist Maria Prymachenko.
Please take some time to watch this video and review some of her work.
The fact is there have always been artists of all genders!
From The Met:
"The history of art is littered with the names of great men—Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, etc. But what about the women who have helped shape the world's visual history? As with many other fields, women were historically discouraged from pursuing a career in the arts, yet many incredible females persevered."
Please read: Famous Female Painters : 1532-1986
Dabbling in art, learning to paint was smiled upon...however, being a female 'artist' was so frowned upon in "genteel" society, that many women artists felt the need to choose between a career and marriage. Often, the most successful female artists of the nineteenth century, such as Rosa Bonheur and the Americans Mary Cassatt and Cecilia Beaux, remained unmarried.
Mary Cassatt's "Mother and Child" (1890)
I love this painting. Besides the brushwork, which I enjoy in its painterly style, it portrays such a real interaction between a parent and child.
Dorothea and Francesca -1898 Cecilia Beaux
Watch this interview with the Guerilla Girls from 2016.
I am aware that even as I make this Module, I am 'placing' female artists apart. It is an uncomfortable truth that in the history of art, they were mostly ignored. Today, thankfully there is a resurgence of inclusion and recognition of the contributions of even recently excluded people of all races, genders and identities.
Maui Artist Abigail Romanchak
Abigail is interested in exploring the boundaries between marking, claiming and making the unseen and overlooked ultimately visible. As an artist, she seeks to perpetuate Hawaiian culture not through traditional means, but contemporary ones, so that it may endure for generations to come. She sees her prints as a way to empower and assert a Hawaiian sense of identity and culture through art. She believes that native cultures are jeopardized once they stop speaking to people in the present. Abigail's work reveals an essential alignment between multiple systems of marking and is greatly influenced by the conceptual terrain of human imprint on the natural environment.
He Ho’ike no ke Ola
He Ho’ike no ke Ola
"Native cultures are jeopardized once they stop speaking to people in present day. The expressive freedom of printmaking allows me to communicate my deep personal feelings about rapidly changing cultural and natural landscapes, and enables me to assert Hawaiian practices through art."
Please watch this interview
A few more contemporary female artists, well known, and not so..
A few more contemporary female artists, well known, and not so..
Kara Walker
Kara Walker
Walker plays with the idea of misrepresenting misrepresentations, stating, “The whole gamut of images of black people, whether by black people or not, are free rein in my mind.” Her work has stirred controversy for its use of exaggerated caricatures that reflect existing racial and gender stereotypes and for its lurid depictions of history, challenging viewers to consider America’s origins of racial inequality. In Walker’s art, the present is defined by the past and the past exerts a savage power.
Read this article!
The Means to an End: A Shadow Drama in Five Acts, etching and aquatint by Kara Walker, five panels, 1995, Honolulu Museum of Art (go and see when you can)
Susanna Bauer
Bauer’s leaf works pay homage to nature as well as holding up a mirror to the viewer. Mainly constructed with dry leaves and cotton yarn ,the pieces hold a fine balance of fragility and strength reflecting individual stories and connections to what is universal and enduring in our co-existence with each other and the natural world.
The leaf works are powerful examples of the interface between artist and nature. Many artists are inspired by nature and attempt to imitate what they see in the natural world. Bauer, on the other hand, includes natural elements into her work as if she is actually collaborating with nature
And last but certainly not least Shirin Neshat
She is an Iranian visual artist who lives in New York City. Her artwork centers on the contrasts between Islam and the West, femininity and masculinity, public life and private life, antiquity and modernity, and bridging the spaces between these subjects
'My art, without denying repression, is a testimony to unspoken female power and the continuing protest in Islamic culture.'
Shirin Neshat directed this film.
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