Feminist art

[4][5] In Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists, Linda Nochlin wrote, "The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education.

[6] Lucy R. Lippard stated in 1980 that feminist art was, "neither a style nor a movement but instead a value system, a revolutionary strategy, a way of life.

By critiquing institutions that promoted sexism and racism, people of color and women identified and attempted to fix inequity.

After women gained suffrage in the United States in the early 1920s, a wave of liberalization spread throughout the world, leading to gradual changes in feminist art.

[8] Before the 1960s, the majority of woman-made artwork did not portray feminist content that it either addressed or criticized the unique conditions faced by women.

In the early 20th century, works that flaunted female sexuality – the pin-up girl being a prime example – began to be produced.

By the late 1960s, there was a plethora of feminine artwork that broke away from the tradition of depicting women in an exclusively sexualized or objectified fashion.

This is an early feminist example of female artists finding ways to break from the traditional role of women in society.

Before this era, common female work consisted of pretty and decorative things like landscapes and quilts, Christa Dowling attempts to explain this theory by stating arguing that 'women are more sensitive by nature than man...'.

[12] Towards the end of the decade, progressive ideas criticizing social values began to appear in which the mainstream ideology that had come to be accepted was denounced as not being neutral.

[14] To put it simply, this rebellion against the socially constructed ideology of a woman's role in art sparked the birth of a new standard of the female subject.

With Yoko Ono's 1964 work, Cut Piece, performance art began to gain popularity in feminist artwork as a form of critical analysis on societal values on gender.

Later that year she projected the images of nude-model-settings, to her own naked body, photographed them and made performances titled NudeModel in which she exhibited herself as a woman artist drawing a female nude model.

Others, however, saw an expression of the uneven balance between the genders in the sense that her photo was critiqued more harshly than a male counterpart, Robert Morris, who posed shirtless with chains around his neck as a sign of submission.

Eventually, they become wilder and begin violating her body – at one point a man threatens her with a rifle – yet when the piece ends the audience gets into a frenzy and run away in fear as if they cannot come to terms with what just happened.

In this emotional performance piece, Abramovic depicts the powerful message of the objectification of the female body while at the same time unravelling the complexity of human nature.

With that came the birth of the Guerrilla Girls who devoted their time to fighting sexism and racism in the art world through the use of protest, posters, artwork and public speaking.

Unlike the feminist art prior to the 1980s, the Guerrilla Girls introduced a bolder more in-your-face identity and both captured attention and exposed sexism.

In one case, the painting La Grande Odalisque by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was used in one of their posters where the female nude portrayed was given a gorilla mask.

By taking a famous work and remodelling it to remove its intended purpose for the male gaze, the female nude is seen as something other than a desirable object.

In that one sentence, Kruger is able to communicate her protest on gender, society, and culture through language designed in a way that can be associated with a contemporary magazine, thus capturing the viewer's attention.

[32] Other works, such as Prema Murthy's Bindigirl (1999), combined performance art with streaming video, live chat, and a website to interrogate gender, colonialism, and online consumerism.

[33] Works such as Victoria Vesna's Bodies© INCorporated (1997) used virtual reality media such as 3D modeling and VRML to satirize the commodification of the body in digital culture.

In order to try and put and end to sexism, women artists used many different art styles to make themselves known and express their worth.

Like the art world, the magazine used the media to spread the messages of feminism and draw attention to the lack of total gender equality in society.

The co-founder of the magazine, Gloria Steinem, coined the famous quote, "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle", which demonstrates the power of independent women; this slogan was frequently used by activists.

[7] Lucy R. Lippard argued in 1980 that feminist art was "neither a style nor a movement but instead a value system, a revolutionary strategy, a way of life."

To see a woman dressed in men's clothing was rare and made the statement of supporting the feminist movement, and many people knew of Dater's passionate belief of equal rights.

In her piece, The Tree of Life, one sees she is exploring this particular pose with her arms raised making her connect with the earth and the heavens and associates that with the female role.

This mixed media work uses a variety of materials including gold chalices and utensils, embroidered runners and china-painted porcelain plates that is all made up like a dinner party.