Your search for: subjects:"Feminism In Art"

Ana Mendieta, a Cuban-born artist who lived in exile in the United States, was one of the most provocative & complex personalities of the 1970s' art-world. In Where Is Ana Mendieta? art historian Jane Blocker provides an in-depth critical analysis of Mendieta's diverse body of work. Although her ...

Ana Mendieta, a Cuban-born artist who lived in exile in the United States, was one of the most provocative & complex personalities of the 1970s' art-world. In Where Is Ana Mendieta? art historian Jane Blocker provides an in-depth critical analysis of Mendieta's diverse body of work. Although her untimely death in 1985 remains shrouded in controversy, her life & artistic legacy provide a unique vantage point from which to consider the history of performance art, installation, & earth works, as well as feminism, multiculturalism, & postmodernism. Taken from banners carried in a 1992 protest outside the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the title phrase "Where is Ana Mendieta?" evokes not only the suspicious & tragic circumstances surrounding her death but also the conspicuous absence of women artists from high-profile exhibitions. Drawing on the work of such theorists as Judith Butler, Joseph Roach, Edward Said, & Homi Bhabha, Blocker discusses the power of Mendieta's earth-&-body art to alter, unsettle, & broaden the terms of identity itself. She shows how Mendieta used exile as a discursive position from which to disrupt dominant categories, analyzing as well Mendieta's use of mythology & anthropology, the ephemeral nature of her media, & the debates over her ethnic, gender, & national identities. As the first major critical examination of this enigmatic artist's work, Where Is Ana Mendieta? will interest a broad audience, particularly those involved with the production, criticism, theory, & history of contemporary art.

Art is always ambiguous. When it involves the female body it can also be erotic. Erotic Ambiguities is a study of how contemporary women artists have reconceptualised the figure of the female nude. Helen McDonald shows how, over the past thirty years, artists have employed the idea of ambiguity to ...

Art is always ambiguous. When it involves the female body it can also be erotic. Erotic Ambiguities is a study of how contemporary women artists have reconceptualised the figure of the female nude. Helen McDonald shows how, over the past thirty years, artists have employed the idea of ambiguity to dismantle the exclusive, classical ideal enshrined in the figure of the nude, and how they have broadened the scope of the ideal to include differences of race, ethnicity, sexuality and disability as well as gender.McDonald discusses the work of a wide range of women artists, including Barbara Kruger, Judy Chicago, Mary Duffy, Zoe Leonard, Tracey Moffatt, Pat Brassington and Sally Smart. She traces the shift in feminist art practices from the early challenge to partriarchal representations of the female nude to contemporary, 'postfeminist' practices, influenced by theories of performativity, queer theory and postcoloniality. McDonald argues that feminist efforts to develop a more positive representation of the female body need to be reconsidered, in the face of the resistant ambiguities and hybrid complexities of visual art in the late 1990s.