Feminist Art Criticism begins with Maryse Holder's blunt and lush language
analyzing and interpreting the significance of female sexuality as a ground of free-
dom. "Another Cuntree: At Last, a Mainstream Female Art Movement" exem-
plifies the tone and developing theory—often more implicit than explicit—of the
early 1970s, when the Women's Movement, having seeded the art world since
the late 1960s, was bearing rich fruit.

Holder asserts the primacy of women's experience. Her exuberant belief
in the body, her stunning consciousness regarding sexuality and her use of "dirty"
words all belong to a feminist effort in art to show connections between art and
social, human, and individual experience. Holder, along with many women artists,
was engaged in what has been called reclaiming. This process has involved the
use of words, subjects, and images that many feminists consider potent and authen-
tic for women despite the devolution of such language into "inappropriateness."
Affirming the feminist maxim that "the personal is political," Holder and others
have known that the exploration of intimate arenas can reveal both the private
and public power of woman.

Holder's passionate voice may not sound theoretical, but it is, for theory
is not simply academic intellectualization written in neutral(ized) language; and
a quintessential part of feminist theory lives in the writing of women who, hav-
ing responded passionately to circumstances in their own and other women's lives,
have analyzed and abstracted from those particulars without losing the passion.

The essays in Feminist Art Criticism are theoretical, and we selected them
for several reasons. First, they show a diversity of concerns. These include spiritu-
ality, sexuality, the representation of woman in art, the necessary interrelation-
ship of theory and action, women as artmakers, ethnicity, language itself, so-called
postfeminism and critiques of the art world, the discipline of art history and the
practice of art criticism. Second, the contributors' work has not been either widely
disseminated or readily available. Third, the essays, especially arranged as they
are (chronologically), demonstrate a continuous feminist discourse in art from
the early 1970s through the present, a discourse that is neither monolithic nor