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Since the day it was inaugurated in 2004, the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art has assumed a pivotal role in re–establishing the history of modern and contemporary artistic practices in Turkey. The major all–woman exhibition titled ‘Dream and Reality: Modern and Contemporary Women Artists from Turkey’, which was opened in late 2011 at Istanbul Modern, constitutes an important case study to prompt deeper exploration into the narrative frameworks within which the art museum reproduces differences. This chapter revisits the institutional and the curatorial discourse of ‘Dream and Reality’ by examining the statements released in the media and in catalogue essays with a view to comprehending the allegedly conflicting notions of gender and feminism on which the exhibition was premised and how differences were articulated against the politics of the state and art history writing. With this reconsideration, the chapter addresses the reverberations of these framings in the art histories of Turkey but also relocates them within the debates of art’s new transnational landscape.

This chapter explores the cultural position of two women artists, Saloua Raouda Choucair (1916–2017) and Etel Adnan (b.1925) in the second half of the 20th century in Lebanon. The strong presence of abstraction in their work calls for a reflection on materiality and abstraction, and on form and anti–form. Choucair and Adnan pioneered new ways of seeing, of thinking about art and its physical relationship to it through abstract aesthetics. Born in Lebanon, they have become significant artists who trained and lived abroad, while always keeping strong links to Lebanon. Their oeuvres present a reflection on the conflicted Western and Islamic heritage in Lebanon and in the Middle East at large. Although abstraction is no clear representation of female subjectivity, the use of abstraction as lived experience in Choucair’s and Adnan’s works serve to explore gender in Lebanon as a subjective and social context.

This chapter reflects on feminist methodologies for research on women artists and art forms that are both feminised and racialised, existing on the fringes of art historical scholarship. The author’s recent work on women's weaving and fibre art sketches a productive pathway for crafting analytical approaches to asymmetrical relationships. Employing Sara Ahmed's writing on feminist sensations, citational relations, and the analogy of a 'wall', the chapter considers underlying reasons for the continued marginal status of women artists, 'feminine' space, and 'craft' production. Focal points of feminist labour include locating archival and artistic records, contending with their relative inaccessibility, invisibility, and vulnerability, and cultivating essential relationships around these materials. If tended to, these records and collaborative relationships yield an exciting picture and scholarship of care that work to destabilise hegemonic art histories.

This chapter discusses the aim and objectives of the volume by way of addressing the recent debates in the discipline of art history. The two main themes that comes through from this discussion are the current efforts of decolonising the curriculum of art history and the discipline itself, and the ongoing challenges to art history and its canon particularly coming from the perspectives of transnational feminism and postcolonialism. This introductory chapters draws upon scholars whose studies have been key to these discussions, including Okwui Enwezor, Nada Shabout, James Elkins and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, providing a comprehensive overview of the current state and relevance of them to the volume. This chapter ends with an explanation of how each section and chapters contribute to these debates and what novelties they bring into art historical scholarship.

The introduction begins with a brief discussion of Lorraine O’Grady’s Mlle Bourgeoise Noire to discuss the risks and rewards of becoming the subject and object of art. It delineates the three key concepts undergirding Embodied Avatars—black performance art, objecthood, and avatar production—and their relationship to the book’s focus on black women performers and artists from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.

Art historian Carol Damian laments the scarcity of Cuban women artists from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Damian explains that this trend was based on both women’s traditional exclusion from art academies and exhibition circuits and difficulties in traveling abroad and establishing their own studios. Yet she documents the work of eight major women artists during the first half of the twentieth century in Cuba, including Mirta Cerra and Gina Pellón. Most of these artists were associated with the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts in Havana, participated in numerous exhibitions, and received critical acclaim during their lifetime. However, most critics now neglect them—except for Amelia Peláez—in favor of the canonized male leaders of the Cuban vanguardia. Damian concludes with a call for further research and reflection on the careers of lesser-known female figures and their contributions to Cuban art before and after the country’s independence in 1902.

This chapter examines theoretical issues of the avant-garde in Der Blaue Reiter and women artists’ strategies in relation to the male hierarchy of the group. It proposes a revision of binary thinking about the nature of masculine and feminine identity through a study of selected works by Gabriele Münter and Marianne Werefkin. In considering critical reception and the correspondence of the writer, poet and artist Else Lasker-Schüler, the chapter argues that Der Blaue Reiter harboured more complex and performative notions of gendered authorship and agency.

This chapter discusses the emergence of women artists and the female body in the Chinese art tradition in the twentieth century. It shows that throughout the course of China's search for modernity, Chinese women artists have constantly negotiated their positions in art history and contributed to the art canons. In reclaiming the female body once again since the 1990s, artists intend not simply to recover but to re-create women's art adrift in art history. Due not only to the quantity and quality of artists and works but also to a clearly inscribed gender consciousness and female aesthetics, for the first time in Chinese art history women's emerged art as a disciplinary category attracting visual analysis.

Concetta Scaravaglione was a critically acclaimed American sculptor. Among the awards and grants she received were major commissions from the Federal Art Project in the 1930s, a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Prix de Rome award from the American Academy, the first such award to be given to a woman. During the early 1920s, Scaravaglione had a love affair with a fellow art student that ended badly. The disruption it caused to her art helped shape her lifelong conviction: she would never marry. Scaravaglione was elected to membership in the New York Society of Women Artists, a group of thirty painters and sculptors. Scaravaglione said, “To sculpture I am grateful for enjoyment and for an opportunity to be free and independent, to create to the extent of my capacities.”

This chapter explores how the female body as a historical and visual subject inspires female narratives and visual representation. The insertion of female narrative into art history legitimates female experience previously invisible in historiography and calls attention to women's art formerly on the canonical margins. In asking how gender operates historically, the chapter follows three modes of articulation: the traditional, the modern, and the ordinary. First, Bai Chongmin and Wu Weihe's pottery sculptures of Exemplary Women in traditional China show historical biographies inscribing the female body and sexuality in the gendered rhetoric of female chastity. The sculptural configuration generates a visual rewriting of historiography, where the exemplary women appear as a collective corpse of veiled bodies and sacrificial victims. Then Hu Ming, in a modern repainting of classical works, replaces the celestial gods and deities with female figures from different historical moments. The artist's dislocation of female figures as historical subjects and her use of modes of dress as spatial-temporal markers is a revision of history with women exclusively the subjects. Finally, Tao Aimin's installation of washing boards brings visibility to ordinary women confined in domestic domains far from the realm of art.

This chapter explores how women artists have returned to flowers and crafts for the purpose of female expression and identity formation. Unlike traditional flower-bird paintings and female craft making, contemporary practices shape flowers into abstract forms and weave crafts into enunciative motifs. Abstraction creates a visual arena where flowers and plants personify the female body and conceptualize enunciation. The flowers captured by Wang Xiaohui's camera, for instance, appear as sexualized abstractions of the female body, suggesting prohibited desires as well as philosophical implications, such as the Buddhist view of the life/death cycle symbolized in the lotus flower. Cai Jin's Banana Beauty transforms plant leaves into living bodies saturated with red and textured with oil pigment. Lei Shuang's Sunflowers, with their radically altered shapes and subjective color tones, speak for the artist's haunting memories of the political past or her psychological exploration of an inner world. The second half of the chapter examines how artists, especially installation artists, transform material objects and the crafts of everyday life into processes of identity formation, domestic deconstruction, and local/global negotiation.

This chapter explores how women artists employ their own bodies in performance practices for the conceptual and visual construction of a central thesis: the body in pain. It begins by first examining paradoxical issues of public (mis)reception of women's performative acts. Taking Xiao Lu's Dialogue (1989) as instructive, it considers the conventions at work when the public interprets a work of radical utterance about unspeakable personal, sexual experience. It then turn to Zhao Yue's Grids (2007) to exemplify self-mutilation as bodily resistance to social confinement and commercial exploitation, and how the public and art critics especially think of body modification as nonart. The chapter goes on to explore the mediation between the body in pain and the artist's self. He Chengyao's performance series unveils how a daughterly body reexperiences the maternal pain caused by social-political trauma and restores it in memory, and Chen Lingyang's Twelve Flower Months foregrounds the bleeding vagina and uses menstrual blood to express emotional and psychological uncertainty. The discussion concludes that performance art remains a marginal practice, paradoxical in art rhetoric. The performance of the female body in pain challenges and is challenged by a domain of art usually centered on visual constructions of the male body and evaluated by conventional criteria.

This chapter examines the question of the body, especially the female body, after technology has rearticulated her into hybrid cyborgs. Taking the concept of the cyborg body as a metaphor, it argues that the creation of cyberspace and cyborg bodies explores the interfaces between the real and the virtual, extending the subject of the body beyond established theoretical and visual norms. When the borders between fantasy/reality and human/machine become blurred, we need to reconsider gender and the body as boundary concepts and think of them as means of transgression across the real and the virtual. The work of two young artists, Cao Fei and Fan Xiaoyan, leads to a virtual world and engagement with body–machine cyborgs. Through her avatar China Tracy, Cao Fei takes us to her newly constructed virtual world in Second Life, RMB City. The artist unfolds how the virtual community in RMB City functions to replicate and also subvert social-cultural reality. In the sculptural figures of Physical Attachment, Fan Xiaoyan demonstrates a post-human subject where the female body is reconstructed as part machine, part human. The hybrid of female nude and machine parts constitutes cyborg feminism and poses a challenge to (post)socialist gender discourse through an innovative, alternative sculptural form. The imagined virtual environments and human–machine cyborgs created by young women artists offer a new space and art form for theoretical and visual examination.

This chapter focuses on contemporary women artists whose artworks were featured in the Gendered Resistance Symposium, sponsored by Miami University and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. These artists include fabric artist Carolyn Mazloomi, choreographer Nailah Randall Bellinger, spiritualist and medical sociologist Olivia Cousins, filmmaker S. Pearl Sharp, and Catherine Roma. Each of these artists shares her vision of the arts as part of a transformative educational platform and speaks about the role of the artist in conveying stories of gendered resistance. Indeed, several of the artists who participated in the symposium reflect on artistic expression and the process of memory, healing, and transformation, discussing the role of art, dance, poetry, performance, and music as bridges between the past and present.

This chapter examines comics created by women artists or komiksistky, such as Elena Uzhinova and Re-I (real name Liudmilla Steblianko), in post-Soviet Russia. It looks at their use of various design strategies for (re)fashioning feminine identity, the possibilities offered by the comics medium to women authors, and the genres that these women prefer. It also considers how women comics artists’ choices reflect current economic, literary, nationalist, and gender realities; the cultural burdens borne by komiks that affect the sorts of expressions komiksistky can, cannot, do not, or will not produce; and Almira Ustinova’s notion of a gendered “visual turn” in late-Russian modernity in relation to komiks by and about women. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the emergence of autobiography as a staple of women’s comics in post-Soviet Russia.