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Alternatives 1971–1988

in Art and Pluralism: Lawrence Alloway's Cultural Criticism

This section focuses on Lawrence Alloway's life as an art critic in the period 1971–1988, beginning with the emergence of disorienting art as an expression of dissent in the art world, Alloway's ... More

This section focuses on Lawrence Alloway's life as an art critic in the period 1971–1988, beginning with the emergence of disorienting art as an expression of dissent in the art world, Alloway's response to the politicisation of art, his new pluralism, the uses and limits of art criticism, criticism and women's art, Alloway's writings on Photo-Realism and Earth art, the decline of the avant-garde, and crises in the art world concerning criticism, feminism and curatorship. It also looks at Alloway's last years.Less

Painting Their Way into the Public World: Women and the Visual Arts

Lauryn Oates

in Land of the Unconquerable: The Lives of Contemporary Afghan Women

This chapter reports young female artists learning modernist painting, not unheard of in Afghanistan but not expected either, particularly from women. The first Women's Arts and Modern Painting ... More

This chapter reports young female artists learning modernist painting, not unheard of in Afghanistan but not expected either, particularly from women. The first Women's Arts and Modern Painting Exhibition was held in Kabul in 2008 and was organized by the Center for Contemporary Arts Afghanistan (CCAA). It featured painting and sculpture, which often expressed the grim realities many Afghan women face in their daily lives, speaking to experiences of deprivation and oppression but also to hope and imagination. Rahraw Omarzad, who founded the CCAA, was overwhelmed with pride. It was a watershed moment and, he hoped, just the beginning. The CCAA is building a mobile cinema unit to travel around the city showing films about art in order to help enlighten Kabul's residents about contemporary art. In addition, it is just one key player in a reviving arts sector.Less

Introduction War Experience, Visual Narrative, and Identity

Claudia Siebrecht

in The Aesthetics of Loss: German Women's Art of the First World War

Women’s artistic testimony produced between 1914 and 1919 bears witness to the major impact the war had on women’s lives and reveals the degree to which extreme events and intense emotions ... More

Women’s artistic testimony produced between 1914 and 1919 bears witness to the major impact the war had on women’s lives and reveals the degree to which extreme events and intense emotions characterized the civilian experience of war. Their visual accounts reflect and express their enthusiasm and disillusionment, hopes, and, importantly, their trauma and bereavement and the pain of their grief. It is this emotional content of women’s art that perhaps most accurately represents their perceived historical truth. The perspectives on women in wartime society offered by German female artists, are, of course, not depictions of reality, but should be viewed as constructs that responded to a public discourse and engaged with cultural codes of conduct and narratives of war. In particular the numerous representations of mourning women stood in conflict with the conventional rhetoric of heroic wartime death and appropriate female mourning.Less

Why Women’s Art?: An Introduction

Shuqin Cui

in Gendered Bodies: Toward a Women's Visual Art in Contemporary China

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to examine the emergence of women's visual art in contemporary China and why the body, especially the female body, so often serves as a ... More

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to examine the emergence of women's visual art in contemporary China and why the body, especially the female body, so often serves as a subject for exploration and a medium of aesthetic experiment. It is argued that bodily inscription through visual articulation involves a process of gendering that challenges artistic conventions as well as viewers' preconceptions. The chapter goes on to discuss issues such as the shifting conceptions of the term women's art or feminist art in the Chinese contemporary art field. This is followed by an overview of the subsequent chapters.Less

Writing from the heart

Griselda Pollock

in Writing otherwise: Experiments in cultural criticism

This essay is a eulogy for Griselda Pollock's long time friend and collaborator, the art historian Rozsika Parker. It reflects on the early years of the women's art movement and feminist art history. ... More

This essay is a eulogy for Griselda Pollock's long time friend and collaborator, the art historian Rozsika Parker. It reflects on the early years of the women's art movement and feminist art history. It considers how we respond to the death of those close to us, and how this response might be translated into art practice. Throughout, it demonstrates how ‘writing from the heart, characteristic of Rozsika Parker's own practice, informs the writing of this tribute to her.Less

National Recognition and Community Acknowledgment

Christine L. Garlough

in Desi Divas: Political Activism in South Asian American Cultural Performances

This chapter examines and explores an event called the Festival of Nations, which showcases a myriad of folk demonstrations that range from African American doll making to Iranian rug weaving. The ... More

This chapter examines and explores an event called the Festival of Nations, which showcases a myriad of folk demonstrations that range from African American doll making to Iranian rug weaving. The festival is a rich pool of ideas and insights into issues of immigration and ethnicity, and provides a chance to engage with scholarly critiques of multiculturalism in the context of a festival. Also present in this festival are performances that can be interpreted through postcolonial feminist critiques, focusing mainly on the ways that women have often been constructed through ideas of family and home, within Indian nationalist discourses. This chapter thus seeks to revisit and reexamine the site of this festival to reflect upon the question of how the School for Indian Languages and Cultures (SILC), through the enactment of women’s folk art, emerged as a women’s performative space that facilitated acknowledgement.Less

“Cold Are the Counsels of Women”: Bloodied Warps and Gilded Wefts The Engendered Economy of Cloth in the North Atlantic

Michèle Hayeur Smith

in The Valkyries' Loom: The Archaeology of Cloth Production and Female Power in the North Atlantic

The poem Darraðarljoð, from Njál's Saga, describes the Valkyries – Óðin's female warrior spirits – weaving the fates of men and nations on a warp-weighted loom with severed heads as its weights. They ... More

The poem Darraðarljoð, from Njál's Saga, describes the Valkyries – Óðin's female warrior spirits – weaving the fates of men and nations on a warp-weighted loom with severed heads as its weights. They weave the entrails of men as the warp and weft threads of the cloth of history that they produce and tear up decide the fates of men and nations.I will use this poem as a framework through which to introduce key attitudes and sentiments about weaving in Norse societies during the Viking Age, within which the poem is set, and in the Medieval period, when it was written. The poem will be deconstructed to introduce the book's main players – women and weaving – and to approach symbolic and mythic views through which textile production, as a woman's art, was associated with fate and the control of social reproduction.Less

“Definite, Burly, and Industrious”: Virginia Woolf and Gwen Darwin Raverat

Kristin Bluemel

in Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries

In February 1909 Virginia Woolf visited the Darwin family home in which wood engraver Gwen Darwin Raverat grew up amid a large, boisterous family that struck Woolf as having a temperament “too ... More

In February 1909 Virginia Woolf visited the Darwin family home in which wood engraver Gwen Darwin Raverat grew up amid a large, boisterous family that struck Woolf as having a temperament “too definite, burly, and industrious”. Woolf predicts that young Gwen will “end in 10 years time by being a strong and sensible woman, plainly clothed”; she never predicts or acknowledges Raverat’s artistic success. Focusing on Woolf’s robust correspondence in 1922-1923 with Raverat’s painter husband, Jacques Raverat, this chapter argues that Woolf’s readers will better understand what is at stake in Woolf’s literary visions of indefinite, ethereal, and leisured femininity if they also understand how Gwen Raverat’s competing aesthetic of definite, burly, and industrious femininity informs her wood engravings. This paper’s concern with Woolf’s aesthetic and her ascription to Raverat of an inferior, less feminine aesthetic is ultimately an inquiry into what can and cannot constitute women’s modern art.Less

Wingwomen: Towards a Feminocentric Poetics of Flight in Twenty-First Century Palestinian Creative Consciousness

Anna Ball

in Post-Millennial Palestine: Literature, Memory, Resistance

The motif of flight is prominent in Palestinian creative work, yet in its contemporary connotations, it assumes increasingly multiple dimensions as it migrates creatively across generational, ... More

The motif of flight is prominent in Palestinian creative work, yet in its contemporary connotations, it assumes increasingly multiple dimensions as it migrates creatively across generational, gendered, spatial, and formal contexts. In the work of artist Sama Alshaibi and poet Lisa Suheir Majaj, aerial and avian images reappear and the motif of flight animates each woman’s ability to explore her complex relationship not simply to the homeland and Palestinian history, but also to her own embodied positionality as a twenty-first century diasporic female subject. In exploring a selection of Alshaibi and Majaj’s poetic engagements, this chapter gestures towards flight not simply as motif but also as sociocultural movement (simultaneously spatial, gestural, and political) within the post-millennial Palestinian creative imagination. This is a movement defined by a distinctively feminocentric poetics, through which it becomes possible to envisage new forms of spatial, psychological, and creative relationships to Palestine fitting for this new century.Less

Art: Seeing, Thinking, Making

Patricia M. Locke

in Philosophy for Girls: An Invitation to a Life of Thought

The philosopher Hannah Arendt carefully distinguishes between labor, which is necessarily repetitious (like doing laundry), and work, which like art-making and philosophical thinking, can be creative ... More

The philosopher Hannah Arendt carefully distinguishes between labor, which is necessarily repetitious (like doing laundry), and work, which like art-making and philosophical thinking, can be creative and long-lasting. By looking closely at and comparing the paintings of Berthe Morisot and Agnes Martin, it is possible to draw out the philosophical meaning of the experience of art works. Their paintings have an affinity with thinking, with respect to free play and coherent harmony, rather than with cognition, which applies already achieved patterns to problem-solving. By contrast, art offers ways of knowing that make thinking and wordless feelings visible to us. While we look at their practices of making, or one’s practices of attention, the artwork stands as a unique thing that helps make a human world.Less