With Jacqueline Millner and Catriona Moore, Art and Feminism: Twenty-First Century Perspectives, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 15, no. 2, 2015: 143-149 (original) (raw)

Feminism And Art: Unexpected Encounters

A Multiple Book Review Essay: Susan Best, Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde. I. B. Tauris: London and New York, 2013. . Katy Deepwell (ed.), Feminist Art Manifestos: An Anthology. KT Press: London, 2014. . Eleanor Heartney, Helaine Posner, Nancy Princenthal and Sue Scott, The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium, Prestel: Munich, London, New York, 2013. . Amelia Jones (ed.), The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, (2nd edition) Routledge: New York and London, 2010. . Helena Reckitt (ed.), Art and Feminism, (Abr Rev Up edition,) Peggy Phelan (survey) Phaidon Press: New York, 2012.

Feminist Emergency: The art field

2017

Helena Reckitt contributed to the breakout session ‘The art field,’ moderated by Angela Dimitrakaki (Edinburgh College of Art) and moderated by Kirsten Lloyd, as part of the three-day Feminist emergency conference at Birkbeck, University of London, 22nd – 24th June 2017. Other instigators were Kerri Jefferis (artist), Lara Perry (University of Brighton), and Hilary Robinson (Middlesex University). Panel convenor Angela Dimitrakaki framed the session by noting how, as elsewhere under neoliberal governance, the art field is affected by the normalisation of precarity and austerity and the ‘feminisation’ of labour, even if art is still seen as a terrain for the privileged or, ultimately, of marginal relevance to ‘real world’ emergencies. Art workers are accustomed to suppressed or missing wages and reside at the bottom of the art pyramid; over 3/4 of art students, but 1/2 of art school lecturers, 1/3 of professors, and 1/3 of exhibiting artists; we legitimise antagonism in supporting bu...

Feminism AND Art: A Review Essay

Australian Feminist Studies, 2015

Since the revolutions of the 1960s, feminism and art have created spaces for thinking and rethinking the links between gender and creativity. Art has been challenged both within and without the frame, as artists and feminists disrupt and complicate pre-established modes of production and representation. Feminism in turn has been challenged by art that asks: what does a feminist subject look like? What does she read? Think? Feel? Make? Amidst the constant questioning some unexpected encounters occur: art made by women is not necessarily feminist art; patriarchal logics continue to dominate the ongoing boundaries of canon formation; and, it remains necessary to examine gender in all its potentialities. As Susan Best writes, it continues to be our job as feminist artists and art historians to address ‘the refraction of the question of the subject through the lens of gender’ (2013, p.143). Subsequently, this review asks: What do you feel when you encounter feminist art? And, who is art AND feminism for? We pursue these questions through five new or recently updated titles broadly collected under the heading of contemporary feminist art history and theory.

A Time of One's Own: Histories of Feminism in Contemporary Art

2022

In A Time of One’s Own Catherine Grant examines how contemporary feminist artists are turning to broad histories of feminism ranging from political organizing and artworks from the 1970s to queer art and activism in the 1990s. Exploring artworks from 2002 to 2017 by artists including Sharon Hayes, Mary Kelly, Allyson Mitchell, Deirdre Logue, Lubaina Himid, Pauline Boudry, and Renate Lorenz, Grant maps a revival of feminism that takes up the creative and political implications of forging feminist communities across time and space. Grant characterizes these artists’ engagement with feminism as a fannish, autodidactic, and collective form of learning from history. This fandom of feminism allows artists to build relationships with previous feminist ideas, artworks, and communities that reject a generational model and embrace aspects of feminism that might be seen as embarrassing, queer, or anachronistic. Accounting for the growing interest in feminist art, politics, and ideas across generations, Grant demonstrates that for many contemporary feminist artists, the present moment can only be understood through an embodied engagement with history in which feminist pasts are reinhabited and reimagined.

Troubling Canons: Curating and Exhibiting Women’s and Feminist Art, A Roundtable Discussion

2016

A discussion between Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, Artists, Berlin; Angela Dimitrakaki, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art History and Theory, University of Edinburgh, and author of books including Gender, artwork and the Global Imperative: A Materialist Feminist Critique (Manchester); Kerryn Greenberg, Curator, International Art, Tate Modern, London; Koyo Kouoh, Artistic Director, RAW Material Company, Dakar, and curator of exhibitions including Body Talk: Feminism, Sexuality and the Body in the Work of Six African Women Artists (WIELS); Camille Morineau, Independent Curator, Co-Founder and President of AWARE, Archive of Women Artists, Research and Exhibition, and former Curator at the Centre Pompidou where she curated exhibitions including elles@centrepompidou; Helena Reckitt, Senior Lecturer in Curating, Department of Art, Goldsmiths, University of London, and former Senior Curator of Programmes at the Power Plant, Toronto; Mirjam Westen, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, ...