The Feminist Artists in my Life
I am in an art class at Scripps College called “Feminist Concepts and Strategies”. In class, we look at and discuss feminist artists and the mediums they use, in order to inspire art projects of our own. Our first assignment asked us to look at where we see feminism in our lives. This super broad topic had me stumped for a while; as a Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies major (yay!), I have read a myriad of articles, books, and opinion pieces on different aspects and histories of feminisms. But, when asked to create art in response to where I see feminism manifest in my everyday life, I didn’t have any great ideas.
Then it hit me - to address the question of where I see feminism in my life, I decided to look at the ways in which the people around me create feminist art, all the while asking myself: what even is feminist art?
I have come to the conclusion that to me, feminist art is created with the purpose of engaging in gender-based resistance, liberation, and equality, in a way that intersects and interacts with other identities. However, I do not believe that there can be a singular definition of feminist art. Feminist art reflects the values, identities and feminisms of the artist, resisting structural guidelines or criteria.
The following photo project looks at feminist art created by my friends and the messages behind their artwork (ranging from self expression to social activism). I believe that you don’t have to be well known or exhibited to be a feminist artist; anyone can make feminist art. Teresita Fernández, in her commencement address at the Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of the Arts, said, “An artist’s work is almost entirely inquiry-based and self-regulated. It is a fragile process of teaching oneself to work alone, and focusing on how to hone your quirky creative obsessions so that they eventually become so oddly specific that they can only be your own.” Through my camera lens, I attempted to explore the ways in which my friends’ work embodied this message. I created a series of triptychs incorporating the artist, the art, and natural backgrounds.
At the beginning of the school year, I visited the Ruth Chandler Williamson Art Gallery on the Scripps campus, where I saw Tatiana Parcero’s “Nuevo Mundo #10”. In this piece, Parcero overlays a profile photograph of her bare, pregnant stomach on top of ancient, colonial maps. Later in the year, one of my friends made a flip book, inspired by Tatiana Parcero’s art, that depicted a woman’s body changing throughout the stages of pregnancy, eventually turning into a map. In the process of creating her flip book, she drew many sketches, highlighting the body at different stages during pregnancy, which I included in my triptych, along with the completed flipbook. The original work by Parcero incorporated the thematics of the body, identity, and the natural world, which is why I decided to give my piece a natural background. Parcero also incorporates layers and levels in her work, through the imposing of the body on top of the map. My friend’s piece mirrors this layering, through the act of flipping through a book and displaying new drawings, one on top of the other, with each flip. To integrate this framework into my own project, I made a photo collage with the image of fruit trees in the background, superimposed by the three photos of the artist, in each of which she holds her work in front of her. Seeing my friend’s rendition and exploration of an existing piece of art inspired me to search for more examples of feminist art being made by my friends, which led me to the content for my next triptych.
In this series, I photographed drawings from another friend’s artist journal, in which she mainly draws abstract self-portraits. My friend keeps these drawings to herself for the most part, but agreed to share them with me for this project. In addition to the self portraits, she writes messages, such as:“This is art”;“This is beautiful”; “This is me”. Her work exemplifies self-expression through artwork with the feminist messages of body autonomy, self love and empowerment. On one of the pages of her journal, she incorporates queer theory by writing “Can you queer it?” throughout the piece. She drew this after a Feminism, Gender and Sexuality Studies class conversation about queer theory, grappling with the learning process through her artwork. While my friend creates her art mostly for herself, she can still be considered a feminist artist, and her work feminist art. According to Ellen Yoshi Tani in “What Makes Contemporary Art Feminist? An Art Genome Project Case Study”, “contemporary feminist art, while exhibiting no stylistic unity, can tell us a lot about the complicated negotiations facing artists engaged with female identity today...Perhaps feminist art in the 21st century has more to do with identifying as a feminist, and often with identity more broadly, than with a set of universally shared goals or a concrete agenda”. My friend’s art embodies this definition, as she uses her artwork as a source of expression and means of developing and defining her own feminism.
My last triptych explores the artwork and activism of Uterish! I had a small photoshoot with Alex (a co-founder) at Pomona College. I photographed her with all of the Uterish products, incorporating the stickers as the background to the image. In my final essay for this class, I wrote about how their shirts provide a feminist critique of the politicization of bodily organs and body autonomy through art. The women behind Uterish use the platform they created to discuss a myriad of issues relating to reproductive justice, and strive to incorporate many voices into the conversation. Over time, their work has evolved to combine both art and scholarship, beginning with designing merchandise and culminating in a media platform to express their ideas through writing. This combination of activist art and scholarship has the potential to be very powerful and effective, and according to Wendy Simonds in “The Art of Activism”, “Activist art and activist scholarship have a number of things in common: they emerge out of creative, passionate personal and political impulses; they question authority, domination, and oppression; they seek to disrupt the status quo”. The women behind Uterish have produced a collection of both feminist art and feminist scholarship surrounding the issue of reproductive justice in the US. Their work engages with the values of “The Art of Activism” through personal connections with the three founders (in personal blog posts exploring the relationships and stories of their own mothers), and political stands, through their slogan “not a political object”.
The three pieces I photographed for this project are examples of where I see feminism in my life: through the artwork made by my friends and the dialogues sparked by their work. While there are many other feminist artists in my life, whose work I did not have time to include, I am constantly inspired by the great work being done by the people around me, and the bravery and passion they display when sharing their art with me and the larger audience of my class.
Bibliography
Fountain, Aaron. “OPINION: Why Do the Media Ignore High School Activism?” Al Jazeera
America, 2 Jan. 2016
“Tatiana Parcero.” Jdc Fine Art, www.jdcfineart.com/tatiana-parcero-1/.
Popova, Maria. “What It Really Takes to Be an Artist: MacArthur Genius Teresita Fernández's
Magnificent Commencement Address.” Brain Pickings, 3 Dec. 2015.
Project, The Art Genome, and Ellen Yoshi Tani. “What Makes Contemporary Art Feminist? An
Art Genome Project Case Study.” Artsy, 16 Jan. 2015.
Wendy Simonds. “Presidential Address: The Art of Activism.” Social Problems, vol. 60, no. 1,
2013, pp. 1–26. JSTOR, JSTOR.