Category Archives: feminism
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
By adrienne maree brown (2017)
Inspired by Octavia Butler’s explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live. Change is constant. The world is in a continual state of flux. It is a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, this book invites us to feel, map, assess, and learn from the swirling patterns around us in order to better understand and influence them as they happen. This is a resolutely materialist “spirituality” based equally on science and science fiction, a visionary incantation to transform that which ultimately transforms us.
Posted in culture, feminism, philosophy, politics
The Women of Atelier 17: Modernist Printmaking in Midcentury New York
In this important book Christina Weyl takes us into the experimental New York print studio Atelier 17 and highlights the women whose work there advanced both modernism and feminism in the 1940s and 1950s. Weyl focuses on eight artists — Louise Bourgeois, Minna Citron, Worden Day, Dorothy Dehner, Sue Fuller, Alice Trumbull Mason, Louise Nevelson, and Anne Ryan—who bent the technical rules of printmaking and blazed new aesthetic terrain with their etchings, engravings, and woodcuts. She reveals how Atelier 17 operated as an uncommonly egalitarian laboratory for revolutionizing print technique, style, and scale. It facilitated women artists’ engagement with modernist styles, providing a forum for extraordinary achievements that shaped postwar sculpture, fiber art, neo-Dadaism, and the Pattern and Decoration movement. Atelier 17 fostered solidarity among women pursuing modernist forms of expression, providing inspiration for feminist collective action in the 1960s and 1970s. The Women of Atelier 17 also identifies for the first time nearly 100 women, many previously unknown, who worked at the studio, and provides incisive illustrated biographies of selected artists.
Biographical Supplement: https://atelier17.christinaweyl.com
Posted in art, biography, education, feminism, printmaking
Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait
Published in conjunction with an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, this catalog presents more than 270 prints and books, organized thematically, and includes an essay that traces Bourgeois’ involvement with these mediums within the broader developments of her life and career. It also emphasizes the collaborative relationships that were so fundamental to these endeavors. Included are interviews with Bourgeois’ longtime assistant, a printer she worked with side-by-side at her home/studio on 20th Street in New York and the publisher who, in the last decade of her life, encouraged her to experiment with innovative prints that broke the traditional boundaries of the medium. The volume is rounded out with a chronology and bibliography that focus on prints and illustrated books while also providing general background on Bourgeois’ life and art.
Link to MoMA online archive: Louise Bourgeois: The Complete Prints & Books
Posted in art, biography, exhibition, feminism, interview, printmaking
Paths to the Press: Printmaking and American Women Artists, 1910-1960
In 1910 Bertha Jaques co-founded the Chicago Society of Etchers and helped launch a revival of American fine art printmaking. In the decades following, women artists produced some of the most compelling images in U.S. printmaking history and helped advance the medium technically and stylistically. Paths to the Press examines American women artists’ contributions to printmaking in the U.S. during the early to mid twentieth century.
Posted in art, biography, exhibition, feminism, history, printmaking
Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture
Out There addresses the question of cultural marginalization – the process through which various groups are excluded from access to and participation in the dominant culture. It is a wide-ranging anthology that juxtaposes diverse points of view on issues of gender, race, sexual preference, and class. It takes up the fundamental issues raised when we attempt to define concepts such as “mainstream” and “minority,” and it opens up new ways of thinking about culture and representation in our society.
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
In a new introduction to the 10th-anniversary edition of Gender Trouble–among the two or three most influential books (and by far the most popular) in the field of gender studies–Judith Butler explains the complicated critical response to her groundbreaking arguments and the ways her ideas have evolved as a result. Nevertheless, she has resisted the urge to revise what has become a feminist classic (as well as an elegant defense of drag, given Butler’s emphasis on the performative nature of gender). The book was produced, according to Butler, “as part of the cultural life of a collective struggle that has had, and will continue to have, some success in increasing the possibilities for a livable life for those who live, or try to live, on the sexual margins.” An attack on the essentialism of French feminist theory and its basis in structuralist anthropology, Gender Trouble expands to address the cultural prejudices at play in genetic studies of sex determination, as well as the uses of gender parody, and also provides a critical genealogy of the naturalization of sex.
The Chalice and the Blade
Women played leading roles in the first Christian communities; Jesus’ teachings had a feminist bent; ancient Hebrews worshipped the prehistoric goddess-mother well into monarchic times; and Nazis, with their system of male dominance, were a direct throwback to the Indo-European or Aryan invaders whom they crudely imitated. These controversial ideas and findings suggest the thrust of Eisler’s highly readable synthesis. She convincingly documents the global shift from egalitarian to patriarchal societies, interweaving new archeological evidence and feminist scholarship. In her scenario, as women, once venerated, were degraded to pawns controlled by men, social cooperation gave way to reliance on violence, hierarchy and authoritarianism.
Sexual Politics
Completing a trilogy begun with Chicago’s Beyond the Flower and The Dinner Party, this volume is the actual catalog of the reappearance of Chicago’s peripatetic icon of feminist art. But “The Dinner Party” is only one of about 100 other feminist artworks, created by 55 women artists, that were put on display at the Armand Hammar Museum to bring 1970s feminist art into perspective.
Posted in art, exhibition, feminism, history, theory
Literary Theory
This classic work, whose first edition sold more than 120,000 copies, is designed to cover all of the major movements in literary studies in this century. The second edition contains a major new survey chapter that addresses developments since the book’s original publication in 1983, including feminist theory, postmodernism, poststructuralism-what is broadly referred to as cultural theory.