Research: Feminism in art

Feminism burst onto the art scene in the 1960s, with the beginning of the worldwide feminist art movement. Although feminist elements existed in art before this time, it was the movement that brought female artists and their works to the forefront of the art world. The movement was based around the idea that the experiences of women should be expressed through art, and that female artists should be receiving the same recognition as male artists.

Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get into the Met. Museum?* (1989, updated 2005, 2012) 

The Anatomically Correct Oscar** (2002)

Guerrilla Girls

The Guerrilla Girls is an anonymous group of feminist artists, formed in New York in 1985, with the aim of exposing sexism and racism in art, and later film, pop culture and politics. Their works specifically bring awareness to the inequalities for women and people of colour in the art industry, by taking the concepts that formed the basis of the Feminist Art Movement, and putting them on billboards and posters for the world to see.  They are known for wearing gorilla masks when making public appearances.

Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get into the Met. Museum?:

In 1989, the Guerrilla Girls gathered statistics of the works in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, comparing the number of male and female artists in the Modern Art section, and the number of male and female nudes in the museum, concluding that, for a woman to get into the prestigious art museum, you pretty much have to be the star of a nude painting. The resulting poster, bearing the statistics, also featured the famous 1814 painting Grande Odalisque by French artist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, but the head of the female nude figure in the painting was replaced with the gorilla head that now represents the Guerrilla Girls. The group rented advertising space on the side of a New York City bus to run the billboard after their proposal was rejected by the Public Art Fund, but their lease was ultimately cancelled, as the MTA found the image to be "too suggestive". The poster has since been on display on buses and billboards in Shanghai, Paris and Venice, and has become one of the most iconic works from the Guerilla Girls.

The Anatomically Correct Oscar: 

A billboard bearing this poster was unveiled at Melrose and Highland in Los Angeles on the 1st of March, where it was on display for the entire month. The billboard exposed the lack of Academy Award recognition for women and people of colour, specifically pointing out that most of the awards go to white men every year, and mocking this fact with a more accurate redesign of the famous statuette. The following year, a related billboard was erected in the same place, stating that only 4% of Hollywood film directors are women.

On the Guerrilla Girls website, the poster is accompanied by the caption: "We redesigned the old boy so he more closely resembled the white males who take him home each year! We got a lot of attention, from as far away as Europe and Australia, most of it very sympathetic. And guess what: at the Academy Awards Ceremony on March 25, Halle Berry became the first ever African-American woman to win Best Actress and Denzel Washington the second ever African-American man to win Best Actor. We're very happy about that, but the film industry still has a long way to go."

*Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get into the Met. Museum? was updated in 2005, with the percentage of female artists changing to 3%, and the percentage of female nudes changing to 83%. It was then updated again in 2011, with the percentage of female artists changing to 4%, and the percentage of female nudes changing to 76%.

**The Anatomically Correct Oscar was updated in 2005, with the percentage of writing awards for men changing to 92.8%, and the percentage of acting awards for people of colour changing to 5.5%. The Oscar for Best Director has since been won by a woman for the first time, awarded to Katheryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker in 2008.

Bind series (2001)

Anikora series (2008)

Ryoko Suzuki

Ryoko Suzuki is a Japanese photographer. Most of her work is self portraits, as she uses her own face and body to express her own experiences and views, focusing on feminist issues like body image and women's roles in Japanese culture. In her works, she utilizes photo manipulation, often morphing one image with another to draw attention to the differences between men and women, Japanese and Western culture, fantasy and reality.

Bind:

Suzuki's Bind series consists of self portraits of her own face and body bound up with pigskin that has been soaked in blood. The pigskin is a symbol of the lies and fictions imprinted into the minds of children, referencing the cute and harmless image of pigs she received as a child from the Three Little Pigs fairytale, versus the harsh reality of ferocious breeding pigs she had seen. The blood that pigskin was soaked in is symbolic of female sexuality and her transition from a young girl to an adult woman. As this pigskin is wound around her head, it warps and distorts her face, making her almost unrecognisable. The series as a whole is a symbol of pain and constriction, representing the issues of oppressed womanhood that is often a theme in feminist art. 

Anikora:

The Anikora series depicts popular pin-up-styled Japanese dolls, equivalent to Barbie dolls in Western culture, with the doll's heads replaced with Suzuki's own face. These dolls represent both the erotic fantasy of Japanese women and women as a whole, with the dolls dressed in typical sexualised costumes like nurses, maids, Playboy bunnies and schoolgirls. By replacing the dolls heads with her own, Suzuki blends humanity with the exaggerated sexual image of the dolls, highlighting the difference between men's fantasy and women's reality. While commenting on both unrealistic expectations of body image and "appropriate" gender roles for women, the series also confronts the fetishisation of "kawaii"culture in Japan, and the way that Japanese women are portrayed to the rest of the world in comics, cartoons and toys.

Henry Ford Hospital (1932)

The Two Fridas (1939)

Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo was a mexican painter who was known for her self portraits and her portrayal of the harsh truth of her own life through her paintings. Throughout her life, she suffered polio which she contracted as a child, a bus accident which left her with many serious injuries and forced her to undergo many operations, infertility which resulted in multiple miscarriages, and a difficult marriage, all of which became strong themes in her work. She also incorporated other aspects of her life into her paintings, such as her Mexican culture, bisexuality and Communist views. Kahlo did not receive major recognition until after her death, and she was often only thought of as Diego Rivera's wife. While Frida Kahlo is not especially known as a feminist artist, her works are ultimately depictions of her struggles and experiences as a woman, which is what the feminist movement was about, and she has become an icon of Mexican femininity and women's art.

Henry Ford Hospital:
Kahlo painted Henry Ford Hospital, also known as The Flying Bed, in 1932 while she was in the Detroit hospital, having suffered her second miscarriage and coming to the realization that she could never carry a pregnancy to term. In the painting, she depicts herself naked on the hospital bed, the sheets covered in blood from her miscarriage, surrounded by images of a fetus, a snail, an orchid, a plaster female torso, and a metal machine. These six objects are connected to the suffering Frida, seemingly by umbilical cords, making them symbols of her own pain. Kahlo never shied away from expressing her own personal tragedies through her paintings, and her infertility was no exception. She was despaired by her inability to carry a pregnancy to term, as she wanted to have children with Diego Rivera, who already had children from his previous marriages.

The Two Fridas:
The Two Fridas is a double self portrait, depicting two images of Kahlo, seated and holding hands. It was painted at the time of her divorce from Diego Rivera, and expresses the feelings of love and loss that Frida was experiencing from the divorce. The Frida on the left is dressed in traditional European attire from the previous century, with her dress ripped open to expose her broken heart. The Frida on the right is wearing a Mexican Tehuana dress, with her heart also exposed, but full and whole. The Mexican Frida is the one who was loved and respected by her husband, while the European Frida was unwanted and abandoned. Like her miscarriages, Frida's divorce was a difficult part of her life. Her marriage to Diego Rivera was tempestuous and unconventional -- both of them had affairs during their time together, and they lived in separate houses connected by a bridge -- but she loved him entirely, saying of him: "I suffered two grave accidents in my life. One in which a streetcar knocked me down ... The other accident is Diego."