Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Design Legend

Sheila Levrant de Bretteville received her B.A. in art history from Barnard College in 1962 and a M.F.A. in 1964 from Yale University. She has honorary degrees from California College of Arts and Crafts and Moore College of Art. In 2006 the American Institute of Graphic Arts chose Ms. De Bretteville “Design Legend”.

In 1971 Ms. de Bretteville created the first women’s design program at the California Institute of the Arts. She co-founded the Woman’s Building and its Women’s Graphic Center in Los Angeles in 1973 and in 1981 the communications design program at Otis College of Art and Design was initiated and chaired by her.

Ms. de Bretteville was named professor and director of graduate studies in graphic design when she joined the Yale School of Art faculty in 1990 to replace Alvin Eisenman. Her appointment was met with great opposition from designer Paul Rand, who left the department and convinced colleague Armin Hofmann to do the same.

As a graphic designer, artists and educator Sheila Levrant de Bretteville’s work reflects her beliefs in the importance of feminist principles and user participation in graphic design.

She has worked extensively in the field of public art, creating art embedded within city neighborhoods. A best known piece of Sheila Levrant de Bretteville titled “Biddy Mason: Time & Place”, an 82-foot concrete wall embedded with objects, which is located in downtown Los Angeles, tells the story of a former slave woman who became a midwife in Los Angeles and who lived near the installation.

Many of her posters and fine press editions are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Centre Pompidou in Paris and numerous university and public libraries. 


To learn more about Sheila Levrant de Bretteville click on image:
The Dinner Party

Kate Millett, Sexual Politics

Kate Millett is an American feminist activist and writer. She is best known for her 1970 book titled “Sexual Politics”.

In 1956 Kate Millett received her B.A from the University of Minnesota where she was a member of the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority. She obtained a first-class degree with honors from St Hilda’s College in Oxford, England in 1958.

Ms. Millett was active in feminist politics in the late 1960’s through the 1970’s. She became a committee member of the National Organization for Women in 1966.

An extremely controversial and important theoretical touchstone for the second feminism wave of the 1970’s was Sexual Politics. Kate Millett criticized patriarchy in Western society and literature. In particular she critiqued the sexism and heterosexism of modern novelists D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and Norman Mailer.

In 1971 Ms. Millett began purchasing and restoring buildings and fields near Poughkeepsie, New York. This project became the Women’s Art Colony/Tree Farm, a community of female writers and artist supported by the sale of Kate Millet’s silk-screen prints and the selling of Christmas trees hand-sheered by the artists in residence.


To see Kate Millett/Time Cover Art Poster click on image:
Kate Millett, Art Poster by TIME Magazine, size 11" x 14"

Suzanne Lacy, Performance Art With Activism

Suzanne Lacy’s art includes installations, large-scale performances and video, which focus on social topics and urban issues. She is an internationally know artist, writer, educator and a former mayor of Oakland, California who went on to become an arts commissioner for the city.

“Three Weeks in May” is a 1977 Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz collaboration, which combined performance art with activism. This performance piece coincided with self-defense classes on the steps of the Los Angeles City Hall to highlight sexual violence committed against women. 

“The Crystal Quilt”, a well know performance piece staged by Ms. Lacy in 1987 on Mother’s Day in Minneapolis, Minnesota that featured 430 women who were over 60 years young. The scheme behind this performance was to depict the cultural invisibility of older women through art in action.  This live performance reframed preconceptions of older women’s beauty, power and relevance. This great piece of performance art provides a glimpse of life patterns and values our generation has lost.

Ms. Lacy has written a number of articles about performance art for a variety of publications. She authored and edited “Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art”.

To know more about Suzanne Lacy click on the image: 

Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art

Faith Ringgold, Painted Story Quilts

Faith Ringgold is an African American artist who was born and raised in Harlem, New York. She attended the City College of New York where she studied with Robert Gathmey and Yasuo Kuniyosi. In 1959 she received her M.A. from the City College of New York.

She was greatly influenced by the fabrics she worked with at home with her mother, a fashion designer, which resulted in her becoming well known for her painted story quilts that blurred the line between fine art and craft because Faith Ringgold combines painting, quilted fabric and storytelling in art expression.

Her story quilts are beautiful pictures painted on fabric and are quilted or brocaded. Ms. Ringgold has influenced many modern artists, which include Linda Freeman.

Many museums, which include the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and many others mostly located in New York City have her art their permanent collection.

In addition to her painted story quilts Faith Ringgold is a writer and illustrator of seventeen children’s books including “Tar Beach”.

In 1973 Ms. Ringgold and her daughter Michele Wallace, a writer were founding members of the National Black Feminist Organization and  “Where We At” Black Woman Artist, Inc., a New York based women art collective associated with the Black Arts Movement. 

To see Faith Ringgold "The Last Story Quilt" DVD click on image: 

Multicultural Videos - Faith Ringgold - The Last Story Quilt, DVD

Martha Rosler, An Eye On Women

Martha Rosler is an artist who utilizes photo, text, video, and performance as her art mediums.

Usually with an eye on women’s experiences, Ms. Rosler’s expressions of art focus on everyday life and the public arena.

“Semiotics of the Kitchen”, “Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained”, “Losing: A Conversation With The Parents” and “Born To Be Sold: Martha Rosler Reads the Strange Case of Baby S/M” are widely known creations of Martha Rosler. Her photo-text installation “The Bowery In Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems” is considered influential in conceptual and postmodern photography.

Her series of photomontages, “Body Beautiful, Beauty Knows No Pain” addresses the photographic depictions of women and domesticity. “Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful” reflects the imagery of the Vietnam War and the War in Iraq as mirroring each other, history repeating itself. 

Ms Rosler received the 2005 Spectrum International Prize in Photography, the 2006 Oskar Kokoschka Prize, which is Austria’s highest fine arts award and in 2007 she presented with an Anonymous Was A Woman Award.


To know more about Martha Rosler: 3 Works click on image:
Martha Rosler: 3 Works: 1. The Restoration of High Culture in Chile; 2. The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems; 3. in, around, and afterthoughts (on documentary photography)

Miriam Schapiro a Feminist Art Poineer

Miriam Schapiro co-founded the Feminist Art education program in 1970 at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, California.

She is a pioneer of feminist art and is a part of the Pattern and Decoration art movement, which consists of bold colors and on occasion include suggestive floral patterns.

Ms. Schapiro became a successful artist during the 1950’s and 1960’s as a hard edge style abstract expressionist. During the 1970’s she radically changed her style of art to collage combining patterns and painting, which Miriam Schapiro calls “femmages”. In 1972 she also participated in the Womanhouse exhibition.

The College of Art Association awarded her with the distinguished artist award for lifetime achievement.

To know more about Miriam Schapiro click on image:

Miriam Schapiro

Judy Chicago, "The Dinner Party"

Judy Chicago is the mistressmind and co-coordinator of The Diner Party feminist art installation. It took six years and $250,000.00 to see this project through to completion. Production began in 1974 with Judy Chicago and ended in 1979 with 400 contributing artists, most of who were women (some men) and volunteers.

This project first exhibited in 1979; despite the opposition it met with in the art world it toured 16 venues in 6 countries on 3 continents with approximately 1 million viewers. In 2007 The Dinner Party moved into its permanent exhibition at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Art Center for Feminist Art in the Brooklyn Museum of New York.

Each place setting is a representation of 39 mythical and historical famous women. The equilateral triangular table measures forty-eight feet on each side and is set with a napkin, utensils, a glass or goblet and a plate placed on a table runner embroidered with the woman’s name and images or symbols relating to her accomplishments. Many of the plates feature a butterfly or flower like sculpture symbolizing a vulva.

The Dinner Party is a celebration of traditional female accomplishments such as textile arts and china painting. This collaborated feminist art installation has elevated female achievement in Western History to epic scale usually reserved for men. 

To learn more about "The Dinner Party" click on image:  
The Dinner Party: From Creation to Preservation

Feminist Artists

Suzanne Lacy, Nancy Spero, Dara Birnbaum, Faith Ringgold, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Kate Millett, June Wayne, Martha Rosler, Miriam Schapiro, Mary Kelly, Faith Wilding and Judy Chicago are a few of mostly American women among thousands who are associated with feminist art.

Known historians, curators and critics of feminist art are Arlene Raven, Catherine de Zegher, Eleanor Tufts, Griselda Pollock and Lucy Lippard. The Guerrilla Girls are the feminist agitators of the art-world.

The CalArts feminist art program was an important center for the Los Angeles feminist artist movement through the 1970’s and 1980’s. It was the catalyst for the Woman’s Building that was organized mostly by a group of feminist artists who were associated with its feminist art program. CalArts provided the venue for meetings, workshops, exhibitions and performances that occurred on a regular basis.

In New York during the 1970’s the Women’s Interart Center was founded and is still in operation today and for a number of years in the early 1970’s New York also hosted the Women’s Video Festival.

Many female artists continue to meet and organize nonprofit galleries, collectives and working groups in local communities around the world to provide a place for women’s stories to be told through feminist art.


To see the book titled WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution click on this image:  
WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution