Georgia Totto O'Keeffe, An American Artist

Georgia O’Keeffe (November 15, 1887 – March 6, 1986) is a prominent artist in American Art; she received recognition for her technical contributions and she challenged the boundaries of modern American artistic style. She is primarily known for paintings of flowers, rocks, shells, animal bones and landscapes that are powerful abstract images.

O’Keeffe played a significant role in bringing an American art style to Europe during a time when Europeans dominated art. This accomplishment improved her art-historical importance because she was one of few women to gain entry into this level of professional influence.

Anita Pollitzer took some of Georgia O’Keeffe’s drawings to New York in 1916 and showed them to photographer Alfred Stieglitz at his 291 gallery. Stieglitz said O’Keefee’s drawings were the “purest, finest, sincerest things that had entered 291 in a long while”. As a result, he chose to exhibit ten of O’Keeffe’s drawings in April 1916. O’Keeffe had not been consulted prior to the exhibit and found out about it through an acquaintance; she confronted Stieglitz and agreed to let her drawings hang. This became Georgia O’Keeffe’s first solo show.

In 1924 Alfred Stieglitz began organizing annual exhibits of O’Keeffe’s work and by the mid 1920’s, Georgia O’Keeffe had become one of America’s most important artists. In 1928 six of her calla lily paintings sold for $25,000 US dollars, which was the largest sum ever paid for a group of painting by a living American Artist.

 “Black Iris III” (1926) evoked a veiled representation of female genitalia. Georgia O’Keeffe denied painting vaginal imagery, but many well-known art historians have linked her work to the feminist artists of the 1970’s. Judy Chicago gave O’Keeffe a prominent place in her “The Dinner Party”.


To see Red Canna Art Poster by Georgia O'Keeffe click on image:
Red Canna Botanical Art Poster Print by Georgia O'keeffe, 23x34

The Guerrilla Girls, Radical Feminist Artists

In 1985 a group of women artists attended an exhibit titled, “An International Survey of Painting and Sculpture”, held by the Modern Museum of Art in New York. These women noticed only 13 of the 169 featured artist were women and the ratio of artists of color was even smaller, none of whom were women artists either. The Guerrilla Girls were established following the attendance of this exhibit.

As an anonymous group of radical feminist artists who wear gorilla masks in public and take the names of dead women artists as pseudonyms, the Guerrilla Girls expose sexism, racism and corruption in politics, art, film and pop culture with facts, humor and outrageous visuals. Supporters have circulated their work around the world.

Trained as visual artists, the Guerrilla Girls first work was putting up posters throughout New York City criticizing the gender and racial imbalance of artists represented in galleries and museums.

To continue their use of provocative text, visuals and humor in the service of feminism and social change two founding members of the Guerrilla Girls established the website www.guerrillagirls.com.

The Guerrilla Girls travel the world talking about the issues of sexism, racism and corruption in politics, art, film and pop culture and their 25 years as masked avengers, reinventing the “f” word in the 21^st century. They are part of Amnesty International’s Violence Against Women Campaign in the UK and brainstorm with Greenpeace. The Guerrilla Girls could be anywhere and are everywhere.

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Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls

Faith Wilding, Feminist Performer

Faith Wilding is a multidisciplinary artist, writer and educator who immigrated to the United States from Paraguay in 1961. She is a founding member of the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, CA where she received her MFA in 1973. Wilding also holds a BA in Comparative Literature, which she obtained from the University of Iowa.

“By Our Own Hands” (1976) is a chronicle by Faith Wilding of her work and experience within the feminist art movement in Southern California.

SubRosa was co-founded by Wilding and is a cyberfeminist cell of cultural produces who utilize BioArt and tactical performance in the public arena to explore and critique the intersections of information and biotechnologies within women’s bodies, lives and work. Faith wilding continues to work with subRosa.

For more than 30 years Faith Wilding has exhibited in solo and group shows throughout the world and is widely recognized for her work. Wilding’s art addresses the recombinant and distributed biotech body in various media including 2-D, video, digital media, installations and performances. 

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A Studio of Their Own: The Legacy of the Fresno Feminist Experiment

Mary Kelly, Conceptual Art and Feminism

Mary Kelly originally trained as a painter. She studied in Florence, Italy with protégés of Giorgio Morandi where she learned traditional techniques, but her real interest was contemporary art. She relocated to London, England in 1968 to continue her postgraduate study at St. Martin’s School of Art.

Simultaneously Kelly’s art career and her involvement with the Women’s Movement began in the 1970’s in London. She was active in grassroots media organizations and was also a member of a group of politically active women, who developed intellectual feminist theories of sexuality and representation.

In 1971 Mary Kelly went to see Othon at the National Film Theater, where she saw the way directors Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub ran the whole reel on a one shot going into Rome. She knew this was what she wanted to do, not just film, but also with installation as a series of stills.

 Her first experience of working on a film was the making of Nightcleaners (1970-1975), an experimental film made by the members of the Berwick Street Collective (Marc Karlin, Mary Kelly, James Scott and Humphry Trevelyan). This film is a documentary that recorded the campaign to unionize the women who worked at night cleaning office blocks and who were being victimized and underpaid.

Kelly exhibited the first of a three part series titled, “Post Partum Document” (1973-1979) at the ICA in London in 1976. This epic series explores the artist’s relationship with her infant son through the combination of text, images and found objects. The installation includes her son’s stained nappy liners, which was considered scandalous at that time by the tabloid press, but in fact was meant to challenge the Conceptual art establishment and was also pivotal to the late twentieth century feminism movement. As a result Mary Kelly became a prominent American woman artist and is among the most influential feminist artists working today.

She is known for her project-based work addressing questions of sexuality and identity in the form of large-scale narrative installations. For more than three decades Kelly has received worldwide attention on her richly textured narratives and images.  

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Post-Partum Document

Dara Birnbaum Reconstructs Television Imagery

Dara Birnbaum initially studied architecture and town planning. Later she switched to studying painting at the San Francisco Art Institute.

In the late 1970’s Birnbaum began her video art career after she returned to New York and continued her education at the New School of Social Research, where she focused on video art.

Primarily Dara Birnbaum’s production consists of video art and installations. Variations of her videos from the late 1970’s and early 1980’s are of the same theme, all reinterpreting the various formats and “language” of television utilizing different techniques.

“Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman” (1978-1979) is a prominent piece of video art by Birnbaum. She utilizes suitable images of Wonder Woman to overturn the ideology and meaning embedded in this television series.

A large three-part video and installation Birnbaum began in the mid 1980’s is based on the myth of Faust. This series is titled, “Damnation of Faust: Evocation” (1983), “Damnation of Faust: Will-O’-the-Wisp” (1985) and “Damnation of Faust: Charming Landscape” (1987).  In this series Birnbaum closely examines the myth of femininity through personal and social experiences.

Birnbaum completed a public art wall project commissioned and designed for an Atlanta, GA shopping mall in 1989. This installation is titled “Rio Videowall” and is comprised of 25 monitors; it is a large-scale interactive installation.

The installation titled, “Tiananmen Square: Break-In Transmission” (1990) created by Birnbaum concentrates on the events surrounding the broadcasting of the students and worker uprising in the summer of 1989. One of the installation’s video channels focuses on the moment CBS and CNN were forced to stop broadcast transmission, while another channel broadcasts the ways and means taken up by students to continue to get images out.

“Transmission Tower: Sentinel” (1992) Dara Brinbuam closes in on the excerpts from the famous, “Thousand Points of Light” speech made by George Bush, when he accepted the Republican party’s nomination to run for President in 1988.

The 1977 kidnapping of Hanns-Martin Schleyer is the subject of Birnbaum’s 1994 six-channel video installation titled, “Hostage”.

Birnbaum’s video art has been viewed in countless festivals, video art exhibitions and events throughout the world.

To date Dara Birnbaum continues to live and work in New York where she reconstructs television imagery using archetypal formats such as quiz shows, soap operas and sports programs. Her techniques involve repetition of images and interruption of flow with text and music. Birnbaum is also well known for forming part of the feminist art movement.


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Dara Birnbaum: Dark Matter of Media Light

June Wayne, Innovative Artist Of The Day

June Wayne has always had an interested in art and is keenly observant. At the age of 5, she recognized in comic strips the dots of color fused by vision produced secondary hues. At this point she began to make drawings composed entirely of colored dots and was a sort of self-taught French Post-Impressionist in the manner of Seurat and Signac.

By the time she was 9 she began to illustrate the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam at the age of 9, this project occupied her into her late teens. Wayne’s dedication to a single project would inform her work for the rest of her life.

Bored with high school June Wayne dropped out and to prove to her mother she was and educated person, she took and passed the entrance examinations to the University of Chicago, but did not enter school.

At the age of 17 Ms. Wayne had a one-person show exhibiting her paintings at the Boulevard Gallery in Chicago. This resulted in her receiving an invitation by the Mexican Government to paint in Mexico.

In 1936 at the age of 18 June Wayne had achieved legendary status among twentieth-century artist due to her exhibit at the Palacio de Balles Artes in Mexico City.

Today Ms. Wayne is best known for her influence and work in printmaking and fine-art lithography. Founding the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in 1959 is one of her most renowned achievements. This workshop under her direction became one of the most important focal points of a general revival of printmaking in the United States. This revival provided other famous artists such as Willem de Kooning, Louise Nevelson and Ed Ruscha an opportunity to experiment in this format. 

The spectacular prints of June Wayne earned her the estimable title “The Incontestable Pioneer of Contemporary Lithography”. Throughout her career she boldly explored a variety of media and aesthetic concepts. Working in painting, tapestry, film and video she was always pushing the limits of the media to develop new techniques.

Ms. Wayne created “Optical Art” long before it was identified and adapted Ben Day dots decades ahead of “Pop Art”. She was exploring new ideas and forms by the time these styles moved into the mainstream.

The feminist movement spurred June Wayne and validated her career. Her art is as varied as her styles and methods, which are informed by a wide range of influences from science, space exploration, literature, personal experience and feminist theory. She has been driven to remains one of the most innovative arts of the day.

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June Wayne: A Catalog Raisonne, 1936-2006: The Art of Everything

Nancy Spero an Artist's Voice

Nancy Spero (August 24, 1926 – October 9, 2009) was an artist and activist who continuously engaged in contemporary social, cultural and political concerns. She chronicled wars and apocalyptic violence as well as articulated visions of ecstatic rebirth and the celebratory cycles of life in her art.

As an activist and feminist, Ms. Spero became a member of the Art Workers Coalition, Women Artists in Revolution and in 1972 she was a founding member of the first women’s cooperative gallery, A.I.R. (Artists in Residence) in SoHo, New York.

When Nancy Spero completed her “Artaud Paintings” (1969-1970) she found her artistic voice and developed her signature scroll paintings, “Codex Artaud” (1971-1972).

By utilizing text and image printed on long scrolls of paper glued end-to-end and tacked on the walls of A.I.R., Ms. Spero disregarded formal presentation, choice of valued medium and scale of framed paintings.

The epic-scale paintings and collage on paper, “Torture of Women” (1976), “Notes in Time on Women” (1979) and “The First Language” (1981) are Nancy Spero’s representations of women from historical to current times, such as the torture of women in Nicaragua, the extermination of the Jews during the Holocaust and the atrocities of the Vietnam War. Her artistic expression is executed with raw intensity on paper.

Since 1960 Ms. Spero’s work has been an unapologetic statement against the pervasive abuse of power, Western privilege and male dominance. Her figures are in full command of their bodies, co-existing in nonhierarchical compositions on monumental scrolls, which visually reinforce values of equality and tolerance.


To see Nancy Spero: Codex Spero paperback book click on image:  
Nancy Spero: Codex Spero