Waubonsee Community College

American women artists, 1935-1970, gender, culture, and politics, edited by Helen Langa and Paula Wisotzki

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

illustrations

index present

non fiction

American women artists, 1935-1970

bibliography

913829631

edited by Helen Langa and Paula Wisotzki

gender, culture, and politics

Numerous American women artists built successful professional careers in the mid-twentieth century while confronting challenging cultural transitions: shifts in stylistic avant-gardism, harsh political transformations, and changing gender expectations for both women and men. These social and political upheavals provoked complex intellectual and aesthetic tensions. Critical discourses about style and expressive value were also renegotiated, while still privileging masculinist concepts of aesthetic authenticity. In these contexts, women artists developed their careers by adopting innovative approaches to contemporary subjects, techniques, and media. However, while a few women working during these decades have gained significant recognition, many others are still consigned to historical obscurity. The essays in this volume take varied approaches to revising this historical silence. Two focus on evidence of gender biases in several exhibitions and contemporary critical writings; the rest discuss individual artists' complex relationships to mainstream developments, with attention to gender and political biases, cultural innovations, and the influence of racial/ethnic diversity

Introduction: challenges, tensions, accomplishments / Helen Langa -- Exhibitions : Opportunities and Resistances. Art of this century: a transitional space for women / Siobhan M. Conaty -- Gender, modern art, and native women painters in the first half of the twentieth century / Cynthia Fowler -- Survival, Politics and Gender. Dorothy Dehner's early career: leftist politics and complicated myths / Paula Wisotzki -- Elizabeth Catlett in Mexico at mid-century : navigating gender and visual politics across cultural borders / Melanie Anne Herzog -- Honoré Sharrer: a cold war reception / M. Melissa Wolfe -- Strategies of artistic survival: Julia Thecla's science fictions of the 1960s / Joanna Gardner-Huggett -- Alternative Media, Alternative Visions. Innovative etchings : Louise Nevelson at Atelier 17 / Christina Weyl -- The crafted abstraction of Ruth Asawa, Kay Sekimachi, and Toshiko Takaezu / Krystal R. Hauseur -- Withstanding entanglement: Claire Zeisler and 1960s fiber art reconsidered / Mary Caroline Simpson -- From Formalist Abstraction to Feminist Agency. A rose by other names: lesbian artists, formalism, coded representation / Helen Langa -- Departing the plane: Charmion von Wiegand's otherwordly abstractions of the 1950s / Aliza Edelman -- What Alma Thomas teachers: the district as art lesson / Seth Feman -- Performing agency in Carolee Schneemann's the queen's dog (1965) / Mary McGuire