Blog #8

In last week’s class we had a brief conversation about Lee Krasner a Female Modernist Artist whom is the wife of Jackson Pollock. During class and now as well as I review the power point I’ve thought about how Lee Krasner during this time became a name, and how in the power point it was significant to the class and to our professor to mention that she is the wife of Jackson Pollock. Why couldn’t Lee Krasner just be her own modernist artist, without the association of her husband? Could she have become a name in the art world without the influence and stature of her husband? The feminist art movement at that time was so interesting and obviously female dominated that it is interesting to discuss an artist and refer to her as the wife of someone important. To me it takes the feminism out f her art, and leads me to believe that she really isn’t such a strong feminist as she portrays to be. Would she have been a significant artist without the aid of her husband? Without the dominant male influence? Many women at the time of the feminist movement were married and were famous for their art and their art alone.

Blog #7 (4/5/11)

“Women artists of the feminist generation differed from the women artists of the fifties and sixties most of all in the deliberate grounding of their art in their socialized experience as women and -the corollary of that position-in their acceptance of women’s experience as different from men’s but equally valid.” The idea of “de-colonizing the female body” took multiple forms in the feminist art movement. One of the ways was in how feminists artists and their art asserted a new position for “woman” in art, as subject rather than object, active speaker and not passive theme. Another form was through ways that artists such as Faith Ringgold, Adrian Piper and Eleanor Antin did which was to reclaim women’s bodies from the societal straitjacket of sex-objected through semiplayful exploration of dieting and fasting, ways in which social expectations literally shaped the female body. An example that comes to mind of how the African American artists we have learned about have “de-colonized the female body,” would be through the semiplayful usage of the stereotypical female “Aunt Jemima” which is a large, African American woman who is older, and works all day long cooking and cleaning wearing a bandana in her hair. The artist Betye Satar painted a piece called, “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972. This painting was portraying the early images of Aunt Jemima, both the older full figured images, and the later thinner, brown-colured, wearing a less flamboyant head-tie, but nonetheless smiling and caring for the white children. This was a way to liberate and decolonize the image and belief behind the mammy figure of the African American culture. (pg. 201 AAA)

Another obvious usage of women artists decolonizing the female body is solely in the artist Faith Ringgold. Since the late 1960’s Faith Ringgold has used her art to voice her dissatisfaction with racism and gender inequality, and the absence of the black image and subject matter in contemporary art. (pg. 197 AAA)