The Art of Revolution: Feminist Art and the Women’s Liberation Movement Jennifer Wall
aegis 2006 88 wall
Feminist art of the 1960s and 1970s, like the Women’s Liberation Movement of the same era, represented a radical new beginning. The women of both movements wanted to change views about gender, and create equality and recognition that women had long been denied. The momentum and force of the Women’s Liberation Movement generated new subjects and inspiration for a new type of female artist, who then used art to advance her cause and inform the public sphere. Judy Chicago and her associates best expressed an example of this interplay. They contributed to the women’s movement in two ways: they used the techniques of the women’s movement to awaken younger women artists, while using their own work and teaching to advance the larger cause of women’s liberation. Critics, historians, and even other artists ignored women artists throughout art history. During some eras, women artists were punished for simply trying to express themselves. The New Deal and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) helped open the door for women all over America. The WPA allowed for women to find a place not just in factories and the job market, but in the fine arts world. The WPA gave jobs to artists, and for the first time these artists included women. Photographers like Dorthea Lange and painters like Lee Krasner found work through the WPA. The New Deal art projects, however, offered both opportunities and repression. Women artists found themselves still having to draw a line between expressing and repressing their femininity in a male-dominated society.1 Although forty percent of self-declared artists in the 1930s census were women, many were still caught in the fold of trying to decide where their loyalties lay. It was not as simple as being a professional; being a woman was always tied to whatever they did. Thus in the 1930s, though women were becoming more “modern” and the ability to work outside the home was more accepted, the challenges of social value or what was thought to be the “the women’s place,” and equal opportunity in the workplace hindered many women.2 The WPA afforded women artists an unprecedented opportunity for professional employment, through which they could form an identity. Although this identity was still limited socially and the assumption was that the only experience worth recording was the male experience, they found a door they could begin to push through.3 However, this narrow passageway for women artists was closed with the end of World War II. It was assumed that women, who had now experienced success and employment, would want nothing more then to return to the role of wife and mother. The women artists of the WPA found themselves in a similar situation. Women artists were automatically denied access to the Abstract Expressionist movement because of its macho mystique. Abstract Expressionism was defined as action painting. It encompassed many different styles but was defined by the male mystique and the movement of action. The Abstract Expressionist group was a “boy’s club” of womanizers and alcoholics.4 Lee Krasner, who had begun to find a voice through WPA projects, found herself
