She’s done alright for a girl : strategies for teaching women artists

While evidence suggests that up to 65% of visual arts graduates in Australia are women, women artists are still dramatically under-represented in most sectors of the industry, from institutional exhibitions through to commercial gallery representation. Gender awareness in art school education was a prominent aspect of second wave feminist activism in this country, however the outcomes for women artists, particularly as their careers proceed, often remain discouraging. Over approximately the past ten years, the Visual Arts discipline at Queensland University of Technology has integrated a range of gender awareness strategies into its teaching program across both studio practice and history/theory areas, with relatively strong outcomes amongst female graduates, both as artists and arts workers. Employing practitioner reflection and praxis-based research, this paper takes stock of the approaches that have been trialled over this period and reflects on the combination of both explicit and implicit strategies employed, as well as student responses to them.

Women artists of the international avant-garde: the case of "Abstraction-Création" (1931-1936)

Women’s contribution to abstract art in the interwar period is a subject that, to date, has received very little attention. In this article we deal with the untold story of the participation of women artists in Abstraction-Création, the foremost international group dedicated to abstract art in the 1930s. Founded in Paris in 1931, the group took on the work of two previous collectives to become a platform for the dissemination and promotion of abstract art and consisted of around a hundred members. Twelve of these were women, whose writings and works were published in the group’s annual magazine, abstraction creátion art non figuratif (1932-1936), and who participated in a number of the group’s exhibitions. Compared to what had occurred in previous groups, the participation of women, although reduced in number, was comparable to that of the male artists and being members of the group had a generally positive impact on the women’s careers. However, all this came at the expense of relinquishing any gender specificity in their work and the public presentation of it, and demonstrates that the normalization of women’s contributions to the avant-garde could only be brought about alongside a questioning of the more dogmatic views of modernity.

Charting Cartographies of Resistance: Line of Flight in Women Artists’ Narratives

In this paper I chart lines of flight in women artist’s narratives. In focusing on the complex interrelations between the social milieus of education and art, what I suggest is that they should be analysed as an assemblage where power relations and forces of desire are constantly at play in creating conditions of possibility for women to resist, imagine themselves becoming other and for new possibilities in their lives to be actualised. As a novel approach to social ontology the theory of assemblages offers an analytics of social complexity that accounts for open configurations, continuous connections and unstable hierarchies, structures and axes of difference. In reconsidering resistance as immanent in dispositifs of power and assemblages of desire, what I finally argue is that women artists’ narratives contribute to the constitution of minor knowledges and create archives of radical futurity.

Breaking the Pattern and Creating New Paths – Feminist Mizrahi Women Artists in Israel

This article addresses the work of Mizrahi women artists, i.e., Israeli-Jewish women of Asian or African ethnic origin, using the artist Vered Nissim as a case study. Nissim seeks to affirm the politics of identity and recognition, as well as feminism in order to create a paradigm shift with regards to the local regime of cultural representations in the Israeli art scene. Endeavouring to find ways of undermining the rigid imbalances between different social groups, she calls for a comprehensive reform of the status quo through artistic activism. Nissim employs a style, content, and medium that disrupts the accepted social order, using humour and irony as unique weapons with which she takes liberties with conventional moral, social, and economic values. Placing issues of race, class and gender at the centre of her work, she seeks to undermine and problematize essentialist attitudes, highlighting the political intersections of different identity categories as the critical analysis of intersectionality unfolds.

Women artists demonstration

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

Women artists at International Women's Day March

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

Women demonstrate for more women artists in galleries

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

Women artists demonstrate in front of the Museum of Modern Art because there are not enough women's art shown at museums

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

Women artists demonstrate in front on Museum of Modern Art

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

The incorporation of violence by women video artists

This paper examines the way in which women video artists embodied violence in their video pieces as a strategy of critique of the patriarchal regime. Since the 1960s several generations of women artists used different strategies of self-harm or explored the physical and mental limits of their bodies to express the anguish of those who are excluded from the patriarchal society on sexist and/or racist grounds. Considering the guiding line that covers three fields – art, gender, and feminist social movements – as well as their key thinkers and scholars in Sociology, Fine Arts and the Humanities, we have built the object of study of this essay, namely, the relationship between women's video art focused on the body, violence and gender along with feminist social movements in the period ranging from 1967 to 2007, in a Western context. The methodology used had as its primary goal to create a link between the micro-sociological level of expressions, body gestures and behaviours in the videos and the macro-sociological level of broader, institutionalized social forces that are at the origin of inequalities, such as dimensions of gender and «race». This study concluded that at least since the 1960s there is the denunciation by women video artists of the general circumstances women live under, while enduring violence of various kinds, such as socio-cultural, psychological and sexual violence against women.

Double blind : women as creative practice-led researchers

While the productive relationship between praxis and feminist research has been well established, the situation is more complicated for female artist/researchers in the fraught field of creative practice-led research. Firstly, their research is being conducted in the context of ongoing debate, as Andrea Phillips has summarized, over whether practice-led research has been embraced in order to potentially produce emancipatory knowledge, or whether it is simply the rationalization and quantification of creative processes. Secondly, there is a pervasive paradox whereby, rather than feeling empowered by the process of critical and reflective self-analysis, many women are inhibited by enduring insecurities about the value of their work and/or their ownership of it. The reasons for this appear to be twofold: they are disheartened by the ongoing disproportion of successful women artists, and they are intimidated by the fundamentally masculine discourse surrounding research in the university. Many of these anxieties appear to have been exacerbated by the research quality assessment process, the Excellence in Research for Australia Initiative (ERA). This collaborative paper draws on the authors' experiences as both artist-researchers and educators to contextualize this paradox and also discuss what forms of praxis intervention may be useful in the preparation for, and supervision of, creative practice-led research by women.