Feminism

“Feminism: The progressive social movements of the 1960s produced their own academic and theoretical equivalents of revision and interpretation. The recognition of women’s historical oppression in a patriarchal society produced numerous reactions in the art world. In the early 1970s exhibitions that recovered ‘forgotten’ women artists began to establish a canon of great women artists. Judy Chicago produced The Dinner Party from craft techniques traditionally associated with women, such as needlepoint and ceramics. By using blatant female imagery, she and other sought to make explicitly ‘female’ works. By the late 1970s second-generation feminism coupled with a measure of psychoanalytic theory shifted the emphasis away from biological determinism to notions of self-identity. This approach was seen as more empowering, enabling both men and women to reexamine questions of gender and sexuality in contemporary art as well as in old masterworks previously rejected for their sexism. Contemporary artists working with this approach include Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman.”

Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.