Contemporary Women Artists

Judy Chicago The Dinner Party, 1974

I did not know the influential and phenomenal role women artists and their work played throughout history until I enrolled in Art and Women or visited Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum. My visit to the museum was insightful, exciting, adventurous and eye-opening. The Dinner Party display at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn museum is an artistic masterpiece. One source describes the Dinner Party as, “A massive ceremonial banquet, arranged on a triangular table with a total of thirty-nine place settings, each commemorating an important woman from history. The settings consist of embroidered runners, gold chalices and utensils, and china-painted porcelain plates with raised central motifs that are based on vulvar and butterfly forms and rendered in styles appropriate to the individual women being honored. The names of another 999 women are inscribed in gold on the white tile floor below the triangular table.” Personally, it was a magnificent site to behold. It was indeed encouraging to see so many women artists throughout history and their work received the recognition and celebration they truly deserve. 

Similarly, just as Judy Chicago created her artistic masterpiece to honor influential women artists throughout history, I would like take a moment to concentrate on five contemporary women artists and elucidate the various themes (gender, race, and class, etc.) evident in their work. The following will focus on women artists like Betye Saar, Wangechi Mutu, Marilyn Minter, Martha Wilson, and Renee Cox. These artists’ work challenge patriarchy, deconstruct  gender-based stereotypes while confronting racism, sexism and the objectification of the female body.   

Betye Saar: Challenging white stereotypes

The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972

It is impossible to talk about radical and influential contemporary women artists living today without referencing Betye Sarar. She is an American artist known for her work in the medium of assemblage. She is also a visual storyteller and an accomplished printmaker. Her works deal with stereotypical images promoted by white culture, as evident in Betye Saar's The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972 (pg. 342). As seen in The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, "Jemima is holding a small revolver in her hand and a rifle in the other in a box papered with "mammy" pictures" (Chadwick 2007, pg. 243). Aunt Jemima is transformed from a happy servant and caregiver to a proud militant who demands agency within society. The Liberation of Aunt Jemima is a symbolic of women artists using their work to transform themselves and break free from the stereotypes and male objectification they encountered throughout history. 

Renee Cox: Gender-based stereotypes and racism

Liberation of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben, 1998

Image of the Black Panter movie depicting a
predominant Black Cast/Superheroes, 2018

Like Saar, Renee Cox, an activist for womens' rights, uses Aunt Jemima to challenge gender-based stereotypes; a serious social issues that still plague of society today. According to Jessica Pizzo, "She has been a model in many of her works, controversially baring her body and image in narratives aiming to correct cultural information and fight racism. Her 1998 piece Liberation of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben turns her figures into superheroes and includes a key racism-fighting character in her work, Raje, who changes the historically determined roles of the figures." Renee's Liberation of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben, like Black Panter, depicts blacks as superheroes, which seems to be an anomaly is our culture today. 

Marilyn Minter: The notion of beauty

Installation view of "Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty
at the Brooklyn Muesum

Marilyn Minter Orange Crush, 2009

While Saar and Cox challenge white and gender-based stereotypes in their work, Marilyn Minter, an American artist who has been a subject of numerous solo exhibitions, challenges the notions of beauty and the feminine body. Marilyn Minter's work is often deemed controversial and provocative. Her work often explores"the relationship between the body, cultural anxieties about sexuality and desire, and fashion imagery. Minter is best known for glossy, hyperrealistic paintings in enamel on metal that depict closeups of makeup-laden lips, eyes, and feet—a liquid-dripping gold-toothed smile or a pair of glistening high heels splashing in metallic fluid." 

Martha Wilson: Gender and Feminine Politics

Martha Wilson Thump, 2016

As mentioned above, Betye Saar and Renee Cox challenged white and gender-based-stereotypes while Marilyn Minter explores the notions of beauty and the female body. Martha Wilson, on the other hand, a performance artist, centers her focus on gender and feminine politics.  In The Intersectional Self, 2017, featuring the work of conceptual artists like Janine Antoni, Andrea Bowers, Patty Chang, Abigail DeVille, Ana Mendieta, Catherine Opie, and Adrian Piper, etc. she "explores gender along a spectrum of possibilities ranging from performance to embodiment, drag to parody, and trans to pandrogyne. 

Merly Streep impersonating Danald Trump, 2016

Between the gender one is assigned at birth and that which is lived, there is an unfixed, elastic quality to gender identity. Beyond its biological underpinnings, the performance of gender can be modulated, both individually and collectively, and its coding varies widely across cultural climates." In her recent work Martha Does Donald, she impersonates Donald Trump, following in the footsteps of actress Meryl Streep. It is great to see the astronomical strides women have made politically over the years. I hope this trend continues.

Wangechi Mutu: sexism and racism

Wangechi Mutu, Cancer of the Uterus, 2005

Wangechi Mutu was originally born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya. In the 1990s she moved to New York and focused on Fine Arts and Anthropology at The New School for Social Research and Parsons School of Art and Design. She later earned a master's degree in sculpture from Yale School of Art in 2000. Her work seems both ancient and futuristic in nature, addressing themes of sexism and racism. Her "figures aspire as a super-race, by-products of a troubled and imposed evolution." For example, in Cancer of the Uterus, she displays an "ominous goddess figure; pasted over a pathology diagram, her portrait is diseased at the core. She uses "materials which make reference to African identity and political strife: her dazzling black glitter is an abyss of western desire, which allude to the illegal diamond trade and its consequences of oppression and war. From corruption and violence, Mutu creates a glamorous beauty; her figures empowered by their survivalist adjustment to atrocity, made immune and ‘improved’ by horror and being victims." I personally find Mutu's work unique and intriguing. 

The five contemporary women artists listed above explore a wide variety of controversial themes in their work. Betye Saar and Renee Cox both used the Aunt Jemima character to address white stereotypes and gender-based racism. Marilyn Minter's work explores the notions of beauty and the female body. Martha Wilson's work centers its focus on gender and feminine politics while Wangechi Mutu's work explores sexism and racism. I hope that upcoming female artists are inspired by these outstanding women artists and their masterful work, as I am. 



By Gordon Springer

 Work cited:
            Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, and Society. 4th ed. New York, N.Y.: Thames and Hudson, 1990. Print.