As the second wave of feminism awakened a generation of American women in the late 1960s, so too did it galvanize a community of women artists. Where such artistically matriarchal figures as Georgia O’Keefe, Helen Frankenthaler and Eva Hesse had ambivalently occupied their identities as women artists, producing work that while critically construed as “feminine” was never resolutely feminist, the post-1968 generation of female artists was proud and defiant in its assertion and celebration of female identity. Motivated by the very real conditions of discrimination and inequality this first generation of feminist artists sought to redress the historical condition into which they were born.
Producing their most influential work during the 1970s, such artists as Eleanor Antin, Judy Chicago, Adrian Piper, Faith Ringgold, Carolee Schnee-mann and Miriam Schapiro returned to the historically objectified female body and reclaimed it as a subject. In such collaborative art projects as Womanhouse (1972) and The Dinner Party (1979), Chicago, Schapiro and their artistic sisters elevated women’s experience and an iconography of the female body to the realm of high art.
While the activism of that first generation of feminist artists saw its continuation in the work and demonstrations of such political organizations as the Guerilla Girls and the Women’s Action Coalition (WAC), by the 1980s a second generation of feminist artists had emerged, displaying markedly different aesthetic and political strategies. Renouncing the celebratory language and bodily imagery of their predecessors as deeply essentialist, such women as Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Martha Rosler and Cindy Sherman sought to deconstruct, rather than reconstruct, culturally normalized conceptions of gender and identity. Working primarily with photography and written text, these artists avoided the representational practices and corporeal iconography that so marked the work of their antecedents and sought instead to expose, explore and dismantle the rigid binary logic of sexual difference. At the same time, such deconstructive strategies opened up a space for a more expansive investigation of issues of race, as is exemplified in the work of Sandra Bernhard, Anna Deavere Smith, Lorraine O’Grady Lorna Simpson, Kara Walker and Carrie Mae Weems.
From the vantage of the late 1990s, it is possible to celebrate the extraordinary gains achieved by women artists in little more than twenty-five years. Yet it is also worth considering whether the founding politics and ideals of feminism, rooted in the experiential difference of women, have been eroded, if not lost, to the theoretical forces of deconstruction and anti-essentialism that continue to shape and inform the production and reception of contemporary art.
