From the first wave of feminism in the 1840s to second-wave feminism and the Feminist art movement of the 1960s and ’70s through the intersectional feminism of today, these 15 artworks by American women stand out for the lasting impact they’ve had on art history.
Read more of our Women’s History Month coverage here.
Edmonia Lewis, The Death of Cleopatra, 1876
Image Credit: Smithsonian American Art Museum.
African American and Native American sculptor Edmonia Lewis was working at a time when the popular style of Neoclassicism favored classical, Biblical, and literary themes. Cleopatra, the legendary queen of Egypt from 51–30 BCE, was often depicted contemplating suicide. Lewis, however, took this subject and sculpted the moment after Cleopatra’s intentional death by snakebite in marble. She sits on a throne in majestic repose and regalia, her left hand drooping over the side of the chair, her head tilted to the side. Her right hand still holds the asp that killed her.
The nearly three-ton sculpture was Lewis’s most ambitious work, and with it, she portrayed Cleopatra as a master of her own fate—something the artist aimed to become herself. Throughout her life, Lewis obscured facts related to her childhood and carefully crafted her biography in the way she wanted it to be known. But her work stood for itself and by the end of the 19th century, Lewis was the only Black woman who had participated in, and been recognized by, the American artistic mainstream.
It should be noted that although Lewis’s work was not explicitly feminist, she and her contemporaries believed in women’s rights and benefited from the first wave of feminism that occurred in the 1840s. At this time, women gained access to higher education at newly founded women’s colleges like Vassar, and newly coed colleges and universities, such as the University of Michigan and Oberlin College, which Lewis attended.
Mary Cassatt, The Reader, 1877
Image Credit: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas.
American painter and printmaker Mary Cassatt depicted the “New Woman”—the label associated with 19th-century feminism—from the woman’s perspective. Unlike other Impressionists of the time, who often focused on street scenes and landscapes, Cassatt painted images of women in social and private situations, with a particular emphasis on the intimate bonds between mothers and children.
In The Reader, a woman lounges in a white armchair reading a large book, a leisure activity that may well not have been possible before the turn of the century. (Prior to the 1800s, only some girls were educated at home or in “dame schools,” informal schools run by women; only in the 1900s did public schools expand and were girls allowed, albeit often with restrictions, to attend elementary and high schools.) As a successful, highly trained artist who never married, Cassatt herself also personified the New Woman. She was an outspoken advocate for women’s equality, campaigning with her friends for equal travel scholarships for students in the 1860s and the right to vote in the 1910s.
American painter Georgia O’Keeffe had a notoriously fraught relationship with feminism. While praised by her contemporaries for paintings commonly interpreted as alluding to female genitalia, O’Keeffe refuted these interpretations. She also refused to join the feminist art movement or any “all-women” projects. Yet she ardently stood up for female artists of the time and is cited by many as paving the way for the feminist art movement of the 1960s and ’70s.
The oil-on-linen painting Jimson Weed shows four pinwheel-shaped blossoms of the poisonous plant commonly known as jimson weed, or devil’s trumpet, surrounded by green leaves and a swirling abstract blue background. Originally commissioned by cosmetics executive Elizabeth Arden, the painting is the largest floral composition the artist ever made. And when the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum—the first art museum in the US dedicated to a female artist—auctioned one of O’Keeffe’s older but similar works, Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 (1932), in 2014, it became the highest-priced artwork by a female artist in history, fetching $44.4 million, more than tripling the previous record.
One of the earliest works of the Feminist art movement, the participatory work Cut Piece was first performed by Fluxus artist Yoko Ono at the Yamaichi Concert Hall in Kyoto in 1965. Following a set of instructions that she had written, which she called the piece’s “event score,” Ono sat down on stage, placed a pair of scissors in front of her, and invited the audience to approach her one-by-one and cut off pieces of her clothing, which they could then take away with them.
The performance is open to wide interpretation, and has been understood to address themes ranging from materialism to gender to class, memory, and cultural identity. Ono herself has cited Buddhist stories, specifically the story of Jataka, or the Hungry Tigress, as an inspiration for Cut Piece and the ideas of ultimate giving and surrender. Many have also seen the performance as the representation of the body as a site of potential violence, where the audience is the male aggressor and Ono is the female victim. In this reading, Ono’s body represents all female bodies subjected to the scrutiny and violence of the male gaze. Although Cut Piece is now widely regarded as an iconic proto-feminist work of performance art, it should be noted that when asked about its feminist readings, Ono said she “didn’t have any notion of feminism” when creating it.
Inspired by the wrongful arrest and subsequent acquittal of human rights activist Angela Davis, Elizabeth Catlett’s wood sculpture Political Prisoner shows a woman nearly six feet tall with her hands cuffed behind her back—one open, the other closed in a fist—gazing toward the sky. Rendered in cedar, her torso is painted in three blocks of color: red, black, and green, representing the Pan-African and Black liberation movement flags.
Catlett, the first Black woman to receive an MFA at the University of Iowa, was known for focusing in her work on her own life as an African American woman. She emphasized that although Political Prisoner was inspired by a specific incident, the figure represents all political prisoners worldwide. According to the artist, the primary purpose of her work is to convey social messages rather than pure aesthetics—and Political Prisoner embodies this statement.
Mary Beth Edelson, Some Living American Women Artists/Last Supper, 1972
In this collage referencing Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, Mary Beth Edelson covers the faces of Jesus and his disciples with those of female contemporaries, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Lynda Benglis, Yoko Ono, and Elaine de Kooning. Framing the primary image are additional photographs of women artists including Faith Ringgold, Agnes Martin, Yayoi Kusama, and Alice Neel. This border “included every photograph of a woman artist that I could find, with most of the 82 photographs coming directly from the artists themselves,” Edelson wrote in an artist statement.
According to Edelson, the collage was intended to “identify and commemorate women artists, who were getting little recognition at the time, by presenting them as the grand subject—while spoofing the patriarchy for cutting women out of positions of power and authority.” Aside from O’Keeffe in the place of Jesus, all other women are randomly placed. In a gesture of solidarity, no one was put in the traitorous role of Judas.
The collage was soon reproduced and distributed as a poster, and copies were sent to every woman pictured. The posters were also given to women’s centers and conferences, and reproduced in early feminist underground publications. O’Keeffe purportedly loved to give it to guests at her New Mexico studio: “She was amused and delighted with it,” Edelson wrote.
Womanhouse, 1972
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
A groundbreaking installation and performance art project, Womanhouse opened in Los Angeles in 1972 as part of the first Feminist Art Program, originally established by Judy Chicago at California State University, Fresno, and later expanded in collaboration with Miriam Schapiro at CalArts. The Feminist Art Program was supposed to occupy a new building, but at the start of the school year in 1971, the building was not yet ready. Faced with a lack of studio space, Chicago, Schapiro, and their students embarked on renovating an abandoned Victorian mansion in Hollywood previously marked for demolition, with the ambition of highlighting the ideological and symbolic conflation of women and houses.
After thoroughly cleaning, painting, sanding floors, replacing windows, and installing lights throughout the house’s 17 rooms, the artists transformed the domestic setting into an imaginative space that showed, exaggerated, and subverted women’s conventional social roles. Chicago painted a bathroom stark white, covered a shelf in gauze, and stuffed a trash bin until it overflowed with bloodied pads and tampons (Menstruation Bathroom). Sandra Orgel ironed identical sheets time and again (Ironing). Karen LeCocq and Nancy Youdelman created a performance entitled Lea’s Room in which the titular character sat in a pink bedroom applying makeup and removing it in an endless cycle, illustrating the pain of aging and the desperate process of trying to restore one’s beauty.
When Womanhouse opened, only women were allowed to enter on the first day, but over its monthlong exhibition, it welcomed more than 10,000 visitors. Over the course of the project, “the age-old female activity of homemaking was taken to fantasy proportions. Womanhouse became the repository of the daydreams women have as they wash, bake, cook, sew, clean and iron their lives away,” Chicago and Schapiro wrote in the introductory essay to the Womanhouse catalog.
The artists of Womanhouse were: Beth Bachenheimer, Sherry Brody, Judy Chicago, Susan Frazier, Camille Grey, Paula Harper, Vicky Hodgetts, Kathy Huberland, Judy Huddleston, Janice Johnson, Karen LeCocq, Janice Lester, Paula Longendyke, Ann Mills, Carol Edison Mitchell, Robin Mitchell, Sandra Orgel, Jan Oxenberg, Christine (Chris) Rush, Marsha Salisbury, Miriam Schapiro, Robin Schiff, Mira Schor, Robin Weltsch, Wanda Westcoast, Faith Wilding, Shawnee Wollenmann, and Nancy Youdelman.
Perhaps the best-known piece of feminist art, Judy Chicago’s installation The Dinner Party comprises a massive triangular banquet table with 39 place settings representing mythical and historically significant women from prehistory to early Greek societies to the Roman Empire to early Christianity to the American Revolution and suffragism. The settings all have unique embroidered runners, gold chalices, utensils, and painted porcelain plates with sculptural motifs based on vulvar and butterfly forms adapted to styles that reflect each woman’s legacy. A white tile floor under the table bears the names of an additional 999 significant female figures written in gold.
The installation displays a series of heritage banners and panels that expand on the stories of the 1,038 women represented, ranging from the Primordial Goddess and Ishtar to Saint Bridget and Trotula to Sacajawea, Sojourner Truth, Emily Dickinson, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Today, the piece stands as a monument to women’s contributions to the world, and it is the centerpiece of the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. “By now it’s been seen by probably 2.5 or 3 million people,” Chicago said in 2019. “It has [been] taught all over the world, [and] it taught me the power of art.”
Lynda Benglis, Artforum Advertisement, 1974
On pages 4 and 5 of the November 1974 issue of Artforum, readers were shocked by a provocative two-page spread. The lefthand page was all black with only the artist’s name, gallery, and copyrights in small white letters. The black bled over onto the opposite page before giving way to a striking photograph of a naked woman, her hair cropped short, wearing white sunglasses, and holding a gigantic rubber dildo between her thighs. This spread—which caused controversy and even led to two staff members leaving the magazine—is now known as Lynda Benglis’s Artforum Advertisement (it was given this official name in 2019).
“I was still thinking about gender stereotypes and I just wanted to make an image that can never be one thing: not one gender, not one form of sexuality or desire,” the artist said when reflecting on the work in 2022.
Although Benglis supports many feminist ideas, she has never identified herself as a feminist and refers to herself instead as a humanist. Yet with this advertisement, she jarringly upended readers’ expectations of what might be seen in an art magazine and also, and perhaps more important, challenged the notions of gender, power, and self-representation.
In her art, Cuban-born American artist Ana Mendieta explored themes of exile, the search for origin, and a return to the landscape. She incorporated blood or bloodlike red pigment into her performances and media works only between 1972 and 1975; the material had many layers of meaning for the artist, including references to Catholicism. In the film Body Tracks, Mendieta stands facing a white wall, with her hands extended upward in a V. She slowly drags her hands and blood-soaked sleeves toward each other down the wall, creating a uterus- or treelike shape in blood. As she reaches the base of the wall, she stands and walks off camera. Mendieta’s actions remain visible even when her body is no longer there, the smeared blood evoking notions of both presence and absence.
In this video performance, conceptual artist Martha Rosler acts out housewifely frustrations by parodying popular cooking demonstrations of the 1960s. Facing the camera from behind a kitchen counter, she goes through the alphabet, assigning each letter from A to T to various tools found in the domestic space. After identifying each object, she motions with it in an often unproductive, sometimes violent, way: A is for apron, which she puts on; B is for bowl, which she holds up and pretends to stir something in; C is for chopper, which she slams into the metal bowl. She continues on, hacking and stabbing with other objects—a knife, a nutcracker, a rolling pin—her deadpan gestures appearing to express the rage elicited by the oppressive roles ascribed to women by society at the time.
For letters U to Z, Rosler uses her body to create the shape of each letter. “I was concerned with … the transformation of the woman herself into a sign in a system of signs that represent a system of food production, a system of harnessed subjectivity,” Rosler has said of the work.
In August 1975, Carolee Schneemann entered an exhibition in East Hampton carrying a bucket of mud. After undressing and wrapping herself in a sheet, she read from her book Cezanne, She Was a Great Painter. She then dropped the sheet and ritualistically painted her body with the mud, before slowly extracting a scroll from her vagina. The scroll bore an adapted excerpt from the dialogue in Schneemann’s film Kitch’s Last Meal (1973–77), which she created in response to a male peer’s accusing her of making “messy, female work.” This performance, titled Interior Scroll, has since become an icon of the feminist art movement. By pulling the scroll out from within herself, she challenged the patriarchal gaze on the female body, reclaiming it as a site of knowledge and creativity. The text itself additionally challenged male-dominated artistic movements and institutions and their routine dismissal of female counterparts.
The Guerrilla Girls, The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist, 1988
The Guerrilla Girls collective was formed in 1984 in response to the exhibition “International Survey of Painting and Sculpture” at MoMA, which included the work of 169 artists, fewer than 10 percent of whom were women. Using the tagline “the conscious of the art world,” one of their first actions was a poster campaign targeting institutions and figures in the art world whom they felt were responsible for the exclusion of women and non-white artists from mainstream exhibitions and publications.
The portfolio of 30 posters, titled Guerrilla Girls Talk Back, included The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist, a text that is exactly what the title suggests. Among the 13 “advantages” it outlined are: “Working without the pressure of success,” “Not having to be in shows with men,” “Having the opportunity to choose between career and motherhood,” and “Knowing your career might pick up after you’re eighty”—the latter two of which still strike a chord today.
Shirin Neshat was born in 1957 and raised in a progressive Iran, where women’s rights were expanded. She attended Catholic school and learned both Western and Iranian histories. In 1974 she moved to the US to attend the University of California, Berkeley. During her studies, her home country underwent a radical change: In 1979 revolutionaries overthrew and abolished the Persian monarchy in favor of a conservative government headed by Ayatollah Khomeini. Women’s rights were restricted, and, among other things, it was written into law that women must wear a veil in public.
In 1990 Neshat returned to Iran for the first time in 17 years, and saw a society markedly different from the one in which she grew up. Visualizing her conflicting feelings, Neshat made her groundbreaking series Women of Allah. Each black-and-white photograph shows a veiled Iranian woman holding a weapon. “These photographs became iconic portraits of willfully armed Muslim women. Yet every image, every woman’s submissive gaze, suggests a far more complex and paradoxical reality behind the surface,” Neshat wrote in an artist statement about the series.
The women are caught in the duality of their post-Revolutionary roles. They are subject to restrictions, such as the mandatory wearing of the chador, while also expected to be responsible warriors for their country. Meanwhile, the artist inscribed, in calligraphic Farsi, atop any area of exposed skin in the images, excerpts from poems and other texts by female authors exploring the notions of intimacy, feminism, and sexuality.
Shahzia Sikander’s 18-foot-tall sculpture Witness depicts a woman with twisting roots for feet and arms, and braided hair coiled to look like a ram’s horns. A lace collar around her neck references similar ones worn by the late US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Surrounding the sculpture’s small waist, rounded bust, and full hips—reminiscent of ancient fertility goddesses—is a metal frame in the shape of a hoopskirt. But rather than conceal her body, it suggests a housing that she stewards. And attached to the armature are colorful mosaic tiles spelling out havah, meaning “air” or “atmosphere” in Urdu and “Eve” in Arabic and Hebrew.
The powerful sculpture, rendered in high-density foam painted gold, was first exhibited to critical acclaim in New York at Madison Square Park in 2023. When placed on view on the grounds of the University of Houston, however, it was immediately criticized by the antiabortion group Texas Right to Life, which considered it “satanic.” On July 8, 2024, during a statewide power outage caused by Hurricane Beryl, vandals beheaded the sculpture. Sikander ultimately decided to leave the sculpture as it is, writing that in addition to its original purpose of “demand[ing] a reimagining of the feminine not simply as Lady Justice with her scale, but of the female as an active agency, a thinker, a participant as well as a witness to the patriarchal history of art and law,” it now also stands as “a testament to the hatred and division that permeate our society.”
Edmonia Lewis, The Death of Cleopatra, 1876
Image Credit: Smithsonian American Art Museum.
African American and Native American sculptor Edmonia Lewis was working at a time when the popular style of Neoclassicism favored classical, Biblical, and literary themes. Cleopatra, the legendary queen of Egypt from 51–30 BCE, was often depicted contemplating suicide. Lewis, however, took this subject and sculpted the moment after Cleopatra’s intentional death by snakebite in marble. She sits on a throne in majestic repose and regalia, her left hand drooping over the side of the chair, her head tilted to the side. Her right hand still holds the asp that killed her.
The nearly three-ton sculpture was Lewis’s most ambitious work, and with it, she portrayed Cleopatra as a master of her own fate—something the artist aimed to become herself. Throughout her life, Lewis obscured facts related to her childhood and carefully crafted her biography in the way she wanted it to be known. But her work stood for itself and by the end of the 19th century, Lewis was the only Black woman who had participated in, and been recognized by, the American artistic mainstream.
It should be noted that although Lewis’s work was not explicitly feminist, she and her contemporaries believed in women’s rights and benefited from the first wave of feminism that occurred in the 1840s. At this time, women gained access to higher education at newly founded women’s colleges like Vassar, and newly coed colleges and universities, such as the University of Michigan and Oberlin College, which Lewis attended.
Mary Cassatt, The Reader, 1877
Image Credit: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas.
American painter and printmaker Mary Cassatt depicted the “New Woman”—the label associated with 19th-century feminism—from the woman’s perspective. Unlike other Impressionists of the time, who often focused on street scenes and landscapes, Cassatt painted images of women in social and private situations, with a particular emphasis on the intimate bonds between mothers and children.
In The Reader, a woman lounges in a white armchair reading a large book, a leisure activity that may well not have been possible before the turn of the century. (Prior to the 1800s, only some girls were educated at home or in “dame schools,” informal schools run by women; only in the 1900s did public schools expand and were girls allowed, albeit often with restrictions, to attend elementary and high schools.) As a successful, highly trained artist who never married, Cassatt herself also personified the New Woman. She was an outspoken advocate for women’s equality, campaigning with her friends for equal travel scholarships for students in the 1860s and the right to vote in the 1910s.
American painter Georgia O’Keeffe had a notoriously fraught relationship with feminism. While praised by her contemporaries for paintings commonly interpreted as alluding to female genitalia, O’Keeffe refuted these interpretations. She also refused to join the feminist art movement or any “all-women” projects. Yet she ardently stood up for female artists of the time and is cited by many as paving the way for the feminist art movement of the 1960s and ’70s.
The oil-on-linen painting Jimson Weed shows four pinwheel-shaped blossoms of the poisonous plant commonly known as jimson weed, or devil’s trumpet, surrounded by green leaves and a swirling abstract blue background. Originally commissioned by cosmetics executive Elizabeth Arden, the painting is the largest floral composition the artist ever made. And when the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum—the first art museum in the US dedicated to a female artist—auctioned one of O’Keeffe’s older but similar works, Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 (1932), in 2014, it became the highest-priced artwork by a female artist in history, fetching $44.4 million, more than tripling the previous record.
One of the earliest works of the Feminist art movement, the participatory work Cut Piece was first performed by Fluxus artist Yoko Ono at the Yamaichi Concert Hall in Kyoto in 1965. Following a set of instructions that she had written, which she called the piece’s “event score,” Ono sat down on stage, placed a pair of scissors in front of her, and invited the audience to approach her one-by-one and cut off pieces of her clothing, which they could then take away with them.
The performance is open to wide interpretation, and has been understood to address themes ranging from materialism to gender to class, memory, and cultural identity. Ono herself has cited Buddhist stories, specifically the story of Jataka, or the Hungry Tigress, as an inspiration for Cut Piece and the ideas of ultimate giving and surrender. Many have also seen the performance as the representation of the body as a site of potential violence, where the audience is the male aggressor and Ono is the female victim. In this reading, Ono’s body represents all female bodies subjected to the scrutiny and violence of the male gaze. Although Cut Piece is now widely regarded as an iconic proto-feminist work of performance art, it should be noted that when asked about its feminist readings, Ono said she “didn’t have any notion of feminism” when creating it.
Inspired by the wrongful arrest and subsequent acquittal of human rights activist Angela Davis, Elizabeth Catlett’s wood sculpture Political Prisoner shows a woman nearly six feet tall with her hands cuffed behind her back—one open, the other closed in a fist—gazing toward the sky. Rendered in cedar, her torso is painted in three blocks of color: red, black, and green, representing the Pan-African and Black liberation movement flags.
Catlett, the first Black woman to receive an MFA at the University of Iowa, was known for focusing in her work on her own life as an African American woman. She emphasized that although Political Prisoner was inspired by a specific incident, the figure represents all political prisoners worldwide. According to the artist, the primary purpose of her work is to convey social messages rather than pure aesthetics—and Political Prisoner embodies this statement.
Mary Beth Edelson, Some Living American Women Artists/Last Supper, 1972
In this collage referencing Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, Mary Beth Edelson covers the faces of Jesus and his disciples with those of female contemporaries, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Lynda Benglis, Yoko Ono, and Elaine de Kooning. Framing the primary image are additional photographs of women artists including Faith Ringgold, Agnes Martin, Yayoi Kusama, and Alice Neel. This border “included every photograph of a woman artist that I could find, with most of the 82 photographs coming directly from the artists themselves,” Edelson wrote in an artist statement.
According to Edelson, the collage was intended to “identify and commemorate women artists, who were getting little recognition at the time, by presenting them as the grand subject—while spoofing the patriarchy for cutting women out of positions of power and authority.” Aside from O’Keeffe in the place of Jesus, all other women are randomly placed. In a gesture of solidarity, no one was put in the traitorous role of Judas.
The collage was soon reproduced and distributed as a poster, and copies were sent to every woman pictured. The posters were also given to women’s centers and conferences, and reproduced in early feminist underground publications. O’Keeffe purportedly loved to give it to guests at her New Mexico studio: “She was amused and delighted with it,” Edelson wrote.
Womanhouse, 1972
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
A groundbreaking installation and performance art project, Womanhouse opened in Los Angeles in 1972 as part of the first Feminist Art Program, originally established by Judy Chicago at California State University, Fresno, and later expanded in collaboration with Miriam Schapiro at CalArts. The Feminist Art Program was supposed to occupy a new building, but at the start of the school year in 1971, the building was not yet ready. Faced with a lack of studio space, Chicago, Schapiro, and their students embarked on renovating an abandoned Victorian mansion in Hollywood previously marked for demolition, with the ambition of highlighting the ideological and symbolic conflation of women and houses.
After thoroughly cleaning, painting, sanding floors, replacing windows, and installing lights throughout the house’s 17 rooms, the artists transformed the domestic setting into an imaginative space that showed, exaggerated, and subverted women’s conventional social roles. Chicago painted a bathroom stark white, covered a shelf in gauze, and stuffed a trash bin until it overflowed with bloodied pads and tampons (Menstruation Bathroom). Sandra Orgel ironed identical sheets time and again (Ironing). Karen LeCocq and Nancy Youdelman created a performance entitled Lea’s Room in which the titular character sat in a pink bedroom applying makeup and removing it in an endless cycle, illustrating the pain of aging and the desperate process of trying to restore one’s beauty.
When Womanhouse opened, only women were allowed to enter on the first day, but over its monthlong exhibition, it welcomed more than 10,000 visitors. Over the course of the project, “the age-old female activity of homemaking was taken to fantasy proportions. Womanhouse became the repository of the daydreams women have as they wash, bake, cook, sew, clean and iron their lives away,” Chicago and Schapiro wrote in the introductory essay to the Womanhouse catalog.
The artists of Womanhouse were: Beth Bachenheimer, Sherry Brody, Judy Chicago, Susan Frazier, Camille Grey, Paula Harper, Vicky Hodgetts, Kathy Huberland, Judy Huddleston, Janice Johnson, Karen LeCocq, Janice Lester, Paula Longendyke, Ann Mills, Carol Edison Mitchell, Robin Mitchell, Sandra Orgel, Jan Oxenberg, Christine (Chris) Rush, Marsha Salisbury, Miriam Schapiro, Robin Schiff, Mira Schor, Robin Weltsch, Wanda Westcoast, Faith Wilding, Shawnee Wollenmann, and Nancy Youdelman.
Perhaps the best-known piece of feminist art, Judy Chicago’s installation The Dinner Party comprises a massive triangular banquet table with 39 place settings representing mythical and historically significant women from prehistory to early Greek societies to the Roman Empire to early Christianity to the American Revolution and suffragism. The settings all have unique embroidered runners, gold chalices, utensils, and painted porcelain plates with sculptural motifs based on vulvar and butterfly forms adapted to styles that reflect each woman’s legacy. A white tile floor under the table bears the names of an additional 999 significant female figures written in gold.
The installation displays a series of heritage banners and panels that expand on the stories of the 1,038 women represented, ranging from the Primordial Goddess and Ishtar to Saint Bridget and Trotula to Sacajawea, Sojourner Truth, Emily Dickinson, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Today, the piece stands as a monument to women’s contributions to the world, and it is the centerpiece of the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. “By now it’s been seen by probably 2.5 or 3 million people,” Chicago said in 2019. “It has [been] taught all over the world, [and] it taught me the power of art.”
Lynda Benglis, Artforum Advertisement, 1974
On pages 4 and 5 of the November 1974 issue of Artforum, readers were shocked by a provocative two-page spread. The lefthand page was all black with only the artist’s name, gallery, and copyrights in small white letters. The black bled over onto the opposite page before giving way to a striking photograph of a naked woman, her hair cropped short, wearing white sunglasses, and holding a gigantic rubber dildo between her thighs. This spread—which caused controversy and even led to two staff members leaving the magazine—is now known as Lynda Benglis’s Artforum Advertisement (it was given this official name in 2019).
“I was still thinking about gender stereotypes and I just wanted to make an image that can never be one thing: not one gender, not one form of sexuality or desire,” the artist said when reflecting on the work in 2022.
Although Benglis supports many feminist ideas, she has never identified herself as a feminist and refers to herself instead as a humanist. Yet with this advertisement, she jarringly upended readers’ expectations of what might be seen in an art magazine and also, and perhaps more important, challenged the notions of gender, power, and self-representation.
In her art, Cuban-born American artist Ana Mendieta explored themes of exile, the search for origin, and a return to the landscape. She incorporated blood or bloodlike red pigment into her performances and media works only between 1972 and 1975; the material had many layers of meaning for the artist, including references to Catholicism. In the film Body Tracks, Mendieta stands facing a white wall, with her hands extended upward in a V. She slowly drags her hands and blood-soaked sleeves toward each other down the wall, creating a uterus- or treelike shape in blood. As she reaches the base of the wall, she stands and walks off camera. Mendieta’s actions remain visible even when her body is no longer there, the smeared blood evoking notions of both presence and absence.
In this video performance, conceptual artist Martha Rosler acts out housewifely frustrations by parodying popular cooking demonstrations of the 1960s. Facing the camera from behind a kitchen counter, she goes through the alphabet, assigning each letter from A to T to various tools found in the domestic space. After identifying each object, she motions with it in an often unproductive, sometimes violent, way: A is for apron, which she puts on; B is for bowl, which she holds up and pretends to stir something in; C is for chopper, which she slams into the metal bowl. She continues on, hacking and stabbing with other objects—a knife, a nutcracker, a rolling pin—her deadpan gestures appearing to express the rage elicited by the oppressive roles ascribed to women by society at the time.
For letters U to Z, Rosler uses her body to create the shape of each letter. “I was concerned with … the transformation of the woman herself into a sign in a system of signs that represent a system of food production, a system of harnessed subjectivity,” Rosler has said of the work.
In August 1975, Carolee Schneemann entered an exhibition in East Hampton carrying a bucket of mud. After undressing and wrapping herself in a sheet, she read from her book Cezanne, She Was a Great Painter. She then dropped the sheet and ritualistically painted her body with the mud, before slowly extracting a scroll from her vagina. The scroll bore an adapted excerpt from the dialogue in Schneemann’s film Kitch’s Last Meal (1973–77), which she created in response to a male peer’s accusing her of making “messy, female work.” This performance, titled Interior Scroll, has since become an icon of the feminist art movement. By pulling the scroll out from within herself, she challenged the patriarchal gaze on the female body, reclaiming it as a site of knowledge and creativity. The text itself additionally challenged male-dominated artistic movements and institutions and their routine dismissal of female counterparts.
The Guerrilla Girls, The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist, 1988
The Guerrilla Girls collective was formed in 1984 in response to the exhibition “International Survey of Painting and Sculpture” at MoMA, which included the work of 169 artists, fewer than 10 percent of whom were women. Using the tagline “the conscious of the art world,” one of their first actions was a poster campaign targeting institutions and figures in the art world whom they felt were responsible for the exclusion of women and non-white artists from mainstream exhibitions and publications.
The portfolio of 30 posters, titled Guerrilla Girls Talk Back, included The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist, a text that is exactly what the title suggests. Among the 13 “advantages” it outlined are: “Working without the pressure of success,” “Not having to be in shows with men,” “Having the opportunity to choose between career and motherhood,” and “Knowing your career might pick up after you’re eighty”—the latter two of which still strike a chord today.
Shirin Neshat was born in 1957 and raised in a progressive Iran, where women’s rights were expanded. She attended Catholic school and learned both Western and Iranian histories. In 1974 she moved to the US to attend the University of California, Berkeley. During her studies, her home country underwent a radical change: In 1979 revolutionaries overthrew and abolished the Persian monarchy in favor of a conservative government headed by Ayatollah Khomeini. Women’s rights were restricted, and, among other things, it was written into law that women must wear a veil in public.
In 1990 Neshat returned to Iran for the first time in 17 years, and saw a society markedly different from the one in which she grew up. Visualizing her conflicting feelings, Neshat made her groundbreaking series Women of Allah. Each black-and-white photograph shows a veiled Iranian woman holding a weapon. “These photographs became iconic portraits of willfully armed Muslim women. Yet every image, every woman’s submissive gaze, suggests a far more complex and paradoxical reality behind the surface,” Neshat wrote in an artist statement about the series.
The women are caught in the duality of their post-Revolutionary roles. They are subject to restrictions, such as the mandatory wearing of the chador, while also expected to be responsible warriors for their country. Meanwhile, the artist inscribed, in calligraphic Farsi, atop any area of exposed skin in the images, excerpts from poems and other texts by female authors exploring the notions of intimacy, feminism, and sexuality.
Shahzia Sikander’s 18-foot-tall sculpture Witness depicts a woman with twisting roots for feet and arms, and braided hair coiled to look like a ram’s horns. A lace collar around her neck references similar ones worn by the late US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Surrounding the sculpture’s small waist, rounded bust, and full hips—reminiscent of ancient fertility goddesses—is a metal frame in the shape of a hoopskirt. But rather than conceal her body, it suggests a housing that she stewards. And attached to the armature are colorful mosaic tiles spelling out havah, meaning “air” or “atmosphere” in Urdu and “Eve” in Arabic and Hebrew.
The powerful sculpture, rendered in high-density foam painted gold, was first exhibited to critical acclaim in New York at Madison Square Park in 2023. When placed on view on the grounds of the University of Houston, however, it was immediately criticized by the antiabortion group Texas Right to Life, which considered it “satanic.” On July 8, 2024, during a statewide power outage caused by Hurricane Beryl, vandals beheaded the sculpture. Sikander ultimately decided to leave the sculpture as it is, writing that in addition to its original purpose of “demand[ing] a reimagining of the feminine not simply as Lady Justice with her scale, but of the female as an active agency, a thinker, a participant as well as a witness to the patriarchal history of art and law,” it now also stands as “a testament to the hatred and division that permeate our society.”
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