Arts Management Department

Women Artists of the Twentieth Century

   It has now been over 30 years since eminent art historian, Linda Nochlin, wrote her ground-breaking article, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" in which she examined how family support, education, economic and social position, class, and freedom (or lack thereof) affected the development and success rate of women artists. The repercussions of this article influenced the active reconsideration of the circumstances faced by women artists. The National Museum of Women in the Arts was founded in 1981 and opened in 1987, the Guerilla Girls and other women artists mounted awareness campaigns to illustrate the lack of support for women artists, and Judy Chicago created her major work of art, The Dinner Party (1974-79), a tribute to women throughout history, which has recently found a permanent home at the Brooklyn Museum Of Art through a gift from the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation.

Reading After a Meal, 1957, pastel on paper Nell Blaine

   Following national trends which promoted awareness of women's contributions, the Sweet Briar Art Gallery's current collecting direction, works of art by twentieth century women, was established in the 1980s as a logical focus for a woman's college. Now, with nearly 70 such objects, this area of the collection provides a rich source of study for students, faculty, and community, as it addresses issues of importance to women and to society as a whole. In the works are dominant themes of women's lives in the twentieth century: women's identity, health, community, support systems. The female body is re-examined and women's traditional arts are made manifest. Issues facing African American and Native American women and women immigrants are presented for our reflection.

   Hollis Sigler's color lithograph, To Have Power is to Realize Our Lack of Control, 1994, chronicles the artist's emotionally draining experience of dealing with breast cancer. Although Sigler's Breast Cancer Journal series was aimed to raise awareness during the 1980s, only recently has widespread national attention been drawn to this devastating disease. Joan Snyder's large color print, . . .and acquainted with grief, 1998, responds to the death of her mother, as does Lorna Simpson's untitled photogravure. These works embody universal emotions, for the death of a mother is deeply affecting.   Ana Maria Pacheco's series of   six prints searches for personal identity and the role of women in community through a pictorial narrative of two Brazilian folk tales. Her tale tells of women's lack of status, but of their collective power. Alison Saar's Blue Plate Special heroizes the sacrifices of African-Americans by using the imagery of Judeo-Christian martyrdom.

Kimono, 1976, fabric collage and acrylic on canvas Miriam Schapiro

    Kimono, 1976, by Miriam Schapiro, exemplifies the Pattern and Decoration movement, which claimed ground for American women artists in the late 20th century. In her Kimono series, Schapiro developed, on a large-scale, paintings that simultaneously referred to the "heroic" works of the male Abstract Expressionist group and to the "anonymous" works of domestic art by women. Schapiro placed monumental fabric-collage kimonos at front and center of these canvasses. By using women's arts such as pieced fabric work (i.e., quilts) and fashions (the kimono), Schapiro adapted her earlier work in women's arts, coined as "femmage," to the art marketplace. Sweet Briar's Kimono is one among a large series of these manifesto paintings.

   Helen Levitt focused her trick camera on the children of Manhattan, leaving an archive of priceless views into the secret souls of young people. In 1936 she bought an inconspicuous Leica camera. Walker Evans introduced Levitt to the right angle viewfinder, a device that enabled her to stand close to the action but appear to be shooting something a quarter-turn away, thus allowing her to capture her unsuspecting subject. The scowling child in the photograph, Girl with Lily, was probably unaware that she was being captured on film, yet Levitt was so skilled that she was able to choose her subject and attain an image of a fleeting moment of life, as the child poses on her way into a building, lily in hand.

   As a student of Hans Hofmann in 1950, Helen Frankenthaler was introduced as a young painter to the Abstract Expressionist group of artists at the time of their great breakthrough. She met art critic Clement Greenberg, artists David Smith, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, and others. Inspired by Pollock's drip painting technique on the floor, Frankenthaler conceived the idea of applying pigment directly onto canvas in a soaking technique. Throughout her career Frankenthaler experimented with both form and materials, and learned, with the help of printmaking specialists, how to achieve the same color staining effects on paper in works such as Tiger's Eye.

   The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles is a lithographic version of Faith Ringgold's quilt of the same subject, part of a series of quilts she made telling the story of a young African-American woman artist in France. Here Ringgold portrays some of her heroines?Rosa Parks, Sojourner Truth, Ida Wells, Madam Walker?piecing together a quilt of sunflowers while Vincent van Gogh looks on, like a suitor in the wings, holding his potted sunflowers and looking quite sheepish. In this work, Ringgold combines traditions such as fabric arts learned from her mother, African-American storytelling, and her experiences in art school with her political consciousness in presenting the valiant African-American women as the protagonists of her story as they piece together a freedom quilt, using van Gogh's sunflowers.

   Drawing on the petroglyphs of the American Southwest, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith creates figures suggestive of shamans or medicine men, combining these images of healing with the image of an Indian pony and a display of bones to express reverence for the antiquity of the Native American cultures. Through the suggestive nature of such gestalts, the artist tells the story of the eradication of indigenous peoples in America and the colonialists' disregard for native peoples, lands, and ecology. Using the symbol of different colored bones to evoke death, she addresses the issues of racism and genocide in Racism: Bones of Color.

   Carrie Mae Weems's Some Said You Were the Spitting Image of Evil is part of the series "From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried," created in response to the Getty's  exhibition, "Hidden Witness: African-Americans in Early Photography," which featured photographs of African-Americans from the late nineteenth   - early twentieth   century made under the influence of the eugenics movement. Weems's installation consisted of images appropriated from the Getty exhibition and from various twentieth   century photographers.   She enlarged the photographs, toned all but two in red, and inscribed a body of text on the glass covering the photographs that ties the works together as one piece. Carrie Mae Weems protests against racism through the use of photography and words, which speak across the years to this child: Some said you were the spitting image of evil.

   If there is a woman artist of the twentieth century who stands as a symbol of female accomplishment, it is Louise Bourgeois. She unflinchingly examines her emotional life, utilizing anatomical and architectural imagery to express narratives of love, anger, violence, abandonment, and selfishness. Now in her 90s, Bourgeois is a recognized icon of the contemporary art world. Her artistic life bridges five decades. She was born in 1911, the year after Sweet Briar College graduated its first class of students. Her hand-colored art book, the puritan, is a combination of text and original art. It evocatively combines a poetic fable-like text with purified modernist architectonic images. She said, "With the puritan I analyzed an episode 40 years after it happened. I could see things from a distance...I put it on a grid. Geometry was a tool to understanding..."

   These works and others in this growing area of the collection are used by Sweet Briar College to expose our audiences to the art and female voices of our time. In their most powerful moments, works of art can help the viewer construct her or his own identity, value systems, and beliefs. Yet our exhibition, Works of Art by Twentieth Century Women, is not designed to promote a particular viewpoint, political stance, or issue, but rather, to awaken in its viewers an response to the issues which are being raised, and to publicly acknowledge the contributions made by these women artists.  

   This exhibition celebrates the twentieth anniversary of the opening of the Pannell Art Gallery, and features works from the college's collection, developed by intentional collecting by the Friends of Art organization.

Rebecca Massie Lane
Director of Museum, College Galleries and Arts Management
Sweet Briar College
September 2004