What with the spate of artists ‘subverting the male gaze’ in recent years, you’d be forgiven for thinking that feminist art is a one size fits all category. The truth is that feminist art encompasses a range of styles and practices, stretching across geographical boundaries and experiences that can’t be neatly reduced to a catch-all term. A new exhibition, which opens this evening at Nottingham Contemporary, Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance aims to explore the multiplicity of feminist art, particularly in relation to the role women have taken in resistance movements from the 19th century to the present day.
Extending across four themed rooms looking at grassroots movements and self publishing, reinvention of social constructs, gendered perspectives and public protest respectively, the exhibition’s curators — Irene Aristizábal, Rosie Cooper and Cédric Fauq — did not want the exhibition to just present “a chronological ‘all women art exhibition’”. Instead, they sought to “unite voices and movements across time and space” by linking artists through alternative modes of resistance. Although the exhibition coincides with the centenary of women’s suffrage in the UK, the idea emerged most significantly from recent and emerging resistance movements since 2010, such as the Occupy movement and the leading roles that women have taken in those resistances.
Still I Rise presents a surprising array of artists ranging from well known names such as Ana Mendieta, Faith Ringgold and Zoe Leonard to important contemporary voices including Jesse Jones, Tai Shani, and Ad Minoliti, as well as mid-century activists like Sister Corita Kent, collective art by the likes of Red Women’s Workshop, Phyllis Christopher’s documentation of the AIDS crisis and 19th century posters by Louise Michel. As is evident from the selection of artists exhibiting and the disparate types of work on display, intersectionality is at the heart of Still I Rise — how different social movements overlap with and connect with feminism. Furthermore, as the curators tell SLEEK, the exhibition poses the significant question, “What might feminist art look like?” As Cooper says, “A lot of people have an idea about what political art looks like and we invited people to exhibit work that looks completely different. It’s just as political but there’s a lot more nuanced relationship between the politics and the aesthetic side of things”. Indeed, many of the exhibits engage covertly with notions of resistance, therefore expanding the concept of what political art can be by means of inteventionalist strategies.
Among this diverse selection is the ‘Godmother’ of the American feminist art movement from the 1960s onwards, Judy Chicago. Although known for her audacious and genre-defining installation, The Dinner Party (1979), the curators instead decided to exhibit some of her lesser known works, the Atmospheres and Women and Smoke series. In the late ‘60s, Chicago starting experimenting with pyrotechnics and smoke in the Californian landscape to protest what she saw as the destructive techniques carried out by her male counterparts within the land art movement. According to the curators, Chicago found their approach to be “macho” and “inaccessible”, so in response “she worked with elements of the earth like smoke and ritual to intervene in the land in a ‘softer’ way,” which she described as “feminising the landscape”. The curators also relay a story about Chicago carrying out a workshop at the Pasadena Art Museum and how she left off coloured smoke bombs that stained the building. “Chicago talks about how that was an unexpected and fulfilling achievement because at the time there were hardly any women presenting art in that context, so to permanently mark the building left a kind of anarchic trace.”
Chicago’s dramatic landscapes punctuated with plumes of brilliantly coloured smoke provide just one example of the types of surprising protests and unconventional resistance art on view. Still I Rise is about starting a conversation, uniting ideas as well as people, and rejecting pre-conceived notions of what resistance or feminist art can be. As the curators explain, “It’s about complicating things in a world where things are becoming more and more polarised. It’s about keeping things complex and acknowledging that complexity. And continuing to ask and pose questions.”
See more images from the exhibition below:
“Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance” opens today at Nottingham Contemporary and runs through to 27 January 2019.