Top 5

            Thanks to the avant-garde female artists of America, we have made strides towards reaching gender equality and expressing the depth of social and political issues embedded in being a female and female artist. Female artists created new and uncommon forms of art that grasped the attention of societal masses. The contemporary movement, including many forms of avant-garde art, was a period of time for the mid 1900’s to the present. It was “[m]odeled on the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960’s[.] [T]he contemporary feminist movement in the arts emphasized political activism, group collaboration and an art practice centered around the personal and collective experiences of women” (Chadwick 8).  Feminists in this period took an introspective approach into discovering what exactly it was about the relationship between the genders that deemed women’s artwork and artist’s inferior to men and granted them little to no credit. These prolific and tenacious female artists included the likes of performance artists such as: Marina Abramovic, Yoko Ono, Adrian Piper and conceptual artists such as Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger who’s impact on the contemporary art and feminist movement we will further discuss in this post.

            Marina Abramovic, perhaps gone too soon, dead at the age of 67 in the year of 2013, was often considered the mother of performance art. Abramovic’s performance art frequently involved her injuring herself while testing the precincts of the relationship between the artist/performer (herself) and the audience. Her “Rhythm” series was a of performances that were monumental in her career. “Rhythm 0 (1974)” of this series was one which I thought was profound. In this performance, Abramovic wanted to test her audience by seeing how aggressive and how vulnerably they would treat her if there were no restrictions or consequences. Abramovic stood idol in front of an audience who she allowed to do anything to anything to by utilizing 72 tools including many that could harm her. By the end of the performance she was cut many times, stripped and treated in a sexually aggressive manner by many men. She was able to expose the violent nature of how many men view women. Marina speaks about her experience in being the subject of her performance and the courage it took her in retrospect in this video below.

            Yoko Ono is another courageous performance artist of the contemporary period who’s work was able to expose the flawed nature of how men viewed women. In her performance “Cut Piece” (1964) Yoko allowed her audience to cut her clothes off with a pair of scissors in order to test their ability to respect her boundaries as a woman. Unfortunately, many men began to rip her clothes apart and got frustrated when articles of clothing were difficult to rip. They viewed Yoko as a sexual object rather than an individual and even went on to cut her bra off. Their aggressive and degrading acts in this performance made a large issue deeply rooted in society visible. Yoko Ono’s performance can be watched below.

            Female performance artists also incorporated the exploration of racial issues into their exploration of gender; they explored identity as a whole. Adrian Piper is an artist who has accomplished this feat. In her performance “They Mythic Being”, performed in intervals between 1973 to 1975, she poses as a black, working class man. She wears an afro, a mustache and male attire while walking through the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts and New York City. She attempts to discover the social implications that come with being an African American male and also ogle’s women in order to get a first-hand understanding of how many of these women feel and react. Adrian Piper explains “The idea is very much to see what would happen if there was a being who had exactly my history only a completely different visual appearance to the rest of society” .

            Conceptual art emerged with the contemporary movement, in which the idea and meaning behind the art is valued more than the finished product itself. Jenny Holzer’s work embodied conceptual art, specifically her piece “Truism” written in a series between 1978 and 1987. In these “Truisms” she expressed maxims, short but thoughtful sentences that allow the audience reflect deeply. Through these maxims, she addresses issues of sex, race, class and a wide range of topics and hopes to engage her audience and receive a wide variety of responses. In one of her truisms, she writes “A rapist died because he left his victim wishing she was dead”. An ambivalent, yet thought provoking statement about a prominent issue of gender and male dominance. Here is an excerpt of one her truisms.

            Barbara Kruger, a well known contemporary artist native to Newark and born in 1954, directly addresses feminist issues through conceptual art. Barbara Kruger utilizes the medium of magazine-like strips of text and black and white photographs. She places the text over the images and creates a poster that can be placed in areas of high traffic in a manner similar to advertisments. In her Untitled piece of 1981, she places a female statue with her face to the side and places “Your gaze hits the side of my face on it’s side”. She shows how the male gaze makes women feel like trapped and not an individual but a sexually appealing object through the placement of the female statue.

Works Cited

Reisman, Sara. “The Intersectional Self.” The 8th Floor, 18 Feb. 2017,

Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, and Society. 4th Edition. 2007