Five Women Artist

Five women

1. Lucy R. Lippard

Contemporary art criticism has its iconic names and Lippard ranks high among them. After receiving her BA from Smith College and her MA from New York University, Lippard went on to become an important part of modern art as a critic and curator. As one of the founders of the nonprofit Printed Matter, Inc. in 1976—an idea that was born at her Tribeca loft while chatting with Sol LeWitt—Lippard widened the conversation surrounding artists’ books. She cofounded the Art Workers’ Coalition in 1969 and has published more than 20 books.

Lucy R. Lippard

With Six Years: Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (1968), Lippard became one of the foremost scholars on Conceptualism—but she’s a consistently important voice in more than just one art genre. She has long been a champion of feminist art, and in 2015 she won the College Art Association’s Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for her writing

2. Kellie Jones

Columbia associate professor Jones has been influential in bringing many black, African-American, and African diasporic artists who have been overlooked into mainstream art conversations. An alumnus of Amherst and Yale, Jones was the inaugural recipient of the David C. Driskell Award in African American Art and Art History from the High Museum Art; and she became a MacArthur Fellow in 2016. Her numerous contributions to art history span curatorial work and writing; a highlight among these is the important show “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960–1980,” which was shown at the Hammer Museum and MoMA PS1 in 2011 and 2012. In a video for the MacArthur Foundation, Jones makes her mission clear: “I think it’s really important to the field of art history to finally be able to acknowledge that there are art histories that are global, and that art history isn’t just written in Europe.”

3. Hayden Herrera

An art historian’s job, in the most basic and purest sense, is to find artifacts, documents, and stories that shed more light on a specific person or art genre—and Herrera excels at this. With her widely acclaimed 1983 book Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, Herrera cemented her place as a foremost scholar on Kahlo’s life and work. The biography went on to inspire the 2002 film starring Salma Hayek and Alfred Molina, and is still an important resource for learning about Kahlo’s artmaking, romances, and health issues, among other topics. Herrera has also published biographies on artists like Arshile Gorky and Joan Snyder; She has lectured widely, curated several exhibitions of art, taught Latin American art at New York University, and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

4. Deborah Willis

As an artist and art historian, Willis focuses primarily on photography as both an art practice and a subject of study. It’s a deeply personal topic for Willis. In a 2013 New York Times article on her show “Framing Beauty,” the artist recalls the exact moment she first saw black people in photographs. (It was in The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a book first published in 1955 with photography by Roy DeCarava and text by Langston Hughes.) That moment made a lasting impact on Willis, who has contributed her own thoughts on black visibility and photography to the art-historical canon.

Willis is also a quilter, also incorporating photographic images into her pieces. Daddy's Ties: The Tie Quilt II from 1992 (27 x 34"), for example, is a fabric collage with added button, tie clips, and pins forming "a supple, irregularly shaped memorial." The work references multiple generations and genders, as it elicits memories of fathers teaching their sons, boys maturing into adult clothes and rituals, and women adjusting their husbands' knots.

5. Linda Nochlin

Nochlin’s iconic essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Originally published in 1971, it continues to inspire many critics, artists, and art historians to take a more incisive look at how the art world continually excludes female artists. Nochlin argued that significant societal barriers have prevented women from pursuing art, including restrictions on educating women in art academies and "the entire romantic, elitist, individual-glorifying, and monograph-producing substructure upon which the profession of art history is based ".

Her critical work has also sparked important conversations in the genres of Realism and contemporary painting and sculpture. In 2007, Nochlin co-curated the Brooklyn Museum exhibition “Global Feminisms,” the inaugural show for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. 

In her 1994 essay "Starting from Scratch: The Beginnings of Feminist Art History," Nochlin reflected on her awakening as a feminist and its impact on her scholarship and teaching: "In 1969, three major events occurred in my life: I had a baby, I became a feminist, and I organized the first class in Women and Art at Vassar College."

Nochlin deconstructed art history by identifying and questioning methodological presuppositions. She was an advocate for "art historians who investigate the work before their eyes while focusing on its subject matter, informed by a sensitivity to its feminist spirit.