#feminist-art

#feminist-art

If you want to paint, put your clothes back on! That was how Carolee Schneemann summarised the critical response to her 1975 performance piece Interior Scroll, which she had performed nude standing on a gallery table. After making a series of life model poses, she removed a scroll from her vagina and began to read her manifesto. In doing so, Schneemann asked an important question: What does it mean for a female artist to be both the artist and the life model?

Art, at its very best, reminds me that there is a world out there that I not only belong to but trust - perhaps even love. Sandra Vázquez de la Horra's beeswax-dipped drawings of erupting women, mystical landscapes, and hallucinatory flora in The Awake Volcanoes at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, did just that. Oh, that old mystery of finding oneself reflected in the material fragments of someone else's private imaginary.

The show features painting, sculpture, photography, film and assemblage, tracing how artists working in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and New York grappled with identity, sexuality, race and power in ways often overlooked in canonical art histories. Though the women's liberation movement didn't enter wider public consciousness until the early 1970s, Sixties Surreal showcases how women artists were creating an early feminist aesthetic and imagining new fields of possibility for themselves and their work.