Can art move you to understand the world in different terms?
How have feminist artists and critics looked power in the eye?
Do women really have to be naked to get into the Met?
Spring 2015
Time: TTh 11:30-1:20
Classroom: Sieg Hall 134
Professor Sasha Welland
Office: Padelford B-110P
Office Hours: M 3:30-5:00 & by appt.
Email: swelland@uw.edu*
*Please note: Every effort will be made to respond to email within 72 hours.
Teaching Assistant
alma khasawnih
Office: Padelford B-111
Office Hours: Th 1:30-3:00
Email: almak@uw.edu
Course Description (For pdf of full syllabus, see the Canvas course site)
In 1989 the U.S.-based group of anonymous artists called the Guerrilla Girls issued the following question with their Metropolitan Museum poster campaign:
Guerilla Girls, Do Women Have to Be Naked…?, offset lithographic poster, 1989
Guerrilla Girls ads like this one have been published in magazines, pasted on signboards for street protests, and plastered on bathroom walls in museums and theaters. Their work, which involves image making, performance, and institutional critique, serves as one example of feminist art practice. Feminist art cannot be classified as a style, like impressionism or cubism; nor is it bound to a particular medium, like painting or quilting; nor is it simply art by women. Feminist art challenges norms and conventions; it embraces multiple media; it critiques inequalities rooted in gender, sexuality, race, class, and nationality; it proposes alternative, experimental ways of seeing the world. In other words, feminist art is an epistemological field of practice rather than an object, event, or project, in which thinking relationally, in terms of social hierarchies, aesthetic form, and ideology, is foundational. This course takes that premise to the global level, asking: 1) how social categories like gender and sexuality are constructed in similar and different ways across cultures, as well as through transnational cultural encounters; and 2) how the work of feminist artists responds to these powerful formations shaped by local and global forces. Rather than assuming that feminist art begins in the West, as origin stories like the formation of the Guerrilla Girls sometimes suggest, we explore an art history of innovation and intervention tethered to centers like Johannesburg and Mumbai, Beirut and Beijing to also ask if women have to be Western to get into textbooks of feminist art.
The first two weeks of the course provide a grounding in basic questions such as “what is feminism,” “what is art or visual culture,” and “what is feminist art.” An overview of how feminist art has been institutionalized focuses our attention on critical sightlines occluded by canon formation. After that, each week of the course presents a case study that introduces students to debates about gender, sexuality, nation, and artistic representation based in specific cultural, historical, and political contexts. With this background as interpretive lens, we then explore the work of specific artists and the configurations of power their artistic practices challenge. An emphasis on feminist transnationalism throughout unsettles static understandings of gender, culture, and identity. While this is a lecture course, close-looking exercises in the classroom are designed to sharpen students’ visual analysis skills and spark discussion.
Course Objectives
To explore how art shapes and transforms understandings of gender, sexuality, race, class, culture, and power on local and global scale.
- To develop close looking and visual analysis skills through written, oral, and visual forms of communication.
- To develop competencies in digital media for research, analysis, and knowledge production and sharing.
- To develop collaboration and presentation skills, with an emphasis on responsibility, intellectual rigor, and creativity.
- To practice an interdisciplinary feminist approach to art through course assignments that guide students to analyze visual form together with the social, political, and economic dimensions of art objects.
Course Texts
Books: Available at University Book Store and on 4-hour reserve at Odegaard Library.
- Cynthia Freeland, But Is It Art? An Introduction to Art Theory
- Guerrilla Girls, The Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art
Course Reader: Available at EZ Copy & Print, 4336 University Way NE, 206-632-2523 (next to University Book Store).
- All other assigned readings will be included in this required course reader.
Additional Required Materials:
- one package of 3 x 5 index cards (for class participation exercises)
- one dedicated note/sketchbook for the course (blank or ruled pages)
Additional books of interest: Selections from some of the following are in the course reader, and you might be interested in further exploring them, as well as other catalogues and films related to the course. The books are on 4-hour reserve at Odegaard. The films are on reserve in the UW Libraries Media Center on the 3rd Floor of Suzzallo. Please request the DVD using the call numbers listed below.
- Cornelia Butler and Lisa Mark, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution
- Centre Pompidou, Elles@centrepompidou: Women Artists in the Collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne
- Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art, and Society
- Amelia Jones, ed., The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader
- Lynn Hershman Leeson (director), WAR: Women, Art, Revolution [DVD ZF 077]
- Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin, eds., Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art
- Shirin Neshat (director), Women without Men [DVD TAC 3841]