Week 2

Reading/Reflection Questions

• What is the difference or relationship between art and visual culture?
• What is feminist viewing?
• What is the relationship between people and things? What is the social life of art as a thing?
• How have feminist scholars of art critiqued dominant stories of art that marginalize women, artists of color, and non-western artists?
• What methods have they used? What have been the successes and pitfalls of these methods?
• What dominant story of feminist art has emerged in recent decades? Who and what does it marginalize? At what cost to our understanding of feminism and art?
• Following the Guerrilla Girls’ line of questioning (see below), do women have to be Western to get into textbooks of feminist art?

Th 04.07 What is feminist art?

Amelia Jones, The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, “Introduction: Conceiving the Intersection of Feminism and Visual Culture”

Rosemary Betterton, The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, “Feminist Viewing: Viewing Feminism”

Arjun Appadurai, “The Thing Itself”

Cynthia Freeland, But Is It Art?, “Money, Markets, Museums”

Begin browsing The Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art

Guerrilla Girls, Do Women Have to be Naked…?, offset lithographic poster, 1989

Th 04.09 Exploding Canons

Presentation: Sage Ross (Wiki Education Foundation) introduction to Wikipedia Art + Feminism course page: Moved to next T 04.14

The Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art

Cynthia Freeland, But Is It Art?, “Gender, Genius, and Guerrilla Girls”

Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art, and Society, “Worlds Together, Worlds Apart”

Handouts: Visual Analysis Paper + Wikipedia Gap Analysis

We will watch the following short video about the Art+Feminism project to begin thinking about the Wikipedia Gap Analysis assignment and to prepare for Sage Ross’s visit to class on Tuesday, April 14. For more information, see the links page.