Miriam (Mimi) Schapiro

Miriam Schapiro

(1923-)
This is all tken from different web sources.
Born in Toronto, she studied painting at colleges in New York and Iowa. She married Paul Brach, an artist in 1946. Schapiro worked a series of odd jobs until she became a artist full-time in 1955. She originally painted in the Abstract Expressionist stlye. As her commitment to feminism grew during the 1960's, she developed her own personal style which she called femmage. Combining such commonplace elements as lace, fabric scraps, buttons, rickrack, sequins, and tea towels she transformed them into sophisticated compositions that often imply multiple layers of both space and meaning. Her recent works juxtapose intricately patterned abstract backgrounds with stylized human figures in motion-whether falling or dancing- made of brightly colored paper.





Miriam (Mimi) Schapiro is one of the foremost pioneers in the feminist art movement in the United States. Nicknamed “Mimi Appleseed” after Johnny Appleseed whose dream was for a land where blossoming apple trees were everywhere (two hundred years later, some of those trees still bear apples), she has opened paths previously closed and unknown to women artists, past and present, trained and untrained. Since 1970, Schapiro has raised women’s consciousness through her writing, painting, printmaking, teaching and sculpture. She has lectured extensively on feminist issues to professional conferences, university audiences, art classes and women’s groups. Through the use of large scale media and symbols emblematic of the female, she has battled to pay homage to women and their undervalued domestic traditions. Her seminal role in the art world was acknowledged with the esteemed honor of 2002 Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement of the College Art Association, the national organization of artists and art historians.

Anni Albers

Annelise Albers (née Fleischmann) (June 12, 1899 – May 9, 1994) was a German-American textile artist and printmaker. She is perhaps the best known textile artist of the 20th century.Albers worked primarily in textiles and, late in life, as a printmaker. She produced numerous designs in ink washes for her textiles, and occasionally experimented with jewelry. Her woven works include many wall hangings, curtains and bedspreads, mounted "pictorial" images, and mass-produced yard material. Her weavings are often constructed of both traditional and industrial materials, not hesitating to combine jute, paper, and cellophane, for instance, to startlingly sublime effect. She was married painter Josef Albers in 1925 .

Romaine Brooks

Romaine Brooks (May 1, 1874 – December 7, 1970), born Beatrice Romaine Goddard, was an American painter who specialized in portraiture and used a subdued palette dominated by the color gray. Brooks ignored contemporary artistic trends such as Cubism and Fauvism, drawing instead on the Symbolist and Aesthetic movements of the 19th century, especially the works of James McNeill Whistler. Her subjects ranged from anonymous models to titled aristocrats, but she is best known for her images of women in androgynous or masculine dress, including her self-portrait of 1923, which is her most widely reproduced work.[1]




Brooks had an unhappy childhood with an emotionally abusive mother and a mentally ill brother, which by her own account cast a shadow over her whole life. She spent several years in Italy and France as an impoverished art student, then inherited a fortune upon her mother's death. Wealth gave her the freedom to choose her own subjects, and she often painted people close to her, such as the Italian writer and politician Gabriele D'Annunzio, the Russian dancer Ida Rubinstein, and her partner of more than 50 years, the writer Natalie Barney.



Although she lived until 1970, she painted very little after 1925. She made a series of line drawings during the early 1930s, using an "unpremeditated" technique resembling automatic drawing, then virtually abandoned art, completing only a single portrait after World War II.

Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama (草間 彌生 or 草間 弥生, Kusama Yayoi?, born March 22, 1929 in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture) is a Japanese artist whose paintings, collages, soft sculptures, performance art and environmental installations all share an obsession with repetition, pattern, and accumulation. (She has described herself as an "obsessive artist".)



Kusama's work is based in Conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, Art Brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. Kusama is also a published novelist and poet, and has created notable work in film and fashion design. wikipedia

Started to paint using polka dots and nets as motifs at around age ten ,and created fantastic paintings in watercolors, pastels and oils.




Went to the United States in 1957. Showed large paintings, soft sculptures, and environmental sculptures using mirrors and electric lights. In the latter 1960s, staged many happenings such as body painting festivals, fashion shows and anti-war demonstrations. Launched media-related activities such as film production and newspaper publication. In 1968, the film “Kusama’s Self-Obliteration”which Kusama produced and starred in won a prize at the Fourth International Experimental Film Competition in Belgium and the Second Maryland Film Festival and the second prize at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Held exhibitions and staged happenings also in various countries in Europe.



Returned to Japan in 1973. While continuing to produce and show art works, Kusama issued a number of novels and anthologies. In 1983, the novel “The Hustlers Grotto of Christopher Street” won the Tenth Literary Award for New Writers from the monthly magazine Yasei Jidai.



In 1986, held solo exhibitions at the Musee Municipal, Dole and the Musee des Beaux-Arts de Calais, France, in 1989, solo exhibitions at the Center for International Contemporary Arts, New York and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, England. In 1993, participated in the 45th Venice Biennale.



Began to create open-air sculptures in 1994. Produced open-air pieces for the Fukuoka Kenko Center, the Fukuoka Municipal Museum of Art, the Bunka-mura on Benesse Island of Naoshima, Kirishima Open-Air Museum and Matsumoto City Museum of Art, , in front of Matsudai Station, Niigata,TGV's Lille-Europe Station in France, Beverly Gardens Park, Beverly hills, Pyeonghwa Park, Anyang and a mural for the hallway at subway station in Lisbon.



Began to show works mainly at galleries in New York in 1996. A solo show held in New York in the same year won the Best Gallery Show in 1995/96 and the Best Gallery Show in 1996/97 from the International Association of Art Critics in 1996.



From1998 to 1999, a major retrospective of Kusama’s works which opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art traveled to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Walker Art Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo.



In 2000, Kusama won The Education Minister’s Art Encouragement Prize and Foreign-Minister’s Commendations. Her solo exhibition that started at Le Consortium in France in the same year traveled to Maison de la culture du Japon, Paris, KUNSTHALLEN BRANDTS ÆDEFABRIK, Denmark, Les Abattoirs, Toulouse, KUNSTHALLE Wien, Art Sonje Center, Seoul.



Received the Asahi Prize in 2001, the Medal with Dark Navy Blue Ribbon in 2002, the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Officier), and the Nagano Governor Prize (for the contribution in encouragement of art and culture) in 2003



In 2004, Her solo exhibition “KUSAMATRIX” started at Mori Museum in Tokyo. This exhibition drew visitors totaling 520,000 people. In the same year,another solo exhibition started at The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo In 2005, it traveled to The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto, Matsumoto City Museum of Art.



Received the 2006 National Lifetime Achievement Awards, the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Losette and The Praemium Imperiale -Painting- in 2006.
this text taken from:
http://www.yayoi-kusama.jp/e/biography/index.html

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith ( Painter and Printmaker)


American Indian, b. 1940

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith's art presents a cross-cultural dialogue between those values and experiences of the artist's inherited past and those of late-20th-century Euro-American culture. A painter of Salish, French-Cree, and Shoshone heritage, Smith was born in St. Ignatius, Montana, and raised on the Flathead Reservation. She became an artist while in her 30s, and was already earning a living as a painter before she completed her M.F.A. degree at the University of New Mexico. By the mid-1970s Smith had also founded artists' groups, curated exhibitions, and organized grassroots protests to express her concern for the land and its people. Over the past two decades, she has become one of the best known American Indian artists in a ground-breaking generation that includes herself, George Longfish, Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds, and others.



Deeply connected to her heritage, Smith creates work that addresses the myths of her ancestors in the context of current issues facing American Indians. She works with paint, collage, and appropriated imagery, using a combination of representational and abstract images to confront subjects such as the destruction of the environment, governmental oppression of native cultures, and the pervasive myths of Euro-American cultural hegemony. Inspired by the formal innovations of such artists as Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, and Robert Rauschenberg, as well as traditional American Indian art, Smith sees herself as "a harbinger, a mediator and a bridge builder. My art, my life experience, and my tribal ties are totally enmeshed. I go from one community with messages to the other, and I try to enlighten people." http://www.nmwa.org/collection/profile.asp?LinkID=421

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908–1992) was a Portuguese-French abstractionist painter.

Maria Elena Vieira da Silva


"When I paint a landscape or a seascape, I'm not very sure it's a landscape or a seascape. It's a thought form rather than a realistic form." Thus did Maria Elena Vieira da Silva explain her approach to her art, which is almost always completely abstract.


Although she was generally regarded as Portugal's greatest contemporary artist, Vieira da Silva spent six decades of her life in France, where she became a naturalized citizen in 1956. Born in Lisbon, Vieira da Silva began seriously studying drawing and painting at that city's Academia de Belas-Artes when she was only 11. At 16, she expanded her artistic interests to include the study of sculpture. Three years later she moved to Paris. There Vieira da Silva studied painting with Fernand Léger, sculpture with Antoine Bourdelle, and engraving with Stanley William Hayter, all acknowledged masters in their fields. She also created textile designs. http://www.nmwa.org/collection/profile.asp?LinkID=779

Mary Cassatt

Mary Stevenson Cassatt (pronounced /kəˈsæt/; May 22, 1844 – June 14, 1926) was an American painter and printmaker. She lived much of her adult life in France, where she first befriended Edgar Degas and later exhibited among the Impressionists. Cassatt often created images of the social and private lives of women, with particular emphasis on the intimate bonds between mothers and children.

Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo 1907 - 1954

Frida Kahlo was a Mexican artist who was an inspiration to many people as well as herself.
As a person, she persevered through physical trauma that left her bedridden. 
Her pain and suffering reflected in the art she produced. But in those portrayals of her life, she became one of the most popular artists in history.

When Frida was 18 years old, a bus accident nearly ended her life. The injuries she sustained were severe and painful. Frida eventually regained her ability to walk after some time, but was crippled by sudden amounts of pain that would keep her bound to a hospital bed or in a bed at her home. While spending many days in body casts after recovering from multiple surgeries, Frida began to spend her time painting.

She began by painting herself, mainly because it was a single subject that she knew best. Of her 143 paintings she made in her life, 55 of them are self-portraits. Her portraits vary to both ends of the spectrum and reflect a lot of the pain she has endured in life including her operations and miscarriages.

Frida married fellow artist Diego Rivera in 1929. She admired his work as an artist and asked him for advice and guidance one day. Diego immediately recognized Frida as a talented artist and their relationship blossomed from professional to personal. Their marriage, however, was turbulent and filled with extramarital affairs. They would eventually divorce but remarry in 1940.

Frida's life was filled with great amounts of passion, pain, and lust. But the mark she left on the world of contemporary art was astounding and unforgettable. Her final months and years were spent suffering from a variety of illnesses that were hard to treat at the time. She died in 1954 and her cause of death was not certain. Although it was listed as a pulmonary problem, some believe her death may have been caused by an overdose, whether it was accidental or not. Unfortunately for the world, she was only known as "Diego Rivera's Wife" during her life. But after her life, that was a whole different story. (taken from lamambovita.com)m

Lee Krasner

We get used to a certain kind of color of form or format, and it's acceptable. And to puncture that is sticking your neck out a bit. And then pretty soon, that's very acceptable. Lee Krasner

I have oftened wondered if Lee Krasner put her painting on hold to support her husband Jackson Pollack.

 How could you ever get out of that shadow?

Krasner was born as Lena Krassner (outside the family she was known as Lenore Krasner) in Brooklyn, New York to Russian Jewish immigrant parents from Bessarabia. [2] [3]

She studied at The Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design, and worked on the WPA Federal Art Project from 1935 to 1943. Starting in 1937, she took classes with Hans Hofmann, who taught the principles of cubism, and his influence helped to direct Krasner's work toward neo-cubist abstraction. When commenting on her work, Hofmann stated, "This is so good you would not know it was painted by a woman."[4] (wikipedia)

Fro the following website:
http://sb.cc.stonybrook.edu/pkhouse/story/krasner2.shtml



During their early years together, Krasner underwent a profound reappraisal of her artistic direction; she struggled, in her words, to "lose Cubism" and "absorb Pollock." Nevertheless, although she acknowledged Pollock's superior gifts, she did not become his follower. More than three years his senior, she was a mature artist when they met and throughout her aesthetic evolution retained elements of her early analytical skills and structural sophistication. Moreover, she never lost her deep admiration for Matisse, an artist who interested Pollock only marginally, and for Mondrian, whose grid remained as an underpinning for many of her all-over compositions, notably her "Little Image" series and rectangle abstractions of 1946-51. Matisse in particular was a life-long source of inspiration for her. Yet the intuitive nature of Pollock's approach helped free Krasner's art from formalist strictures, while her discerning eye and keen judgement--as well as her single-minded dedication to promoting his career--proved invaluable to his success.

Georgia O'keeffe

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way--things I had no words for. Georgia O'keeffe

There has been so much attention to  Georgia's flowers that when I found this article it really spoke to me because I prefer O'keeffe's abstractions.

Love It or Hate It, O'Keeffe's at the Whitney

Email Print More...By Leon Neyfakh

September 15, 2009
7:22 p.m

There are two types of people Barbara Haskell hopes to surprise with the Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition opening on Thursday, Sept. 17, at the Whitney Museum of American Art: those who love O’Keeffe for her famous flowers and those who deride her for them.

The show, which consists of more than 130 pieces, highlights O’Keeffe’s little known abstract works, many of which she made early in her career, before her focus shifted to the more representational paintings of flowers, animal bones, and landscapes for which she is best known. In an interview Tuesday, Ms. Haskell, who led the curatorial team, said the exhibition aims both to advance the idea that O’Keeffe was at heart an abstractionist, and to rescue her from critics who for years have written off her work as decorative and commercial kitsch. “We want to argue that Georgia O’Keeffe created a body of fantastically radical abstract work, and that she was at the forefront of the most vanguard concepts of what it meant to make a painting,” Ms. Haskell said. “There’s a paradox, in that she is so beloved by the public and yet in some ways is not taken as seriously by the so-called art connoisseurs. She needed a fresh look. One of the handlers here said he’d always taken her for granted and had never thought of her as a serious painter. Now he’s totally convinced.”

Barbara Hepworth

Dame Barbara Hepworth DBE (10 January 1903 – 20 May 1975) was an English sculptor. Her work exemplifies Modernism and along with her contemporaries in England such as Ivon Hitchens, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, Naum Gabo and others she helped to develop modern art (sculpture in particular) immeasurably. (wikipedia)

Judy Chicago

Judy Chicago (born Judy Cohen on July 20, 1939)[nb 1] is a feminist artist, author, and educator.

Chicago has been making work since the mid 1960s. Her earliest forays into art-making coincided with the rise of Minimalism, which she eventually abandoned in favor of art she believed to have greater content and relevance. Major works include The Dinner Party and The Holocaust Project.

Shwe wrote the book Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist (1975)
The Dinner Party is an installation artwork by feminist artist Judy Chicago depicting place settings for 39 mythical and historical famous women. It was produced from 1974 to 1979 as a collaboration and was first exhibited in 1979. Subsequently, despite art world resistance, it toured to 16 venues in 6 countries on 3 continents to a viewing audience of 1 million. Since 2007 it has been on permanent exhibition at the Brooklyn

Helen Frankenthaler

Helen Frankenthaler is an American-born painter, printmaker, and sculptor who, along with fellow artists Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis, spearheaded the practice of Color Field painting, a component of Abstract Expressionism. Her innovative technique, along with her use of landscape to inform her abstract work, changed the way artists conceived of and used color in their own work and made her the most prominent female member of the Abstract Expressionist and Color Field Painting movements.

Key Ideas / Information

Frankenthaler echoed Jackson Pollock in both the large scale of her canvases and her decision to paint on the floor rather than on an easel. Unlike Pollock, however, her paintings conveyed a tranquil experience of the natural world rather than an intermittently ominous sense of the sublime.

Frankenthaler emphasized the role of her "wrist" as her own personal artistic signature and in this way aligned herself with the Abstract Expressionists and the importance they placed on the visibility of "the artist's hand" in a painting.

Frankenthaler's use of light hearkens back to landscape painters of earlier centuries who used light from the natural world to define focal points and illuminate their works, but absent in her work is the religious sentiment they sought to inspire.
http://www.theartstory.org/

We get used to a certain kind of color of form or format, and it's acceptable. And to puncture that is sticking your neck out a bit. And then pretty soon, that's very acceptable.

Helen was married to Robert Motherwell

Elizabeth Murray

Elizabeth Murray was born in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Murray graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1958-1962. She earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from Mills College in 1964.As a student, she was influenced by painters ranging from Cezanne to Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

In 1967, Murray moved to New York, and first exhibited in 1971 in the Whitney Museum of American Art Annual Exhibition. One of her first mature works included "Children Meeting," 1978 (now in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum, New York), an oil on canvas painting evoking human characteristics, personalities, or pure feeling through an interaction of non-figurative shapes, colour and lines.[4] She is particularly noted for her shaped canvas paintings.[5] (wikipedia)

Agnes Martin

Agnes Martin (March 22, 1912 – December 16, 2004) was a Canadian-American painter, often referred to as a minimalist; Martin considered herself an abstract expressionist. I think she was just an introvert.

Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings. (Agnes Martin)

Lee Bontecou

Lee Bontecou is an American artist who was born 15 January 1931 in Providence, Rhode Island. She attended the Art Students League of New York from 1952 to 1955, where she studied with the sculptor William Zorach. She received a Fulbright scholarship to study in Rome in 1957-1958 and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in 1959. From the 1970s until 1991 she taught at Brooklyn College. (from wikpedia)

Louise Nevelson

I only know this – that you can't give advice to an artist. (Louise Nevelson)

Louise Nevelson became renowned during the Abstract Expressionist period for constructing crated assemblages full of wooden items grouped together into monochromatically painted cubic structures. Her aim to reinvigorate found objects with a spiritual life was informed by feminist ideals and Nevelson's strong persona, which inspired multitudinous female artists associated with the women's movement. Influenced by Duchamp's found object sculptures, Nevelson sought to build abstract wooden environments, painted gold, black, or white, that obscured original content to historicize debris with a second, more mysterious narrative life. The narratives in her artwork originated from her personal migration history as a Jewish woman who relocated to America, and from her active life in New York's artistic community.






Key Ideas / Information

Nevelson's art career spanned over sixty years, and is marked by periods of abstract sculpture-making focused on precariously balanced geometric forms. For decades, Nevelson built wooden structures, but in the 1970s, she began experimenting with plexiglass, aluminum, enamel, steel, and bronze.

Louise Nevelson may be most remembered as an artist whose brilliant ability to endow abstract sculpture with personal narrative led to a deep influence on artists who struggled with expressing themselves in a formalist artistic vein.

Dialogues in the feminist art movement were greatly expanded thanks to Nevelson's sculptures, which complicated gender stereotypes. They were large-scale, bold, and edgy which were traits affiliated with masculinity at the time. They also expressed, however, the artist's deepest emotions about her life as a woman.

This was taken from: www.theartstory.org

"Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions, and feelings we store away and finding new ways to connect them. What we're talking about here is metaphor. Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art, if it is not art itself. Metaphor is our vocabulary for connecting what we are experiencing now with what we have experienced before. It's not only how we express what we remember , it's how we interpret it - for ourselves and others."


— Twyla Tharp

Sidelined

The Flu sidelined me last week. It was like getting hit hard and being out of it, and sleeping through it. Kind of like the physical equivalent to a creative dry spell.  I intended to post everyday in March something amount woman artists. I will get back to it and make up for lost time. But for now the topic is: The dreaded Creative Dry Spell and recovering from it.

There is no use trying,” said Alice. “One can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” — Lewis Carroll



The key question isn’t “What fosters creativity?” But it is why in God’s name isn’t everyone creative? Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? I think therefore a good question might be not why do people create? But why do people not create or innovate? We have got to abandon that sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it were a miracle if anybody created anything.” — Abraham Maslow

Joan Mitchell

Joan Mitchell was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1925 and died in a Paris suburb in 1992. Her expatriate years began in the late 1950s and continued uninterrupted until her passing in Vetheuil, France. She occupied a celebrated stature in the generation that succeeded Pollock and Rothko. She declined the theoreticism of her European counterparts, and remained throughout her career the empirical American, personally accountable for her memories and emotions. Her work is characterized in many developments from the 1950s to the early 90s shortly prior to her passing. She usually worked on multiple panels or large scale canvases - striving to attract a natural rather than constructed rhythm from the composition, a rhythm emanating from the expansiveness of the gesture or from the unrestrained use of color and the pervasive luminosity. The titles of her last paintings suggest the abstract valleys and empirical fields of her beloved French countryside.



(taken from the Joan Mitchell Foundation website)

Joan Mitchell

Grace Hartigan

Grace Hartigan gained her reputation as part of the New York School of artists and painters that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and '50s. She was a lively participant in the vibrant artistic and literary milieu of the times, and her friends included Jackson Pollock, Larry Rivers, Helen Frankenthaler, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Frank O'Hara, Knox Martin, and many other painters, artists, poets, and writers.[2] She was the only woman artist in the Museum of Modern Art's legendary The New American Painting exhibition which toured Europe in the late 1950s.[3](wikipedia)

In Honor of Women's History Month

This month I would like to focus on Women Artists. This is a group that has been overshadowed for way too long.



Suzanne Valadon (23 September 1865 – 7 April 1938) Modeled for Renior and Lautrec. She was a skilful artist and mother to Maurice Utrillo (painter). Valadon painted still life, portraits, floral art, and landscapes that are noted for their strong composition and vibrant colors. She was, however, best known for her candid female nudes. A perfectionist, she worked on some of her oil paintings for up to 13 years before showing them. She also worked in pastel. Her first exhibitions, held in the early 1890s, consisted mostly of portraits.

(Wikipedia)