What Is Feminist Art?

In 1978, Argentine artist Lea Lublin marched to the Seine River in Paris alongside artists in the collective Femmes/Art. She carried a banner stenciled with 25 questions calling attention to stereotypes about women, including, “Is woman an inferior being?” and “Is woman a sexual object?” To conclude this day of feminist action, she threw the banner into the river. Lublin’s work and its public procession and destruction joined a growing movement of artists, theorists, and writers advancing the rights and voices of women around the world.

While the 1960s and ’70s are often considered the beginning of feminist art, artists were challenging male dominance in art and society and expectations about womanhood long before then. As feminism continues to evolve, both it and feminist art have expanded to include more voices and perspectives.

Claude Cahun used photography and writing to explore multiple facets of their identity. They began making self-portraits as a young adult. In the 1920s, Cahun settled in Paris with their stepsister Marcel Moore, who became their artistic collaborator and life partner. The images they made together mostly depict Cahun in a variety of costumes and settings used to create different personas.

This is a closely cropped, black-and-white portrait of Cahun donning a shaved head and suit jacket. Posing with no hair—hair was a mainstream symbol of femininity—and wearing clothing traditionally understood as masculine, Cahun undercut the notion of a fixed identity and challenged the gender binary of male and female. They considered their self-imaging project to be never-ending, writing in their 1930 book Aveux non avenus (Disavowals), in which this photograph was published, “Under this mask, another mask; I will never finish removing all these faces.”

Born in California, Ruth Asawa began her art education as a teenager taking painting and drawing classes at an internment camp. She and her family were among the thousands of people of Japanese descent forcibly imprisoned by the US government during World War II. After being released, she studied to be a teacher but was unable to get a license because of her Japanese heritage. Asawa enrolled at Black Mountain College, an experimental art school in North Carolina, where she was encouraged to mine the possibilities of different materials. Throughout her career, she was a tireless advocate for arts education in San Francisco’s public schools, and she founded a program that integrated the arts and gardening.

In 1955, Asawa created this untitled work by looping wire with a dowel—a process she likened to “drawing in space.”³ When she first exhibited her wire constructions, critics not only questioned whether they were sculpture since they had no interior mass, but critiqued her work in gendered terms, calling it decorative and domestic. These distinctions meant little to Asawa: “It doesn’t bother me. Whether it’s a craft or whether it’s art. That is a definition that people put on things.”⁴

In 1979, after working as a curator at The Museum of Modern Art for 12 years, Howardena Pindell was in a car accident that left her with partial memory loss.⁶ Several months later, she made Free, White and 21, illustrating the stark divide between Black and white American experiences by appearing as both herself and as a white woman. In it, Pindell recounts the racism that she experienced from early childhood to adulthood, while her white character dismisses Pindell’s experiences with statements like “you really must be paranoid” and “you won’t exist until we validate you.”

Pindell credits both the Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation movements with helping her to discover her own voice: “I developed a number of tools for inward looking, personal assessment through the women’s movement’s consciousness raising processes in order to understand how racism and sexism work within the art community as well as the community at large. I found my true voice through the African American movement but received my training wheels in the women’s movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.”⁷