Quotes & Sayings About Feminist Art

I would suggest that especially in the differential of images that arise, in the inflections that we find within the representations of women we may also recover a subjectivity for women. For this reason also I am specifically interested in bringing to light other models for women's roles, models that upset business as usual and offer a greater diversity of possibilities for the easy we can imagine women. — Loriliai Biernacki

I guess maybe my art can be said to be a protest. I see things a certain way, and as an artist I'm privileged in that arena to protest or say publicly what I'm thinking about. Maybe the strongest work I've done is because it was done with indignation. Considering myself as a feminist, I don't want my work to be a reaction to what male art might be or what art with a capital A would be. I just want it to be art. In a convoluted way, I am protesting- protesting the usual way art is looked at, being shoved into a period or category. — Nancy Spero

I remain interested in the potential of art, except I've always been more struck by applied modernism than high modernism. It's partly because of feminist theory and being brought up in the '70s, with questioning who is speaking, and why, and what authority they're carrying. — Liam Gillick

I never made "feminist art," and if I did it was not deliberate ... — Michelle Stuart

Women's work, like much blue-collar work and agrarian work, is often invisible and uncredited, the work that holds the world together - maintenance work as the great feminist artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles called it in her Maintenance Art manifesto. — Rebecca Solnit

Capitalism is an art form, an Apollonian fabrication to rival nature. It is hypocritical for feminists and intellectuals to enjoy the pleasures and conveniences of capitalism while sneering at it. Everyone born into capitalism has incurred a debt to it. Give Caesar his due. — Camille Paglia

Very early on I was interested in doing political art, but it was not feminist political art. — Michelle Stuart

A woman brings so much more to the world than birth, for she can birth discovery, intelligence, invention, art, just as well as any man. — Shannon Celebi

The Bobbit case, which brought to life the ancient mythic archetype of woman as castrator, demonstrated that women are as aggressive as men and that sex is a dark, dangerous force of nature. But of course the feminist establishment, stuck in its battered-woman blinders, learned nothing as usual from this lurid refutation of its normal views. Classic art works like Bizet's Carmen tell us more about the irrationality of love, jealousy and revenge than do all the pat formulas of the counseling industry. — Camille Paglia

For instance, I may bring a certain feminist perspective to my songwriting, because that's how I see life. I'm interested in art, poetry, and music. As that kind of artist, I can do anything. I can say anything. It's about self-expression. It knows no package - there's no such thing. That's what being an artist is. — Laura Nyro

I consider Otto Rank to be one of the great spiritual giants of the twentieth century, a genius as a psychologist and a saint as a human being. Though vilified by his original community of Freudians, he never became bitter. He died a feminist and deeply committed to social justice, in 1939 ... His deep understanding of creativity makes him a mentor for all of us living in a postmodern world ... I believe that Art and Artist, especially chapters 12 to 14, may well emerge as the most valuable psychoanalysis of the spiritual life in our time. — Matthew Fox

Some feminist critics debate whether we take our meaning and sense of self from language and in that process become phallocentric ourselves, or if there is a use of language that is, or can be, feminine. Some, like myself, think that language is itself neither male nor female; it is creatively expansive enough to be of use to those who have the wit and art to wrest from it their own significance. Even the dread patriarchs have not found a way to 'own' language any more than they have found a way to 'own' earth (though many seem to believe that both are possible). — Paula Gunn Allen

I didn't like anti-Vietnam War art. I didn't like feminist art. I thought it was heavy-handed and stupid - as art. — Robert Barry

I think that's my hope for a lot of the feminist movement is that the gender thing sort of stops being the selling point, if that makes any sense. We're just people making art, and that's how this process has felt to me. — Sara Bareilles

For me, now, feminist art must show a consciousness of women's social and economic position in the world. I also believe it demonstrates forms and perceptions that are drawn from a sense of spiritual kinship between women. — Suzanne Lacy

Women's art, political art - those categorisations perpetuate a certain kind of marginality which I'm resistant to. But I absolutely define myself as a feminist. — Barbara Kruger

I think for a long time it seemed like working in an art form and being a feminist meant portraying women in a perfect, angelic light. And there's nothing feminist about that. — Rebecca Hall

All of the significant art of today stems from Conceptual art. This includes the art of installation, political, feminist and socially directed art. — Sol LeWitt

Online media is the future, and younger feminists are already instrumental in using social media and multi-media platforms on the web to document street harassment, archive and critique the media, and create art. — Jennifer Baumgardner

I didn't go to high school, I didn't go to college, I didn't have women's studies. All of my feminist ideals and education have been built around art and my friends and community. And so it's still growing. — Kathleen Hanna

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. — Andrea Dworkin

The work is what it is and hopefully it's seen as feminist work, or feminist-advised work, but I'm not going to go around espousing theoretical bullshit about feminist stuff. — Cindy Sherman

I know certainly, for instance, it's part of the black aesthetic, the whole concept of art as business, art for art's sake, art as the competitive gesture, I connect with a very male-oriented concept of living, as opposed to, and we would call them alternate aesthetics, which include the black aesthetic, the feminist aesthetic, where art and poetry become part and parcel of one's daily living, one's daily expression, the need to communicate, the need to share one's feelings, to develop within oneself the best that is possible. And the definition of art as betterment, I think, is a mainstay of the alternative aesthetics. — Audre Lorde

The belief that established science and scholarship
which have so relentlessly excluded women from their making
are "objective"and "value-free" and that feminist studies are "unscholarly," "biased," and "ideological" dies hard. Yet the fact is that all science, and all scholarship, and all art are ideological; there is no neutrality in culture! — Adrienne Rich

The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to. — Frida Kahlo

Feminist art may ... though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme ... should we call it 'joy'? — Andrea Dworkin