A few weeks ago, I made a video listing five fierce women
of art and it didn't even begin to cover
the tremendous volume of interesting
and boundary pushing work made by women.
And many of you shared with us the fierce artist you admire.
So let's do it again, but let's be clear about my motivations
here.
I too am suspicious any time an artist's sex is brought up.
Like when I see a museum or gallery
bragging about having up only women artists, I'm
like, whoopee!
Do you want a ribbon?
Do you boast when you have up a group show of all men?
We all have different approaches to our feminism,
and you can surely find fault with mine,
but I encourage you to read Linda Nochlin's 1971 essay,
"Why Are There No Great Women Artists?"
where she says, "The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones,
our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces,
but in our institutions and our education-- understood
to include everything that happens
to us from the moment we enter this world
of meaningful symbols, signs, and signals."
And at this moment, YouTube is a new institution,
a new place where education happens
and where history is written.
And wouldn't it be cool if in this new platform,
there were an equal number of videos about women
who make art as men, or more?
And not because they are women, but because they
make great art.
So here are five more artists who've made incredible work
and who happen to be women.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Artemisia Gentileschi is one of very few women
artists from the 17th century that we know anything about.
Her father, Orazio, was a famous painter
and that's the only reason she was able to learn how to paint,
as women generally weren't allowed to apprentice or enter
the Academy.
But she was a masterful painter from a very young age, taking
on ambitious large-scale figure painting
of religious and historic subject matter.
Gentileschi was a follower of Caravaggio, the most prominent
of Italian Baroque painters, and she similarly depicted
dramatic lifelike scenes, defined by their rich colors
and high contrast between light and dark.
Unlike male artists of the day, she
was permitted to work with female nude models
and she depicted many powerful women in her work,
including Susanna and the Elders, Judith Slaying
Holofernes, Danae, Venus, Lucretia, Mary Magdalene,
and herself.
At 15, her father felt he could teach her no more
and brought in Agostino Tassi as her private tutor.
He raped her and then so generously offered
to marry her, but she refused and he was already
married anyway.
A bitter court battle ensued that involved
Gentileschi being tortured while defending her testimony.
And Tassi was ultimately convicted.
Many see her painting of the courageous heroine Judith,
saving her people by slaying the brutish general Holofernes,
as her revenge for the rape.
Soon after, she married another man
and moved to Florence, where she had a successful career
and was the first woman admitted to Florences' Accademia Del
Disegno.
While her work was long neglected and frequently
misattributed to male artists, Gentileschi
has emerged victorious from the misogynistic past
and is now finally heralded for her intense and masterful
paintings, retelling canonical stories
from the rare perspective of the woman,
and managing to tell her own story,
despite centuries of distance and discrimination.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Mona Hatoum first gained attention
in the early 1980s for her performance and video works
that involved her own body.
In 1982, she contained herself in a transparent box,
covered herself in clay, and smeared the walls with it,
to the sounds of news reporting and revolutionary songs.
For another, in 1985, Hatoum walked barefoot
through the street in London with a pair
of Doc Martens laced around her ankles and dragging behind her.
But by the late '80s, she's subsumed the energy
of these performances into objects,
with work such as "The Light at the End," six heating
rods installed vertically like prison bars.
Approaching the piece, you feel the increasing heat of the rods
and know immediately that this is no Dan Flavin.
For "Light Sentence," she made a u-shaped enclosure
of mesh lockers with a bare lightbulb inside,
moving up and down to cast dramatic and disorienting
shadows.
The pieces allude to confinement, imprisonment,
and the threat of violence, but remain open to interpretation.
And Hatoum's works are almost always interpreted
through her biography.
She was born in Beirut in 1952 to a Palestinian family,
who had fled after the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli war.
Hatoum traveled to Britain in the 1970s and the civil war
back home in Lebanon prevented her from returning,
so there she stayed.
Ideas of home and homeland linger in many of her works,
presenting objects and situations that
reference everyday domestic items that are usually
harmless, but under her treatment,
are unstable and threatening.
Hatoum is often asked what in her work
comes from her own culture and she
said, "As if I have a recipe and can actually
isolate the Arab ingredient, the woman ingredient,
the Palestinian ingredient.
People often expect tidy definitions of otherness,
as if identity is something fixed and easily definable."
And of course her work does address
the instability of identity, but it goes much further than that.
Hatoum's installations are both beautiful and disturbing,
seductive and dangerous.
One is never safe around her work.
Violence is imminent, even in the most domestic of settings.
Her work has the uncanny ability to impart the precariousness
of each of our situations, whether we are surrounded
by war, threatened by war, or believe ourselves
to be impervious to it.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
We all love Frida Kahlo, but it's
important to remember why we do.
She had a tumultuous life, filled
with accident and intrigue and pain and suffering.
And it's impossible to talk about our work
without talking about her life because the two are
very much intertwined.
About a third of her entire body of work is self portrait.
Although Kahlo was born outside of Mexico City in 1907,
she claimed her birth year to be 1910, the same year
the Mexican Revolution began.
She contracted polio as a child and didn't
learn to paint until the age of 18, while recovering
from a debilitating bus accident, making self portraits
and still lives, influenced by the colors
and forms of Mexican folk art.
In 1929, she married muralist Diego Rivera,
whom she called my child, my lover, my universe.
They shared a love of art and politics
and they traveled the world making art, meeting
amazing people, and fighting a lot,
because Rivera was a serial cheater.
Kahlo achieved some renown during her lifetime,
but her work only really gained traction in the 1970s,
when the feminist movement began to unearth and celebrate
remarkable work like Kahlo's.
Through her works, you see Kahlo addressing her many hardships--
displacement from home, losing her mother, miscarriage,
and divorce.
Her images reflect upon her own life, but also
universal issues, of course-- pain, heartbreak, revolution.
The worlds she constructed seem surrealist to some,
but she insisted, "I never painted dreams.
I paint my own reality."
And it's that reality that remains
so strong, it feels almost electric,
as she gazes out at us from her pictures,
testifying to her suffering and to our own.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hannah Hoch Was a master of collage,
synthesizing the fractured state of post World War I Germany
into ingenious montages of disparate images pulled
from magazines, journals, and newspapers.
She also made what she calls Dada Dolls,
a kind of sculptural montage that also reflected
on the fractured state of individuals at the time,
physically and psychologically mutilated from the war.
Hoch was the only female member of the Berlin Dada
group, which included, among others, George Grosz
and Raoul Hausmann.
But despite their progressive politics,
the members didn't really treat her as an equal,
even though she was deeply involved
and participated in the first international Dada
Fair of 1920.
It was in that show that she presented her masterpiece,
"Cut With the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar
Beer-belly Cultural Epoch of Germany."
Hoch was critical of the Weimar government
and the political chaos at the time
and she used the medium of collage to express it.
She also challenged the standards
of beauty of the, quote, "new woman" promoted
in postwar media culture and questioned
the oppressive ideals of homogeneity set forth
by the National Socialist Party.
Hoch bravely embraced difference at a time
when it was increasingly dangerous to do so.
Her heart was branded degenerate by the Nazis,
but Hoch remained in Germany during the Second World War,
although wasn't allowed to exhibit.
A pioneering feminist, Hoch continued
to make innovative and astute work until her death in 1978,
using humor and startling beauty to define
alternative views of self during a time
of enormous social change.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
You may not know you know Yayoi Kusama's work, but you do.
You may have waited in line or seen people waiting in line
to experience one of her miraculous infinity rooms
or noticed one of her bright patterns on a passing handbag,
or done a double take at her vibrant, distinctive look.
But Kusama, at age 87, is one of the world's best known living
artists and has had a remarkable career.
She was born in Japan and moved to New York in 1958,
first creating paintings she called infinity nets,
large scale canvases covered completely
in small painted loops.
This obsessive accumulation of gestures
extended into objects, phallic soft sculptures,
as well as walk-in sensorial environments.
In 1966, she created "Narcissus Garden"
for the Venice Biennale, a kinetic carpet of hundreds
of mirrored spheres, which she sold for $2 each
until the organizers shut her down.
Back in New York, she began staging happenings and events,
painting participants with polka dots
and choreographing orgiastic performances.
She published a sexual freedom newspaper,
opened naked painting studios, and made an experimental film
called "Kusama's Self Obliteration."
It's an apt term for her practice.
She calls her work art medicine, which
applies to both herself and her audience,
asking us to quote, "Forget yourself.
Become one with eternity.
Become part of your environment."
She burnt out in the '70s and returned home to Japan,
where she admitted herself to a mental hospital
and continued to make art and write novels.
She eventually built a studio near the hospital
and still works there every day, creating a wide range of works
all within her own language of optically vibrating accumulated
marks.
She once said, "I wanted to start a revolution,
using art to build the sort of society I myself envisioned."
And what's remarkable about Kusama
is not just her work, but the persistence and singularity
of that vision.
She and her work are immediately recognizable,
and that her brand can resound so clearly
through the din of contemporary visual culture
is an astounding feat.
Making another list of fierce women of art
has made me think about why I'm using the adjective
fierce to describe them.
When you look back upon the history of art,
the women whose work is able to stand out and persevere
despite centuries of discrimination
had had to be fierce.
And in truth, they still do.
So stay fierce and thanks for watching.