Women Artists and the 1944 Canadian Army Art Exhibition

In 1944, the Canadian Army held an art exhibition in Ottawa. Among the 33 exhibitors were five women: Cathryne Blackley, Beulah Jaenicke, Molly Lamb, H.E. Herbert, and Mary Wilson. Lamb went on to a stellar career but no trace of Wilson or Herbert or their exhibited paintings has yet been found. Unknown and invisible for more than 60 years, Beulah Jaenicke and Cathryne Blackley recently donated their war-related work to the Canadian War Museum. Why has it taken so long for their work to resurface? By exploring the presence in the exhibition, their subject selection, their artworks’ reception, and their own attitudes to their work at the time and after I hope to shed light on the relationship of women and art during the Second World War

Women Making Shells: Marking Women’s Presence in the Munitions Work 1914–1918: The Art of Frances Loring, Florence Wyle, Mabel May, and Dorothy Stevens

In 1915, while working as a volunteer in a munitions factory canteen, Canadian artist Florence Carlyle described the munitions factory in letters to her family as a “systematized hell.” However, the atmosphere of the factory made a deep impression on her, for she continued; “what a picture for an artist...an artist with a fifty foot canvas and tubs of paint.” This paper will focus on the art commissioned from Canadian women artists during the First World War by the Canadian War Memorials Fund (CWMF), and specifically upon art which depicts the subject of women working in Canadian munitions factories. These works of painting, sculpture and printmaking were executed by four of Canada\u27s premier women artists: Frances Loring (1887–1968), Florence Wyle (1881–1968), Henrietta Mabel May (1884–1971), and Dorothy Stevens (1888–1966) between 1918 and 1920. These commissions garnered significant critical acclaim, and were hailed as among the most successful works in the Canadian War Memorials (CWM) exhibitions that toured between 1919 and 1924. The art created by these women not only forms the nucleus of official war art by Canadian women artists during the First World War, but is also significant as powerful expressions of Canadian home front activity during the war. This paper will examine this artistic production with consideration of the social context of the time, and in the light of the contemporary critical reception

Who Were the Greatest Women Artists of the Twentieth Century? A Quantitative Investigation

Recent decades have witnessed an outpouring of research on the contributions of women artists. But as is typical in the humanities, these studies have been qualitative, and consequently do not provide a systematic evaluation of the relative importance of different women artists. A survey of the illustrations of the work of women artists contained in textbooks of art history reveals that art historians judge Cindy Sherman to be the greatest woman artist of the twentieth century, followed in order by Georgia O'Keeffe, Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, and Frida Kahlo. The life cycles of these artists have differed greatly: the conceptual Sherman, Hesse, and Kahlo all arrived at their major contributions much earlier, and more suddenly, than the experimental O'Keeffe and Bourgeois. The contrasts are dramatic, as Sherman produced her greatest work while in her 20s, whereas Bourgeois did not produce her greatest work until she had passed the age of 80. The systematic measurement of this study adds a dimension to our understanding of both the role of women in twentieth-century art and the careers of the major figures.

Quilters\u27s Oral History Project Collection - Accession 1278

This collection contains materials related to Dottie Moore’s oral history project for the organization “Piecing a Quilt of Life.” Dottie Moore is a fiber artist from Rock Hill, SC. Mrs. Moore that specializes in quilt art. She has been featured in many art and craft shows and is the author of Lives in Process: Creativity in the Second Fifty Years and has been published in numerous magazines and newsletters. She is also the founder of Piecing a Quilt of Life, “an international project dedicated to empowering senior women by recognizing their creative abilities.” Through this project Mrs. Moore interviewed over a hundred women artists and the majority of this collection consists of materials related to this project. The collection includes audio cassette tapes of the interviews, transcriptions, correspondence, slides, brochures, forms, inventories, poems, a VHS tape of a South Carolina Educational Television show concerning the project, a DVD of containing her interactive book, Lives in Process: Creativity in the Second Fifty Years, and other materials related to the project. For more information about Dottie Moore and her work please visit her website.https://digitalcommons.winthrop.edu/manuscriptcollection_findingaids/2052/thumbnail.jp

Contemporary Black Women Artists’ Narratives

The purpose of this study is to explore contemporary Black women visual artists’ experiences in the arts. Specific experiences studied include: finding support, balancing family responsibilities, and overcoming gender and race barriers. Though there are numerous articles on Black women’s artwork (e.g., Edwards, 2015; Murray, 2014; Wickham, 2015), there are few about their lived experiences, in their own words. To address this gap, semi-structured interviews were conducted with Black women visual artists from the southeast United States. Despite its focus on a particular group, the study speaks to diverse audiences about surmounting challenges in life and work. Two interviews have been conducted so far, and preliminary results show common themes. These themes include family support for art-making and family participation in art-making, mentorship and helpful connections with other Black professionals, strategic navigation around gender and race barriers, culture as an important theme in their work, and an integrated relationship between their academic professions and their artistic work. These results are clearly not conclusive nor generalizable, but may provide leads for future investigation. The results might also provide helpful information and guidance to emerging Black women artists. Both artists interviewed affirmed the importance of learning from more experienced artists, and this study can serve that end

The Kentucky Women Artists Timeline

This article highlights a partnership between the Margaret M. Bridwell Art Library at the University of Louisville and the Kentucky Foundation for Women to document the accomplishments of Kentucky women artists through a digital timeline. The timeline was made possible through the Director of the Art Library\u27s collaboration with a student intern on the research process and timeline design

Perspectives on Consciousness-Raising: A Modernist Intersectional Feminist Agenda

My thesis objective is to extend women\u27s understanding of the impalpable second-wave feminist term, consciousness-raising, and its applications through curating a fictitious exhibition. My fabricated exhibition Great Women Artists: Consciousness-Raising among Intersectional Feminists will juxtapose the works of iconic feminist artists who practiced consciousness-raising with emerging and iconic female artists to advocate consciousnessraising\u27s applicability for practicing women artists. Curating Great Women Artists will support the idea of raising a female class consciousness via mass consciousness-raising. I will utilize the voices of iconic second-wave feminists, such as Kathie Sarachild, who have discussed consciousness-raising’s impacts and supported the founding female class consciousness of feminist artists. Meanwhile, female class consciousness is rooted in the Marxist idea of ego and economic duality; male-representation\u27s dominance only exists with the subjugation of female artists. Raising a female class consciousness would acknowledge women artists\u27 lack of diversified representation in the male-dominated art world. Feminist artists may adapt consciousness-raising as a tool to elevate suppressed thoughts and feelings to change the dominant male visual practices, mutually draw conclusions, and command political activism, demanding institutional representation of women artists. If contemporary women artists practiced consciousness-raising in small intimate groups of women, they would uniquely contribute to modernism and create an essential dialogue between diverse women artists demanding intersectional womens’ art representation

Women Artists in the Collection

This special exhibition of the permanent collection focuses exclusively on the contributions of American women artists. The fact of women\u27s historical exclusion from the art world is part of the exploration, Why have there been no great women artists? -art historian Linda Nochlin famously asked in a 1971 essay. Her findings pointed to the past exclusion of women from working with male nude models, hence apprenticeships, then professions and academies, to which we add commercial gallery exhibitions, art criticism, and art history. Over the centuries this vicious cycle has shaped the current phenomenon: the predominance of male artists in museum collections . The expression better half historically referred to a wife or lover, acknowledging the significance of the unnamed woman by a man. Better Twelfth, in the title, refers to the approximate ratio of female to male artists currently represented in the collection, The exhibition demonstrates the productivity of women artists-primari ly twentiethcentury artists-by naming a selection of them in the galleries, allowing us to consider who is still missing in the collection, The galleries are organ ized according to six groups: work by pioneering art ists, sculpture, printmaking, photography, representational and abstract paintings