Cartographies of a Violent Landscape: Viramontes’ and Moraga’s Remapping of Feminisms in Under the Feet of Jesus and Heroes and Saints

Feb. 1, 2008

“I cannot continue to use my body to be walked over to make a connection.” –Cherríe Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back, xv There is “[n]o sense talking tough unless you do it.” –Estrella, Under the Feet of Jesus , 45 [1] In her 1980 preface to This Bridge Called...

Minnesota’s Hot Mamas: An interview with Joanna Inglot

Jan. 2, 2008

[1] KLEIN: In your book WARM: A Feminist Art Collective in Minnesota you chronicle the history of the Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota, a woman’s art collective and gallery based in Minneapolis. In the introduction, you write that “thirty years after the founding of the WARM collective no studies about...

Jet-Man Meets Cover Girl at the F-111: Gender and Technology in James Rosenquist’s F-111

Oct. 1, 2006

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went to the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations! —Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California” (1955) Figure 1 James Rosenquist (b. 1933). _F-111_. 1964-65. Oil on canvas with aluminum. 10′ x 86′ overall. Purchase Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alex...

Agreeable Objects and Angry Paintings: “Female Imagery” in Art by Hannah Wilke and Louise Fishman, 1970-1973

April 1, 2006

[1] “Who has the guts to deal with cunts?” asked sculptor Hannah Wilke in 1973 (Schwartz). Louise Fishman, a painter, told critic Sarah Whitworth that her thoughts immediately turned to women’s genitals when she decided to examine consciously what part being a woman played in her work (58). Both saw...

Mystically Perverse: Towards a Queer Semiology of Breton Male Bodies

April 1, 2005

Paintings are not mere illusions about the world but determined and produced allusions to it. Art history must acknowledge these complexities and work on these real social processes, significations and their interactions and relations. Art history which is also a practice of representation must provide complex accounts (Orton and Pollock,...

Family, Sexuality, Gender, Art: Jo-Anne Berelowitz interviews Vivien Green-Fryd about her new book, Art and the Crisis of Marriage

Jan. 2, 2004

[1] BERELOWITZ: (1) In this book you examine debates about marriage, family, sexuality, and gender by focusing on the marriages of Edward and Jo Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz. I was struck by a shift from your previous focus on race and ethnicity in your book Art and...

Smoke and Mirrors: Feminism, Figurality, and “The Vine-Leaf”

Oct. 1, 2003

If one wishes to deceive a man, what one presents to him is the painting of a veil, that is to say, something that incites him to ask what is behind it. –Jacques Lacan, “What Is a Picture?” Ignorance, far more than knowledge, is what can never be taken for...

Elaine de Kooning, Portraiture, and the Politics of Sexuality

Sept. 1, 2003

[1] In the 1950s, Elaine de Kooning used the Abstract Expressionist style of “action painting” to create sexually- charged images of men. For example, in Fairfield Porter #1, 1954, de Kooning pushes the seated faceless figure to the foreground, confronting the viewer with his open-legged stance; an invitation to visually...

Clarence Holbrook Carter’s War Bride and the Machine/Woman Fantasy

May 1, 2003

Dynamos are women Round with the first sweet swelling Of a new mother’s milk. — Macknight Black, “New Mother,” 1929 [1] In 1940, Clarence Holbrook Carter produced a painting that disturbed him. In fact, War Bride (figure 1) was so unlike his previous work that he was reluctant to exhibit...

Refashioning Masculine Identity: Jo-Anne Berelowitz interviews Martin Berger about his book, Man Made: Thomas Eakins and the Construction of Gilded Age Manhood.

Jan. 2, 2003

[1] BERELOWITZ: You make the argument that Eakins’s paintings are an attempt to negotiate – indeed, to refashion – Gilded Age conceptions of masculinity. Could you set out for us what was the dominant understanding of masculinity when Eakins was embarking on his career in the 1870s and what shift...

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