(no subject)
Kay, so hopefully I'll be able to keep my attention span up long enough to make this worth it. *coughs and puts on important voice*
While studying art history, I've found that the majority of people in general mental picture of what and who artists are: Leonardo da Vinci, sketching out designs for an early helicopter; Michaelangelo laboring at the Sistine Chapel ceiling; van Gogh, cutting his ear off; or hard-drinking womanizers like Jackson Pollock....
Basically, men.
This isn't to say that men haven't been great contributors to art history. They obviously have. However, there's been a great omission of women artists in general from the layman's art vocabulary. If I were to go up to, say, a business major and ask him or her to name a famous female artist, they'd probably not be able to think of one off the bat (not that I have anything against business majors asides from the fact that they hate fun.)
So basically, I'm going to try to start a blog project that goes back into art history and brings some of my favorite female artists to the forefront. And since ilu guys, you get to be my test audience XD
This is Ghada Amer.
Born in Cairo, Egypt and trained in Paris and Nice, France, Ghada Amer is a contemporary artist dealing with the subjects of gender and female sexuality. Particular to her work is the examination of the idealized art historical female (for men to project their desires onto) versus the real female with all her own flaws and personal desires. Despite the dichotomy of her Islamic upbringing in Egypt and Western social mores, her feminist work deals with the universal oppression of women in all it's forms.
In her work, she explores many related themes: the submission of women to the tyranny of expected domesticity, the celebration of female sexuality and pleasure, the incomprehensibility of love, the foolishness of war and violence, and an overall quest for formal beauty.
Awards and notable exhibitions (quoted from Wikipedia until I edit it myself):
"Amer's work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions at such venues as Cheim & Read, New York, Deitch Projects, New York; the 2000 Whitney Biennial, New York; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; the 2000 Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; SITE Sante Fe, NM; the 1999 Venice Biennale; the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale; Gagosian Gallery, London and Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills.
She is the first Arab artist to have a one-person exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. A detail of her work, Knotty but Nice was used on the cover of the September 2006 cover of ARTnews magazine, as part of a focus on erotic art. In 2003 Amer's work was included inLooking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora, at The Museum for African Art in Queens. In early 2008 a retrospective of her work was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, at the museum's Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. In the same year, she was featured in Chiara Clemente's documentary "Our City Dreams"."
Amer's most famous trademark is the use of embroidery as a medium, which she refers to as her "paint". The use of the feminine craft of embroidery mixed with the masculine dominated field of contemporary art and the field of painting in general from an art historical perspective. Her organic, erotic, and drip-painting inspired paintings are a far cry from the expected neatness of such a domestic craft as embroidery. Much like Pollock's drip paintings, Amer leaves loose threads and knots hanging from the composition, much in the way a painter would let the drips run down the canvas. Her embroidery work, inspired by the male dominated field of Abstract Expressionism, forces the viewer to read the work from the feminine perspective.
In her particular series of embroidered paintings, "Color Misbehaviors", Amer appropriates images from soft-core pornographic magazines; repeating and overlapping her image, she both obscures and reveals the forms in her work. This work is an inherent rejection of the male gaze rooted in pornography.
From Color Misbehavior:
More: http://www.sheisfrench.com/ghada-amers-misbehavior/art/
Some other iconic works by Amer include:
Barbie Loves Ken, Ken Loves Barbie, which questions the role of stereotypes by making people (women in particular) examine the ways role-playing games like Barbie reinforce the male-dominating, heterosexual model of a perfect life. However, the emptiness of both suits leave the future open for someone of either gender to fill either role.
"“Gawami al Lada” or "Encyclopedia of Pleasure" was written by Ali Ibn Nasr Al Katib around the late 11th/early12th century. I was interested in this book because it was written by a Muslim centuries ago, and is forbidden today, according to Muslim law. This shows how open-minded literature was at that time and how centuries later, we are living in a much more conservative time. It is very sad to see that this voice has now been silenced. Why has speaking and reading about sexuality become so taboo in today's Muslim society?
I have chosen to trace and then embroider parts of the Encyclopedia on a grid of fifty-seven boxes… Specifically, I am choosing to illustrate parts of the Encyclopedia that speak of women's pleasure….'"- Ghada Amer
"A notable section of Ghada Amer: Love Has No End contains three photographs from a larger series that Ghada Amer collaborated on with two fellow artists in 1991, titled I ♥ Paris, 1991. Then an art student living in Paris, Amer and close friend and artist Ladan S. Naderi walked around the city, dressed in veils and other conservative garments, staging group portraits in front of famous Parisienne tourist attractions such as the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and the iconic merry-go-round located at the Sacre Coeur. These photographs were taken shortly after a string of terrorist bombings by Islamic militants in Paris took place from 1990 to 1991. The series also extended into performances of Amer and Iranian-born Naderi attending art openings around Paris dressed in the Iranian chador and Egyptian naqqab, which called attention to the regional variations of Islamic attire and the meaning associated with choosing to wear the garments."-Brooklyn Museum
I've left out a lot about her, but I feel that that gives a good overview. Do you guys think I should continue this?
While studying art history, I've found that the majority of people in general mental picture of what and who artists are: Leonardo da Vinci, sketching out designs for an early helicopter; Michaelangelo laboring at the Sistine Chapel ceiling; van Gogh, cutting his ear off; or hard-drinking womanizers like Jackson Pollock....
Basically, men.
This isn't to say that men haven't been great contributors to art history. They obviously have. However, there's been a great omission of women artists in general from the layman's art vocabulary. If I were to go up to, say, a business major and ask him or her to name a famous female artist, they'd probably not be able to think of one off the bat (not that I have anything against business majors asides from the fact that they hate fun.)
So basically, I'm going to try to start a blog project that goes back into art history and brings some of my favorite female artists to the forefront. And since ilu guys, you get to be my test audience XD
This is Ghada Amer.
Born in Cairo, Egypt and trained in Paris and Nice, France, Ghada Amer is a contemporary artist dealing with the subjects of gender and female sexuality. Particular to her work is the examination of the idealized art historical female (for men to project their desires onto) versus the real female with all her own flaws and personal desires. Despite the dichotomy of her Islamic upbringing in Egypt and Western social mores, her feminist work deals with the universal oppression of women in all it's forms.
In her work, she explores many related themes: the submission of women to the tyranny of expected domesticity, the celebration of female sexuality and pleasure, the incomprehensibility of love, the foolishness of war and violence, and an overall quest for formal beauty.
Awards and notable exhibitions (quoted from Wikipedia until I edit it myself):
"Amer's work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions at such venues as Cheim & Read, New York, Deitch Projects, New York; the 2000 Whitney Biennial, New York; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; the 2000 Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; SITE Sante Fe, NM; the 1999 Venice Biennale; the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale; Gagosian Gallery, London and Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills.
She is the first Arab artist to have a one-person exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. A detail of her work, Knotty but Nice was used on the cover of the September 2006 cover of ARTnews magazine, as part of a focus on erotic art. In 2003 Amer's work was included inLooking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora, at The Museum for African Art in Queens. In early 2008 a retrospective of her work was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, at the museum's Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. In the same year, she was featured in Chiara Clemente's documentary "Our City Dreams"."
Amer's most famous trademark is the use of embroidery as a medium, which she refers to as her "paint". The use of the feminine craft of embroidery mixed with the masculine dominated field of contemporary art and the field of painting in general from an art historical perspective. Her organic, erotic, and drip-painting inspired paintings are a far cry from the expected neatness of such a domestic craft as embroidery. Much like Pollock's drip paintings, Amer leaves loose threads and knots hanging from the composition, much in the way a painter would let the drips run down the canvas. Her embroidery work, inspired by the male dominated field of Abstract Expressionism, forces the viewer to read the work from the feminine perspective.
In her particular series of embroidered paintings, "Color Misbehaviors", Amer appropriates images from soft-core pornographic magazines; repeating and overlapping her image, she both obscures and reveals the forms in her work. This work is an inherent rejection of the male gaze rooted in pornography.
From Color Misbehavior:
More: http://www.sheisfrench.com/ghada-amers-misbehavior/art/
Some other iconic works by Amer include:
Barbie Loves Ken, Ken Loves Barbie, which questions the role of stereotypes by making people (women in particular) examine the ways role-playing games like Barbie reinforce the male-dominating, heterosexual model of a perfect life. However, the emptiness of both suits leave the future open for someone of either gender to fill either role.
"“Gawami al Lada” or "Encyclopedia of Pleasure" was written by Ali Ibn Nasr Al Katib around the late 11th/early12th century. I was interested in this book because it was written by a Muslim centuries ago, and is forbidden today, according to Muslim law. This shows how open-minded literature was at that time and how centuries later, we are living in a much more conservative time. It is very sad to see that this voice has now been silenced. Why has speaking and reading about sexuality become so taboo in today's Muslim society?
I have chosen to trace and then embroider parts of the Encyclopedia on a grid of fifty-seven boxes… Specifically, I am choosing to illustrate parts of the Encyclopedia that speak of women's pleasure….'"- Ghada Amer
"A notable section of Ghada Amer: Love Has No End contains three photographs from a larger series that Ghada Amer collaborated on with two fellow artists in 1991, titled I ♥ Paris, 1991. Then an art student living in Paris, Amer and close friend and artist Ladan S. Naderi walked around the city, dressed in veils and other conservative garments, staging group portraits in front of famous Parisienne tourist attractions such as the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and the iconic merry-go-round located at the Sacre Coeur. These photographs were taken shortly after a string of terrorist bombings by Islamic militants in Paris took place from 1990 to 1991. The series also extended into performances of Amer and Iranian-born Naderi attending art openings around Paris dressed in the Iranian chador and Egyptian naqqab, which called attention to the regional variations of Islamic attire and the meaning associated with choosing to wear the garments."-Brooklyn Museum
I've left out a lot about her, but I feel that that gives a good overview. Do you guys think I should continue this?