Women Artists at the Millennium

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Artists, art historians, and critics look at the legacies of feminism and critical theory in the work of women artists, more than thirty years after the beginning of the modern women’s movement and Linda Nochlin’s landmark essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”

More than thirty years after the birth of the modern women’s movement and the beginnings of feminist art-making and art history, the time is ripe to examine the legacies of those revolutions. In Women Artists at the Millennium, artists, art historians, and critics examine the differences that feminist art practice and critical theory have made in late twentieth-century art and the discourses surrounding it. In 1971, when Linda Nochlin published her essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in a special issue of Art News, there were no women’s studies, no feminist theory, no such thing as feminist art criticism; there was instead a focus on the mythic figure of the great (male) artist through history. Since then, the “woman artist” has not simply been assimilated into the canon of “greatness” but has expanded art-making into a multiplicity of practices with new parameters and perspectives. In Women Artists at the Millennium artists including Martha Rosler and Yvonne Rainer reflect upon their own varied practices and art historians discuss the innovative work of such figures as Louise Bourgeois, Lygia Clark, Mona Hatoum, and Carrie Mae Weems. And Linda Nochlin considers changes since her landmark essay and looks to the future, writing, “We will need all our wit and courage to make sure that women’s voices are heard, their work seen and written about.”

Artist Pages By: Ellen Gallagher, Ann Hamilton, Mary Kelly, Yvonne Rainer, Martha Rosler

Contributing Writers: Emily Apter, Carol Armstrong, Catherine de Zegher, Maria DiBattista, Brigid Doherty, Briony Fer, Tamar Garb, Anne Higonnet, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Molly Nesbit, Mignon Nixon, Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Lisa Tickner, Anne Wagner

• Portfolio, by Yvonne Rainer
• “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”, by Linda Nochlin
• Rethinking the Artist in the Woman, the Woman in the Artist, and That Old Chestnut, the Gaze, by Griselda Pollock
• Mediating Generation, by Lisa Tickner
• Responding, by Molly Nesbit
• Portfolio, by Martha Rosler
• Duchess of Nothing, by Ewa Lajer-Burcharth
• Drawing Drawing, by Briony Fer
• The Inside Is the Outside, by Catherine de Zegher
• Responding, by Brigid Doherty
• Portfolio, by Ann Hamilton
• Hairlines, by Tamar Garb
• The She-Fox, by Mignon Nixon
• Difference and Disfiguration, or Trockel as Mime, by Anne M. Wagner
• Responding, by Emily Apter
• Portfolio, by Mary Kelly
• Francesca Woodman, by Carol Armstrong
• Taunting and Haunting, by Abigail Solomon-Godeau
• Sally Mann, by Anne Higonnet
• Responding, by Maria diBattista
• Portfolio, by Ellen Gallagher

Carol Armstrong is Doris Stevens Professor of Women’s Studies in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. She is the author of Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843-1875 (MIT Press, 1998).

Catherine de Zegher was Director of The Drawing Center in New York from 1999 to 2006. She is the editor of Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth Century Art in, of, and from the Feminine (MIT Press, 1996).

Yvonne Rainer (b. 1934) is a dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker. She is the author of Feelings Are Facts: A Life (MIT Press).

Molly Nesbit teaches at Vassar College. She is a contributing editor at Artforum and is the author of Atget’s Seven Albums and Their Common Sense.

Martha Rosler lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She has taught and lectured on photography since the mid-1970s. Her work was the subject of a major retrospective, “Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World,” in 2000. She is the author of 14 books and numerous essays.

Catherine de Zegher was Director of The Drawing Center in New York from 1999 to 2006. She is the editor of Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth Century Art in, of, and from the Feminine (MIT Press, 1996).

BRIGID DOHERTY teaches the history of modern and contemporary art, literature, and film in the Departments of Germanic Languages and Literatures, and Art and Archaeology, at Princeton University. Her book Montage: The Body and the Work of Art in Dada, Brecht, and Benjamin will be published by the University of California Press in 2004, and she is currently working on a second book project, Writing as Making Present: The Art of Hanne Darboven, 1966–2000.

Mignon Nixon is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at University College London and an editor of October magazine. She is the author of Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art and the editor of a previous October Files volume, Eva Hesse (both published by the MIT Press).

Emily Apter is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at New York University. She is the editor of a book series, “Translation/ Transnation,” published by Princeton University Press and is completing a book on the politics of translation. Her recent book, Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects was published in 1999 (Chicago University Press).

Carol Armstrong is Doris Stevens Professor of Women’s Studies in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. She is the author of Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843-1875 (MIT Press, 1998).US

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