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Women with an Art for Change
By Marielena Zuniga
The New York Times headline shocked Judith Brodsky
that morning in 1990. It read: “One Hundred Million
Women are Missing.” A ripple of indignation stirred in
the creative and feminist heart of the renowned printmaker
and artist from New Jersey. The essay stated that in
places in the world where women had unequal status, they
simply vanished. In China, because they were female, girls
were aborted, murdered or abandoned as infants. In India,
they didn’t receive the same health care as males, and died. Simply because they were female, women were missing.
Brodsky, an advocate for women artists, set about documenting the essay in a series of prints and titled it after the newspaper headline. The poetic and persuasive grouping addressed the denigrating treatment of and discrimination against women in traditionally male areas. One of the panels, “Red Fingernails” (1994), portrayed row upon row of red fingernails and told her own daughter’s story.
“When she was in college studying to be a molecular biologist, she went to meet the professor assigned to be her mentor,” says Brodsky, co-director of the Institute for Women and Art (IWA) <http://iwa.rutgers.edu/> at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. “But when he saw my daughter wearing red fingernail polish, he told her, ‘I’m not sure I want you as a student. Someone who wears red fingernail polish can’t possibly be a serious student.’ Today, my daughter runs a huge research lab and furthers the careers of women in science.”
In her large-scale prints and drawings, Brodsky tackles
such social issues, as is the case in another series of lithographs, “The Meadowlands Strike Back.” For many years she drove the New Jersey Turnpike to Rutgers, where she also heads the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions. Outraged by the landscape, she spoke in her artist’s statement of oil refineries “sucking out the resources of the earth and replacing them with cancerous residues,” and of “garbage mountains landscaped to look like parks, but rotting, foul and burning underneath.”
Brodsky has not been alone in her art-activism efforts.
During the last few decades, more and more women artists
from Toyko to Mexico City to New York City have been stepping forward. Telling stories with their art. Struggling to
foment social change.
“The Named and the Unnamed” (2002), for example, a sculpture/photograph/ video installation by First Nations/Canadian-born Rebecca Belmore, protests and mourns the abduction and murder of more than 50 women, many of them sex workers, in Vancouver. (First Nations denotes the Aboriginal peoples in Canada.)
Playwright Lynn Nottage of Brooklyn, New York, traveled to Africa to research the brutalities Congolese women had suffered in their country’s civil conflict. Her play, “Ruined,” depicting rape of women as a tool of war, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
For decades, Japanese artist Yoko Ono, wife of the late John Lennon, has used her art for positive social change
and action. In 1964 in Tokyo, she took the passive resistance of the Civil Rights movement and made it a medium of art in “Cut Piece.” Sitting onstage in an auditorium, Ono invited audience members to climb up and clip off her clothing with scissors.
A theatrical metaphor for violence against women, Ono’s performance art is today onscreen as part of the traveling
exhibit, “Off the Beaten Path: Violence, Women and Art,” curated by Art Works for Change <www.artworksforchange.
org> in Oakland, California. When the show opened in Oslo in 2009, Ono told a Norwegian newspaper: “I want to bring sad situations to light. … I want to express works like ‘Cut Piece’ in order to heal.’”
Violence, women and art
Ono’s art, as with all the works in “Off the Beaten Path,” is a catalyst for the show’s theme. The multi-media exhibit
addresses gender violence from a global perspective, and brings together 33 well-respected artists from 26 countries,
including Japan, South Korea, Peru, Norway, Israel and Kenya. The show opened earlier this year in Tijuana,
Mexico, and will be traveling the world until 2013.
“The invited artists were asked to help us create new representations through their artworks and, in doing so, help us feel and understand the essence of the problem of violence against women,” says Randy Jayne Rosenberg,
executive director and chief curator. Living up to its name, Art Works for Change partners with leading educational
and activist groups to produce art exhibits on topics such as social justice, human rights, gender equity, war and
peace, and the environment.
While Rosenberg’s hope is that art touches people deeply, the nonprofit also uses art to engage community groups and partners. Their exhibits remain three to four months at a venue, allowing the public at large to discuss the topic, or groups to hold conferences or do their own programming over an extended period of time.
“When we show ‘Off the Beaten Path’ in Mexico City, we have a collective of 18 organizations addressing sex
trafficking who want to become involved,” she says. The idea for “Off the Beaten Path” was born after artist Susan Plum, based in Houston but raised in Mexico City, created an installation project, “Luz y Solidaridad” (Light and Solidarity) for another exhibition by Art Works for Change. The art project brings to light the problem of violence against women everywhere, but especially in Juarez, Mexico, where women and girls continue to go missing and turn up murdered, and honors the sorrows of their mothers and families. While creating that piece, Plum says she was aware that it was only one seed being planted for a much greater global problem of violence toward women.
“There is no justice for these women,” Plum explains, “and my intention for ‘Luz y Solidaridad’ was not only as art-activism, but as a moving and shared experience for both mothers [of Juarez] and the audience.”
Now part of the “Off the Beaten Path” exhibit, Plum’s display features 12-foot brooms hanging from a ceiling.
Rosenberg explains: “It’s a symbolic work, with the brooms used in a shamanic way, with the broom that sweeps and cleanses, an idea that was healing to the situation of these women. She accompanied it with a performance video of women tapping the earth and sweeping, the idea of awakening the spirit of the earth for healing.”
Yoko Inoue, originally from Kyoto, Japan, and now living in New York, created a digital print scanned from a Polaroid for the exhibition. The image (below) of a woman holding a frying pan covering her breasts has become the identity for “Off the Beaten Path.” According to Inoue, “In some communities where direct intervention is impossible, women respond to severe domestic violence by assembling outside of the household in question and banging out an alarm on pots and pans. This informs the man that the spirit he attempts to break belongs to many, not one.”
Rosenberg adds, “So art tells us that the community can come together to make change. I’m hoping this exhibition
does show people there are options, that they feel empowered, giving them voice, that they can speak out about their situations.”
Who was that woman artist?
Given the myriad social issues and women artists to portray them, however, begs a basic question: Why women and art? Don’t men use their artistic expressions to make political/social statements as well? And what is the form and nature of feminist-artistic activism?
While those questions continue to be discussed and debated in the art world, some realities exist, agree art experts. Indeed, male artists have impacted society with their art, and have been studied, exhibited and sold throughout history. Women artists, as in most endeavors, haven’t been recognized despite their contributions. “So that means when you’re in an educational setting, women’s work is not included in the textbooks when doing art history or art appreciation,” says Ferris Olin, Ph.D., co-director with Brodsky of IWA at Rutgers.
Olin cites another key reason women artists are not studied or are written out of history. In addition to and because of
discrimination, many women artists are not documented, she says. But the Women Artists Archives National
Directory (WAAND) <http://waand.rutgers. edu/> at the university, of which Olin is project co-director, is changing
that. WAAND is the nation’s first online integrated directory of primary source collections of women visual artists active in the U.S. since 1945. “We’ve been working with artists and organizations to organize their papers, and have a body of work and documentation available to future scholars,” she says.
Working to showcase and support women artists on many levels, Olin is also co-director of The Feminist Art Project (TFAP), <http://feministartproject.rutgers.edu/home/> under the umbrella of the IWA. TFAP brings together feminist artists, curators and art critics, among others, to refocus public attention on the significant achievements of the Feminist Art Movement, born in the U.S. in the 1960s
and ‘70s (See sidebar on page 14).
“TFAP’s mission not only celebrates feminist art,” Olin says, “but also demonstrates the aesthetic, intellectual and political impact of women on the visual arts, art history and art practice—past and present—and is a strategic intervention against the ongoing erasure of women from the cultural record.”
For Brodsky, the feminist art movement continues to be important not only politically and in being an activist, but
in her personal work as an artist. “My art was already about narration. Now I could pull in whatever elements I needed
to tell my story. I had always defined my art with the important social, political and cultural issues of my own times, absorbing everything around me and putting it together, hoping to transmit to future generations something about my period in which I lived and what was important.”
Supporting women in the arts
Even as more women artists come into their own, the lives and stories of women themselves still aren’t represented as they could be in the arts, says Martha Richards. “I want to see what we women feel, what we think. And I believe we don’t get that as much in the mainstream. We need more characters in movies and the arts who speak from our perspective rather than what a man might think,” says the executive director and founder of WomenArts in San Francisco, California <www.womenarts.org>.
The non-profit helps women find the resources they need to do their creative work by providing free networking, fundraising and advocacy information on their website. “I was disturbed that stereotyped images of women were often accepted without comment in 'works of art,’ and I had experienced many situations where women artists were not paid as well as their male counterparts,” Richards says. “I decided to create an organization that would address those issues.”
The WomenArts Network maintains a directory of more than 1,200 women artists and provides information about funding sources through its e-newsletters and website, as well as organizing activities like Support Women Artists
Now (SWAN) Day. The annual event, held the last Saturday of March (Women’s History Month in the U.S.) and surrounding weeks, celebrates women’s creativity and art in all its forms, with more than 170 events held in 14 countries last year.
“When we announced SWAN Day, one of our goals was to embody our faith in women’s creativity,” Richards says. “We did this because we have spoken to so many women artists who doubt their own talents and instincts. They are discouraged because our society constantly tells them that being ‘businesslike’ is more important than being creative. In recent months, they have seen that when huge businesses fail, they get bailed out because they are too important to go under. No one says this about the countless women artists who are suffering in the current economy.”
In April 2009, author Isabel Allende of Chile spoke to women artists at SWAN Day at the San Francisco Women’s Film Festival, sharing that when she grew up, there were no
women writers she could emulate. “The few women writers were British, spinsters and had committed suicide,”
she said.
Challenging the double standard in the act of creation, she added: “When a woman creates anything, it’s craft. When a man creates anything, it’s art … there’s an underestimation of anything a woman creator does. We are breaking those barriers, but it takes a long time.”
Esther Waikuru, an artist from Nairobi, Kenya, attended SWAN Day last year, saying, “This was an eye opener for us women to understand that we are the majority and we can make positive change. As mothers, sisters and
daughters of the world, we can cherish our [artistic] creation.”
Women making waves in film
While women have been making inroads in the fine arts, their work in film has been bringing increasingly important social and gendered issues to large audiences. “The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo,” directed by Lisa F.
Jackson, is one of Debra Zimmerman’s current favorite examples.
The results of that film were quite extraordinary, says the executive director of Women Make Movies (WMM) <www.wmm.com>, a Brooklyn-based non-profit media arts organization that facilitates the production, promotion,
distribution and exhibition of independent films and videotapes by and about women. “The wife of the U.S. Ambassador to the UN was in attendance at a screening
of the film,” Zimmerman explains. “She brought it home and showed it to her husband. It moved him to sponsor a UN Security Council resolution that recognizes that rape as a tactic of war destabilizes families and threatens a nation’s security.”
With a deep belief that films create social change, she
adds of WMM’s mission: “We want to have an impact on
how women are seen in the world, the way women have
equality in terms of their participation in the world, the way
their lives are part of dialogue on all kinds of issues.”
At the 2010 Academy Awards, “Which Way Home,” by
Rebecca Cammisa, was nominated, but didn’t win, in the
Best Documentary Feature category. The documentary follows three unaccompanied Latin American children as they journey through Mexico to reach the U.S. border so they can reunite with their parents who have left them behind.
“The film was produced through our production assistance
program,” Zimmerman says, “and has received a number
of accolades, and was also nominated for Best
Documentary at the 2010 Independent Spirit Awards.”
While mainstream films are often described as art, documentaries often aren’t. Zimmerman reflects: “When I see a really good documentary, it’s the way I feel when I see a really good painting or sculpture. I feel I’ve seen the world in a different way. ‘El General,’ which won at The Sundance Film Festival, is a beautifully poetic, visual film made by a woman about her great grandfather in Mexico who was a dictator. It’s pure poetry. That’s art. I wouldn’t say all documentary is art, but a really good documentary is absolutely art.”
In other countries women are also making cinematic
inroads, such as at Taiwan’s annual Women Make Waves
Festival, founded in 1993, the largest of its kind in Asia. The
festival features 100 films by international and local female
directors, with themes that include women’s health and
body, animation and experimental films.
“We were very much involved with the first Seoul
Women’s Film Festival in Korea,” Zimmerman adds, “which
was founded in 1997 after Women Make Waves … and both
of these festivals represent the incredible young energy
around women’s filmmaking.”
Not part of WMM’s services, but showing the power of
women artists, “The Hurt Locker,” about a bomb-disposal
team in Iraq, earned Kathryn Bigelow the Academy Award
as best director in 2010. She became the first woman in
Oscar history to win that honor, calling it “the moment of a lifetime.” In total, the film garnered six Academy Awards,
including best picture.
Art working for change
But can art really foment social change? Actress Emma
Thompson hopes that it does. She is the driving force behind a unique art installation—“Journey”—which emphasizes that sex slavery is closer to home than many think. The art project consists of seven transport containers (the kind used for trafficking people) to illustrate the brutal and harrowing experiences of women sold into the sex trade. Each container is curated by a different artist and captures one aspect of the road a woman has taken, internal and external.
Zimmerman also has seen firsthand how art can create
change in attitudes and shares a personal story. She had had a huge fight with her father about the U.S. bombing of
Afghanistan, arguing to the point of hanging up on him,
unusual for her, she says.
“The next week he called me and his perspective had
changed completely. He now felt it was wrong to bomb
Afghanistan and when I asked him why, he said he had seen ‘Beneath the Veil’ on CNN and he had not realized that the country had already been bombed and it was mostly women and children who were affected. I have to say, that was an extraordinary moment for me.”
The question of art’s power to make social change is a
question that Art Works for Change has grappled with for
some time, Rosenberg admits. “If it came to a ‘yes’ or ‘no’
whether art is going to save the world, art is not going to
create the kind of change we really need in this society, to
get rid of some of the evils or general violence against
women,” she says.
But art does have its impact, she qualifies. The “Off the
Beaten Path” exhibit, not intended to be sensational or
tabloid, is hoping to touch the audience at an emotional
level, in a different kind of language, Rosenberg says.
“So, we’re hoping the art is a catalyst. We’ve had feedback
from people who have seen the art and are saying,
‘Honestly, I never realized it [violence against women] was
happening to the extent it’s happening,’” she says. “We hope that the artworks in this show can push the door open a little wider, and in the process, shed new light on an old problem as we begin to forge a new journey off the beaten path.” |
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