Mothers of Invention The Feminist Roots of Contemporary Art

Offering a radical rewriting of the history of contemporary art from a feminist perspective, four distinguished authors explore the lineages of performance, abstraction, craft and ecofeminism in ways that reveal the debt these important genres owe to the work of pioneering women artists. The painters, sculptors and performance artists featured here have shaped ideas now dominating the art world: the vulnerability of the environment, the rise of activist art, the challenge to the reign of high technology (including digital culture), and the development of a new language of abstraction. Having demolished the linear narrative of modernism, the privileging of a white male ethnocentric vision, the division of high and low art and the separation of art from larger social issues, feminist artists laid the groundwork for the globalised, multi-media, postmodern art world of today. Illustrated with a spread of work from the last sixty years (and including contextual discussion of earlier practitioners), this book makes a compelling case for placing feminist art and artists at the heart of contemporary art.

'Breaking the Rules, Rewriting the Script: Feminist Influences on Contemporary Art - A Roundtable Conversation with E. Heartney, H. Posner, N. Princenthal and S. Scott'; 1. 'Performance Art and Action', H. Posner; 2. 'Handmade: Art, Craft and Feminism', N. Princenthal; 3. 'Beyond Tragic and Timeless: Women, Abstraction and Feminism', S. Scott; 4. 'Confronting Dominionism: How Women Rewrote the Role of Humans in Nature', E. Heartney; Epilogue; Further Reading; Acknowledgments and Index