Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics

Women Making Art engages with contemporary feminist thinking on history, subjectivity and aesthetics to rework those conventions which have occluded women's cultural agency and defined art made by women as a derivative version of a masculine norm. Rather than providing an inclusive survey of women artists, Marsha Meskimmon examines women's art practice across five continents and in a wide range of media at a number of key moments in the twentieth century to give an understanding of the intersections of history and culture, art practice, and theoretical issues. Examining the ways in which women artists have reclaimed, expressed and defined personal and political histories, challenged conventional western notions of dichotomous sexed subjectivity, and opened out the relationships of pleasure/knowledge, word/flesh and space/time to new ways of thinking against the grain, Meskimmon discusses the work of artists such as Deborah Lefkowitz, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Cornelia Parker, Faith Ringgold, Mona Hatoum and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, as well as other, less well-known artists from around the world. Focusing on historical, theoretical and aesthetic moments in the twentieth century such as the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, the African diaspora, Queer Theory and cyberculture, Meskimmon illustrates the importance of women artists in rethinking dominant traditions and assumptions at times of cultural, political and technological change. Book jacket.

Marsha Meskimmon is Reader in Art History and Theory at Loughborough University