The piece from the article that I found most intriguing and inspiring has to be Chicago’s Menstruation Bathroom. Menstruation is seen as such a taboo thing in our society, we don’t openly talk about it. This piece is attempting to fight those taboos by bringing the imagery of Menstruation, the tampons, the pads, the blood, into the open as opposed to being hidden behind the stall doors. For me, this piece has even more meaning because in one of my other cultures classes we learned about women in Nepal who are sent to sleep in cow sheds during their periods because they are considered “impure” while menstruating. So art like this is important to help fight taboos and normalize this thing that is part of human life, and more specifically a woman’s
Anything from a police man leaning on a wall that gets lost in the crowd on busy days to a cleaning lady next to a garbage can. Duane creates life like art pieces that you can lose the fact that they are fake. The amount of detail along with the expressions on the figures’ faces tells the tale. The spectator creates a relationship to the piece because its the familiar look or feeling they receive from the experience. Duane uses the figures’ as they are portrayed to accomplish an everyday ordinary person moreover with that technique displays the ability to relate the viewers to the art
...ructure balance of the sculpture. How he did it all from memory and made it look fantastic. The blackberry woman may not be one of my favorites, but I love the controversy it brings. How our world can be so cruel just because the color of one’s skin, will still forever intrigue and irritate me.
In "Woman Work" the poet Maya Angelou has made it so the reader can see a womandoing all this work in the reader's head, and how life must have been like for her.
Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art, and Society 3rd ed. (NY: Thames & Hudson world of art, 2002), 153-160.
Our expression comes from a desire to be heard. As of late, I’ve been on a journey of finding my voice as a writer and activist. Constantly, I question the power of my individual voice. Am I loud enough? Am I putting in the work? Artists and creators alike are the architects of change, and even still, we can use a boost of inspiration. My inspiration comes from a visit I had at the new location of the AIDS Memorial Quilt.
Joan Brown’s piece titled Girl Sitting 1962 depicts a nude figure of a female body sitting. This colorful piece was made in 1962 and it is located in the Oakland Museum of California. It is oil on canvas, and can be seen on a white wall within a thin black frame around five by four feet. It has a composition of a female nude sitting to the left, leaving a big empty space on the right. The colors are made from a thick application of oil paint known as Impasto, where the paint are like globs, and does not look smooth at all. Instead, it is textured and shows off the brush and palette knife marks. Overall, the composition, application elements, colors, and size contributes together to give this piece an effect to make an individual feel small
No other artist has ever made as extended or complex career of presenting herself to the camera as has Cindy Sherman. Yet, while all of her photographs are taken of Cindy Sherman, it is impossible to class call her works self-portraits. She has transformed and staged herself into as unnamed actresses in undefined B movies, make-believe television characters, pretend porn stars, undifferentiated young women in ambivalent emotional states, fashion mannequins, monsters form fairly tales and those which she has created, bodies with deformities, and numbers of grotesqueries. Her work as been praised and embraced by both feminist political groups and apolitical mainstream art. Essentially, Sherman’s photography is part of the culture and investigation of sexual and racial identity within the visual arts since the 1970’s. It has been said that, “The bulk of her work…has been constructed as a theater of femininity as it is formed and informed by mass culture…(her) pictures insist on the aporia of feminine identity tout court, represented in her pictures as a potentially limitless range of masquerades, roles, projections” (Sobieszek 229).
Throughout the ages, mankind has been troubled by a multitude of questions. Through perseverance and great intellectual curiosity, many of these questions have answers. Long have they pondered questions such as “Why is the sky blue?” “Why is grass green?” “Is the sky falling?” “What is the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything?” and “What is the average velocity of an unladen swallow?” Thus far, we have been successful in compiling answers. However, there are other questions such as “Where do all the socks in laundry go?” “Why are gooses geese but mooses not meese?” and “What would we do without any hypothetical questions?” that have yet to be answered. However, through meditation, self-inquiry and theoretical logic, one of the unanswered questions has been answered. “What do women really do in the bathroom?”
Feminism and political issues have always been centered on in the art world and artists like to take these ideas and stretch them beyond their true meanings. Female artists such as Hannah Höch, who thrived during the Dada movement in the 1920s in Germany and Barbara Kruger who was most successful during the 1980s to 1990s in the United States, both take these issues and present them in a way that forces the public to think about what they truly mean. Many of Kruger’s works close in on issues such as the female identity and in relation to politics she focuses on consumerism and power. Höch, like Kruger, also focuses on female identity but from the 1920s when feminism was a fairly new concept and like Kruger focuses on politics but focuses more on the issues of her time such as World War I. With the technique of photomontage, these two artists take outside images and put them together in a way that displays their true views on feminism and politics even though both are from different times and parts of the world.
"Whilst some feminists have argued to be included in 'male stream' ideologies, many have also long argued that women are in important respects both different from and superior to men, and that the problem they face is not discrimination or capitalism but male power." (Bryson, 2003, p. 3). The feminist art movement is unclear in its description because some describe this movement as art that was simply created by women and others describe it as art with anti-male statements in mind. For the focal point of this paper, the goal will be to analyze several female artists and their works of art who influenced, and who are said to have made powerful influence both in the feminist art movement from a political and societal perspective, then and today. With that being said, we will start with the female artist Judy Chicago and a quote from her that calcifies her position as an artist. "I believe in art that is connected to real human feeling that extends itself beyond the limits of the art world to embrace all people who are striving for alternatives in an increasingly dehumanized
The lavatories in the women's dorm always get crowded on Saturday afternoon. B. The lavatorie's in the womens' dorm always get crowded on Saturday afternoon. C. The lavatories in the womens' dorm always get crowded on Saturday afternoon.
The Interaction Order of Public Bathrooms, written by Spencer E. Cahill, is an article that does a fairly well job at analyzing interpersonal relationships and individual practices in restrooms. Cahill used ideologies of Emile Durkheim, Erving Goffman, Margaret Atwood, Horace Miner, and Lyn Lofland to help construct his perspective on the individual’s expectations of bathroom etiquette through our experiences with others and how we internalize these behaviors.
There is a long history of gender roles in society. The expectations of gender roles continually shift; however, there is not a time when women and men share the same equalities simultaneously. The idea of how men and women should act is instilled in us at a young age. I think it starts really young with girls and boys being told what they can be and when they see what they are expected to be, they abandon parts of them which society deems as undesirable. We don’t acknowledge how much pressure we put on men and women to conform to the ideas of gender roles but it is apparent in our media and in the history of our art. One of the most influential things about figurative art is that it has the ability to capture society’s concepts of how men and women are expected to be during that time period. One thing for certain about gender equality is that it has historically and predominantly been a women’s movement. This sculpture, entitled Portrait Bust of a Woman with a Scroll, stood out to me in particular. It is is made of pentelic marble and dates back to the early 5th century. The sculpture shows a woman with a restless face, clothed in a mantle and head piece while holding a scroll. This sculpture reflects the women’s intelligence and capabilities being overshadowed by her gender and
Considering the historical micrcosm surrounding The Story of Menstruation one might begin to imagine life for teen girls of the late 1940s - noting the high standards for feminine perfomativity and the expectation of consumerism. The closing line from the film remarks “all life is built on cycles and the menstrual cycle is one normal and natural part of nature’s eternal plan for passing on the gift of life.” This statement is overlayed upon visuals of an adolescent girl growing up and cycling through various stages of life, but ends with “nature’s eternal plan” which according to Disney and Kotex is marriage. This brief visual display bookends the short film and establishes the notion that marriage is as normal and expected as one’s menstrual
The issue of gender neutral bathrooms and transgender bathrooms is a hot topic right now in North America. Some people are strongly for it and others are going to great lengths to stop it. The majority of public bathrooms in Canada and The United States of America are gender segregated. Public bathrooms are one of the last places to still be separated by gender. Men and women work with each other, sit next to each other in restaurants, use public pools together, and much more. A bathroom with a locked stall, or single occupancy washrooms with a lock, should not be much different. When the idea was raised by the LGBTQIA*+ community to have transgender bathrooms or gender neutral bathrooms, North America was divided. There were those with no