The feminist art movement emerged in the early 1960s during the Second Wave of Feminism. Feminist artists around the world set out to re-establish the fundamental pillars and reception of contemporary art. The movement inspired change, reformed cultural attitudes and transformed gender stereotypes in the arts. Feminist art as a movement, a relatively new concept in the field of art history, did not become a reality until the 1960s and 1970s.
Many women who saw themselves as feminists set out to create a work that would challenge the patriarchal status quo in the art world. The Dinner Party is one of the best-known feminist works of art in existence and is permanently housed in the Brooklyn Museum's Center for Feminist Art. Feminist art and performing art often intersected during the 1970s and beyond, as performance was a direct way for female artists to communicate a physical and visceral message. So how did the artists of the 1960s and 1970s expand the idea of feminist art? Although many great female painters had appeared before, the feminist artistic movement of this time was born out of this enormous cultural upheaval of Epoca. Video art emerged in the art world only a few years before feminist art and provided a medium, unlike painting or sculpture, that had no historical precedent established by male artists.
Soon a wave of other feminist art movements and exhibitions emerged, such as “Twenty-six Contemporary Women Artists” from 1971 and, in 1973, “Women Choose Women”, organized by the group Women in the Arts. In 1972, the artists Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, co-founders of the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts, organized the Womanhouse project, which encompassed an entire property in Los Angeles to which several female artists contributed on-site installations. Feminist art created opportunities and spaces that did not exist before for women and minority artists, and paved the way for the identity and activist artistic genres of the decade. of 1980.
The Womanhouse installation encompassed an entire Hollywood residential house, organized by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro as the culmination of the California Art Institute's Feminist Art Program (FAP) in 1972. In 1973, Chicago, together with graphic designer Sheila Levrant de Bretteville and art historian Arlene Raven, created the Feminist Studio Workshop (FSW), a two-year program for women in art that covered feminist practice in the studio as well as theory and criticism.
