Teaching Packet

Women and Art

Part of Uncovering America

Grade Level

Subject

Download Image Set

On this Page:

  1. Overview
  2. Selected Works
  3. Activity: Respond and Relate
  4. Activity: Identity and Action
  5. Activity: A Woman's World?
  6. Activity: Gender and Artistic Expression
  7. Additional Resources
Guerrilla Girls, When Racism & Sexism are No Longer Fashionable, What Will Your Art Collection Be Worth?, 1989, offset lithograph in black on wove paper, Gift of the Gallery Girls in support of the Guerrilla Girls, 2007.101.6

Overview

How is feminism expressed? What forms does feminism take on a personal level (by an individual) or on a larger scale (by a society)?

How does gender inequality intersect with injustices related to race, ethnicity, religion, age, or other markers of identity (visible or invisible)?

What tactics have artists used to confront gender inequality?

The Guerrilla Girls is an activist group formed in 1985 whose members are female artists, curators, and writers. Their work focuses attention on gender and racial discrimination in the art world through demonstrations, performances, and “public service messages.” When Racism & Sexism are No Longer Fashionable, What Will Your Art Collection Be Worth? (1989) comments on the fact that many US museums have been built their collections around the work of white, male artists. The text suggests that their work has been overvalued—in the art market and culturally—while female artists and artists of color have been undervalued. Another work, The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist (1988) describes the frustrations and ironies of trying to succeed in a world that does not value your contributions. Using humor and data, it points to the systemic gender and racial bias in the works audiences see in museum collections.

During the late 1960s and 1970s, women in the United States mobilized to demand gender equality in their civic, educational, home, and professional lives. The women’s movement was part of a climate of social activism and questioning inspired by the civil rights movement and, later, by protests against the Vietnam War. The social activism of the period extended to the art world, as female artists began to confront and defy long-standing biases and traditional gender roles that had limited their careers.

Women in the art world were galvanized by a now-famous 1971 essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” by Linda Nochlin. She argued that the real issue was not that there were no great women artists, but rather that they were historically invisible, unknown, and fewer in number than men because of systematic obstruction to education, patronage, and opportunities to exhibit art. Nochlin’s essay led to new research resulting in the rediscovery of many long-forgotten women artists, a process that continues to this day.

While the 1970s contained many watershed moments in the women’s movement, incremental change has occurred over centuries. Research shows that female artists working prior to that time, during the 19th and 20th centuries, pioneered new forms and materials with which to express their ideas. They created works that gradually broadened the possibilities for art and its audiences, although their achievements sometimes took decades to register with mainstream culture. The widespread recognition of the work of female artists has accelerated as they continue to produce works that complicate and challenge our understandings of gender, identity, empowerment, and expression. From the innovative and powerful abstract paintings of Joan Mitchell and Alma Thomas, such as Salut Tom (1979) and Tiptoe Through the Tulips (1969), accorded recognition relatively late in each artist’s career; to Betye Saar’s tiny sculpture, Twilight Awakening (1978), which offers a reimagined and potent mythology with a Black protagonist; to Rozeal’s afro.died, T. (2011), a mash-up of culture and concepts of female beauty—their art conforms to no expectations.

Selected Works

  • We look slightly down onto a woman dressed in golden yellows, sitting in a pale green chair, with a nude child sitting in her lap as they both gaze into a mirror in this vertical portrait painting. Both the people have pale, peachy skin. The chair is angled to our left so the woman’s knees and child cant down toward the lower left corner of the composition, and the woman leans onto the arm closer to us. The chair is painted mint green and the rose-pink upholstery is visible on the seat and a corner behind the woman’s shoulder. To our right, the woman’s vibrant, copper-colored hair is pulled loosely to the back of her head. She has a rounded nose, flushed cheeks, and her full, coral-pink lips are closed. Her long dress has a low, U-shaped neckline. The fabric shimmers from pale, cucumber green to light sunshine yellow. The sleeves of the dress split over the shoulder and a second long, goldenrod-yellow sleeve falls from her elbow off the bottom edge of the canvas. An oversized sunflower, larger than the woman’s face, is affixed to her dress near her left shoulder, closer to us. She looks with dark eyes down toward the small, gold-rimmed mirror she holds in her right hand, farther from us. The child also holds the handle of the mirror with both hands, and in the reflection, the child looks back at us with dark eyes, a button nose, and pink lips. The child’s hair in the reflection is the same copper color as the woman’s, but the child on her lap has blond, shoulder-length hair. The woman rests one hand on the child’s left shoulder, closer to us. The child has a rounded belly and smooth, rosy limbs. The woman and child are reflected in a second mirror hanging on the wall alongside them, opposite us. Their reflections are very loosely painted. The wall behind the pair is sage green across the top and it shifts to fawn brown across the bottom. Brushstrokes are visible throughout, especially in the woman’s dress and hair, and are more blended in the bodies and faces. The artist signed the painting in the lower right corner, “Mary Cassatt.”
  • A woman with pale skin and dressed in white sits on a couch gazing into the distance to our left as she raises one arm to stroke a black cat perched on her shoulder in this vertical portrait. Shown from the lap up, the woman’s dress has voluminous, puffed, elbow-length sleeves and a high collar, and her narrow waist is cinched with a white sash. Her dark brown hair is parted down the middle and tied back, and she has pale blue eyes and pink lips. She reaches up to the cat with her left hand, on our right, and her other hand, farther from us, rests flat in her lap. The black cat looks at us with greenish-yellow eyes as it almost disappears into the dark brown background above the white couch, which is decorated with a blue pattern. The artist signed the work with dark letters in the lower left corner: “Cecilia Beaux.”
  • Printed with black against cream-white paper, a woman pointing to our right nearly fills this vertical linocut. Her body is angled slightly to our right, and she looks off in that direction with hooded eyes. She has wide cheekbones, a thin upper lip, full lower lip, and her mouth is closed over a pointed chin. Her head is covered in a patterned cloth, and she wears a knee-length coat over a long skirt. A knapsack hangs across her torso, and she braces the barrel of a rifle with her right hand, to our left, as she points with the other hand. Two people with short, dark hair stand behind her and to our right. The front person wears pants, square-toed shoes, and a jacket over a shirt. Bracelet-like objects on his wrists could be broken shackles. The other person touches that man’s arm. A fourth person digs in the background to the left. The ground, trees, hills, and sky are dense flicks, slivers, and strokes. The artist signed the sheet in the bottom right corner under the image, “Elizabeth Catlett.”
  • Vertical bands of vibrant, saturated color are created with upright dashes of paint in this abstract, square painting. The colors range widely from primary colors to intense jewel tones, and there is no repeating pattern. The dashes are also varying widths, and bands occasionally repeat so there could be two or more of a single color before another shade marches up the canvas.
  • A scene with a person holding a cornucopia is set against a night sky on this wood block. The person has peachy-brown skin and long silvery hair. A piece of drapery, also silver, flows around the hips as the person holds a cornucopia angled down and to the left. Blue and green material pours or hangs out of the horn. The person is contained within a silver oval frame. Fifteen green teardrop- or sperm-shaped orbs approach the oval to the left and fourteen approach from the right. Everything described so far is shown in low relief on the wood block. A translucent star is pinned or nailed to the panel near the top left corner and a translucent, crescent moon to the top right. To either side of the person are textured triangular shapes. The form to the left is green and points up, like a mountain, and the form to the right is blue and points in, like a cresting wave. Both have ragged edges and appear to be carved and affixed with nails, the heads of which are visible. Two translucent rectangles, possibly the same material as the star and moon, lie side-by-side between the green and blue forms on the bottom edge of the block.
  • The top quarter of this horizontal abstract painting is dominated by bright, sunshine yellow over areas of sky blue, moss and forest green, and white below. The painting is made up of four vertical panels joined to make one long composition. Yellow dominates the leftmost panel over a field of pale blue marked with forest and spring green, teal, and yellow, mostly along the bottom edge of the canvas. The field of pale blue and white take up most of the space in the two center panels, with a band of yellow above and deep green marks below. In the rightmost panel, the blue field is more variegated with darker blues, shades of green, white, and yellow. Throughout, some of the colors are layered and sometimes they are applied next to each other. Thick and thin areas of paint and drips create a variety of textures on the surface of each panel. The artist signed this work in pencil in the lower right corner: “Joan Mitchell.”
  • A grainy black and white photograph showing a close-up of a woman’s profile is overlaid with three horizontal red bands with white text at the top, center, and bottom edges of this horizontal composition. The woman seems to lie down and look up at a metal instrument, perhaps a piece of medical equipment, with a long, eye-dropper-like tube extending close to her face. Her cheeks and profile appear between the central and bottom bands of text. Lit from our left, she has dark eyebrows and eyelashes, a straight nose, and her lips are closed. She seems to have pale skin and her hair is covered by a fold of fabric, perhaps a hat. The eye we see is open and the metal instrument points to the bridge of her nose, seeming to close in on her right eye. Light colored fabric behind her could be the uniform of a person standing opposite us. The red bands have white lettering saying, “Know nothing” across the top; “Believe anything” across the center; and “Forget everything” across the bottom.
  • Printed with tones of black, gray, and smoky gray, two oversized hands reach out of an ocean and hold up a masted ship in this horizontal etching, aquatint, and drypoint. Closer to us, the black silhouette of a woman sinks under the surface of the water, face down with her arms thrust back and her mouth gaping open. Her features are exaggeratedly rounded to reference stereotypes historically connected with Black and African people. The wave surges to our left, and the giant hands lift the boat just left of center of the composition. Small in scale, two silhouetted people stand on a flat area to the left. One wears a brimmed, flat-topped hat, a coat with tails, and holds up a tool, perhaps a hoe. The other wears a spiky headdress and skirt and holds up a stalk of sugar cane. The sky is pale gray to either side of a plume of white and a black void with jagged edges, which spreads like a seeping stain down the middle of the sky. Under the image and across the bottom of the page, the artist wrote “A.P. VI/VIII” to the left and “KW 2010” to the right lightly in graphite.
  • A woman sitting on a floor with her body angled to our left nearly fills this stylized, vertical painting. Her skin is light tan in some areas, as around her eyes, chest, one hand, and the leg and foot we can see, while what seems like brown paint creeps up her neck to drip upward around her cheeks and onto her forehead. The brown also drips down onto her cleavage, along one arm toward her wrist, and down the shin of her leg. Her right hand, on our left, is entirely brown. She holds her long hair up over her head with her brown hand in front of her face, looking at it with blue eyes and touching it with the other hand. Her hair is blond with dark roots at her scalp, created with long, parallel brushstrokes. Her long nails and curling lips are scarlet red. She wears an emerald-green robe trimmed with white fur and a long strand of pearls that drape over her left arm, closer to us. She sits on a cushion decorated with brown koi fish and stylized blue waves of water, but the exact arrangement of her legs is unclear. A stack of patterned pillows is piled behind her to our left, and comes up to her shoulder. Red circular forms behind her head are painted slate blue with deep brown shadows and red highlights. The words “BACK AND FORTH” are repeated in rows, written in capital yellow letters edged with red, filling the background. Two Japanese characters are painted in red near the lower right corner.

Activity: Respond and Relate

A scene with a person holding a cornucopia is set against a night sky on this wood block. The person has peachy-brown skin and long silvery hair. A piece of drapery, also silver, flows around the hips as the person holds a cornucopia angled down and to the left. Blue and green material pours or hangs out of the horn. The person is contained within a silver oval frame. Fifteen green teardrop- or sperm-shaped orbs approach the oval to the left and fourteen approach from the right. Everything described so far is shown in low relief on the wood block. A translucent star is pinned or nailed to the panel near the top left corner and a translucent, crescent moon to the top right. To either side of the person are textured triangular shapes. The form to the left is green and points up, like a mountain, and the form to the right is blue and points in, like a cresting wave. Both have ragged edges and appear to be carved and affixed with nails, the heads of which are visible. Two translucent rectangles, possibly the same material as the star and moon, lie side-by-side between the green and blue forms on the bottom edge of the block.
Betye Saar, Twilight Awakening, 1978, mixed media on printer's wood block, Gift of Francine Farr in honor of Dr. Samella Sanders Lewis, with gratitude to Scripps College, Claremont, California, 2015.27.1

Ask students to examine the works of art in the image set and pair what they see as related works. Students might consider some of the following characteristics (or come up with their own):

  1. Mood—expressive, controlled, bold, quiet
  2. Techniques and materials—how was the work of art made?
  3. Subject—person, place, thing
  4. Setting—public, private, ambiguous
  5. Your interpretation of the works’ meaning
  6. A story you create that links two works

Call on individual students to share their pairings (to the entire class) or, alternatively, ask them to share in small group settings.

Activity: Identity and Action

Dorothea Lange, Eighteen-year-old mother from Oklahoma, now a California migrant, March 1937, gelatin silver print, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser, 2016.191.32

In the 1970s, the slogan “The personal is political” became popular among feminists. This phrase connected women’s experiences—in the home or workplace—to larger social structures where gender bias played out. For women artists, limited opportunities to show their work and under-recognition were often connected. Ask students to review the image set and place each work of art into one of two categories:

a. Works that convey a political or feminist message
b. Works that reflect the artist’s personal experience

For works of art that appear to have a “message,” prompt students to explain what they think it is. How does the artist’s choice of color, shape, line, and artistic technique or medium (painting, photograph, sculpture, etc.) contribute to that meaning?

For works that appear to express a more personal experience, have students research the artist’s biography. What challenges did she face? Were they personal challenges (such as particular life events) or larger societal ones (such as laws)?

Ask your students whether any of the political messages or personal experiences conveyed in these images resonate with them as challenges today.

Activity: A Woman's World?

Women have rejected, accepted, pushed against, and embraced the ideals and traditional cultural expectations of homemaking and domesticity, motherhood and child-rearing, and femininity and physical appearance. Ask students:

  • How do you see women’s relationships to those situations expressed in these works of art? Which of these situations would you reject, accept, push against, or embrace? Think of people in your life who may have embraced different norms.
  • How might female artists differ from male artists in their representation of women as subjects? Think about what ideas, issues, and points of view are expressed or made visible in the image set. What are some current examples of gendered points of view from art or media?

Activity: Gender and Artistic Expression

Sheila Hicks, Embedded Thoughts, 2013, silk wrapped paper, wool, cotton, linen, Gift of Roy and Cecily Langdale Davis, 2014.134.1

“The state of female artists is very good. But the very definition of art has been biased in that ‘art’ was what men did in a European tradition and ‘crafts’ were what women and natives did.” —Gloria Steinem

Here, feminist icon Gloria Steinem points out that there is no shortage of women and Indigenous artists—but that pervasive notions of what counts as “art” have excluded them from mainstream recognition. Steinem calls out the ways in which materials and subjects can be assigned different cultural values.

Art materials and forms have acquired gendered associations over time. For example, oil painting and sculpture were once framed as high-minded masculine pursuits valued more highly than other artistic media. Practices such as quilting, sewing, or weaving that produced utilitarian objects were relegated to the female and domestic sphere. Works on paper—including watercolor and drawing, which often use less expensive materials—have been associated with female pursuits, taught along with embroidery and sewing as part of a girl’s genteel education. Works executed using these materials have also been viewed as “supporting” work—preparation for oil painting, sculpture, or architecture—rather than as independent art forms. The subjects of works of art have also reflected biases. In much Western and European art, historical and mythological narratives were highly valued and intellectualized, while those relating to daily or home life, most often, were not.

In modern and contemporary art, feminist artists have challenged these value judgments. They have embraced a broad variety of materials and treated new subjects, creating works that have made women’s experiences, accomplishments, and lives visible.

Invite students to examine the works of art in the image set, reading the descriptions and learning about the artists’ lives and works. How do their choices of art materials or subject relate to or challenge cultural ideas about gender?  

Additional Resources

Women Artists in Our Collection

National Gallery of Art Library Digital Collections: Women in Art

National Museum of Women in the Arts

National Women’s History Museum

Researchers Explore Gender Disparities in the Art World,” Hidden Brain, NPR

Elizabeth L. Haines, Kay Deaux, and Nicole Lofaro, “The Times They Are A-Changing… Or Are They Not? A Comparison of Gender Stereotypes, 1983–2014,” Psychology of Women Quarterly 40, no. 3 (2016): 353–363

Christopher Knight, “Review: A groundbreaking show to confront the gender bias in art: ‘Women of Abstract Expressionism,’” Los Angeles Times, April 11, 2017

Guerrilla Girls, The Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art (New York, 1998)

Cornelia Butler and Lisa Gabrielle Mark, eds., Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2007)

Helena Reckitt, ed., The Art of Feminism: Images That Shaped the Fight for Equality, 1857–2017 (San Francisco, 2018)

Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, eds., Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970–1985 (New York, 1987)

You may also like

Educational Resource:  Uncovering America: Activism and Protest

Artists in the United States are protected under the First Amendment, which guarantees freedoms of speech and press. This module features works created by artists with a range of perspectives and motivations.