On the Cover
Mariko Mori , Play With Me (1994). Fuji super gloss print, wood, pewter frame, 120" x 14" x 3".
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GUIDELINES
PREVIOUS ISSUE
PARALLEL PERSPECTIVES
By Joan Marter and Margaret Barlow
PORTRAITS, ISSUES, AND INSIGHTS
THE PARADOX OFMARIKO MORI’SWOMEN IN POST-BUBBLE JAPAN: OFFICE LADIES, SCHOOLGIRLS, AND VIDEO-VIXENS
By Jonathan Wallis
LATINA IDENTITY: RECONCILING RITUAL, CULTURE, AND BELONGING
By Stacy E. Schultz
TO PAINT THE UNSPEAKABLE: MEXICAN FEMALE ARTISTS´ ICONOGRAPHY OF THE 1930S AND EARLY 1940S
By Dina Comisarenco Mirkin
REDISCOVERING HELENE FUNKE: THE INVISIBLE FOREMOTHER
By Julie M. Johnson
REVIEWS
Italian Women Artists from Renaissance to Baroque
BY CLAUDIO STRINATI, JORDANA POMEROY, ET AL
Reviewed by Katherine M. Poole
Shifting Priorities: Gender and Genre in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting
BY NANETTE SALOMON
Reviewed by Martha Moffitt Peacock
Miss Angel: The Art and World of Angelica Kauffman
BY ANGELICA GOODDEN
Angelica Kauffman: Art and Sensibility
BY ANGELA ROSENTHAL
Reviewed by Heidi Strobel
Tempo, Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt
BY ELIZABETH OTTO
Reviewed by Melissa A. Johnson
Paths to the Press, Printmaking and American Women Artists, 1910-1960
EDITED BY ELIZABETH G. SEATON
Reviewed by Marilyn Symmes
June Wayne, The Art of Everything: A Catalogue Raisonné 1936-2006
BY ROBERT P. CONWAY
Reviewed by Donna Stein
The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend
EDITED BY BROOKE KAMIN RAPAPORT, WITH ESSAYS BY ARTHUR C. DANTO ET AL
Reviewed by Mona Hadler
The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air
EDITED BY DANIELL CORNELL
Reviewed by Midori Yoshimoto
Betye Saar: Extending the Frozen Moment
ESSAYS BY JAMES CRISTEN STEWARD, DEBORAH WILLIS, ET AL
Reviewed by Robin Rice
WARM: A Feminist Art Collective in Minnesota
BY JOANNA INGLOT
Reviewed by Joanna Gardner-Huggett
Pat Steir: Installations
BY DORIS VON DRATHEN
Reviewed by Robin Rice
This issue of WAJ has a decidedly international focus. We are reminded that geographical and cultural differences do matter. While women often share distinctive emotional and psychological experiences, there are differences as well. More important, women artists bring their experiences to bear through riginal subject matter as well as contributing to the innovative art practices of their time and place.
On our cover is a work by Mariko Mori, a Japanese-born performance artist who engages the cultural, social, and sexual mores of “post-bubble” Japan. In his article, subtitled “Office Ladies, Schoolgirls, and Vixens,” Jonathan Wallis writes that “Mori’s work…exposes layers of meaning embedded in the discourses of late twentieth-century Japanese culture: the paradoxical liberation and oppression of Japanese women.” Wallis explains how the “cyborg” characters this former fashion model creates represent a fascinating and complex portrait of young women in contemporary Japan.
Two articles on Latin American artists uncover issues related to universal themes. One, a survey of contemporary Latina performance artists by Stacy Shultz, presents works by several women engaged in “journals of self-discovery.” Coco Fusco, Marta María Pérez Bravo, Lorena Wolffer, Merián Soto, and Elia Arce — representing various nationalities and backgrounds and inspired by Ana Mendieta’s work in the 1970s and 1980s — define Latina identity through ethnic, racial, emotional, political, and geographic elements. What they share, Shultz observes, is that “[t]he cultural traditions of colonial cross-fertilization and overwhelming machismo profoundly affect how Latina women see themselves.”
Dina Comisarenco Mirkin has identified themes such as “the unhappy bride,” “frustrated motherhood,” “infant deaths,” and “gender violence” in works by Mexican women artists of the 1930s and 1940s. She examines how María Izquierdo, Frida Kahlo, Rosa Rolando, Olga Costa, A u rora Reyes, and Isabel Villaseñor, among others, expressed private, deeply personal, and often painful, life experiences, and compares their works with those by their well-known male contemporaries .
In keeping with WAJ’s tradition of recovering all-but forgotten artists, author Julie Johnson introduces the work of Viennese painter Helene Funke. She exhibited with Matisse and the Fauves in Paris (and even shared an address with Gertrude and Leo Stein at 27 rue des Fleurus). Following her return to Vienna in 1911, Funke continued exploring daring approaches to still life subjects, introducing the color dissonances and harmonies of a true modernist.
WAJ’s indefatigable book editor, Ute Tellini, has the job of selecting — from an impossible number of volumes that arrive — which books to discuss in the review section and matching them with willing reviewers. WAJ easily could become a “Women’s Review of Art Books” and still not have space to give attention to all the worthy texts received . The first three reviews in this issue are on pre-modern subjects. Nanette Salomon’s collection of her essays on gender and genre in seventeenth-century Dutch painting offers “truly feminist encounters with art, rather than merely superficial treatments of women as subject matter,” writes reviewer Martha Moffit Peacock. Reviewer Katherine Poole discusses the National Museum of Women in the Arts’ catalogue, Italian Women Artists from Renaissance to Baroque. Its chapters, by various essayists, cover a range of topics “from the contemporary fascination with the ‘woman artist’ to the unique financial and professional struggles” these women faced. Two books on Angelica Kauffman, reviewed by Heidi Strobel, reveal the similar challenges this eighteenth-century Swiss-born artist faced as she “fashioned a feminine identity in an overwhelming masculine art world.”
Three books on graphic arts and artists bring this often neglected fine-art area to the fore. Marianne Brandt became well known for her Bauhaus metalwork designs, but her Dadaist photomontages are the subject of Elizabeth Otto’s Tempo Tempo!, reviewed by Melissa Johnson. Marilyn Symmes reviews Paths to the Press, Printmaking and American Women Artists, 1910-1960, a survey that looks at “women’s creative and technical role in American printmaking.” In 1960, June Wayne, the subject of the third book in this group, helped revive the art of lithography when she founded the Tamarind Lithography Workshop. Reviewer Donna Stein writes that Wayne, who just turned ninety, is one of a few living American women artists to be the subject of a catalogue raisonné, and is well-served by this beautifully produced, 450-page documentation of a life in art.
In many ways sculptors Louise Nevelson and Ruth Asawa epitomize their respective mid-twentieth-century East and West Coast art worlds; both are now being reassessed. Mona Hadler writes in her review of the recent Nevelson catalogue that a “commanding show and its important catalogue go a long way toward recontextualizing Nevelson’s elegant, challenging, and in its own way, problematic production.” Describing the "organic sculptures" pictured in the beautifully produced monograph on Asawa as "ethereal," reviewer Midori Yoshimoto writes that “they grow like seaweeds in the ocean or orbit like planets in the universe.”
Looking at one of the few treatments in the literature of “collaborative practice, particularly the history of women artists’ collectives,” Joanna Gardner-Huggett reviews a catalogue documenting the Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota, a thirty-five-year old feminist art collective. Finally, Robin Rice examines recent publications on two American originals: Pat Steir, who says that her “life is a product of my pictures and not the other way round,” and Betye Saar, whose “iconic” art pictures the realities of the American black experience. “Even though Saar’s work embodies nearly every kind of pain imaginable.., it can be so brilliantly conceived and executed that the perception of beauty, as well as occasional laughter, offer a momentary respite,” writes Rice.
As the “new” editorial team of WAJ commences its third year, we are pleased to report that Rutgers University will continue its support of the journal’s editorial production, and we will continue to collaborate with Old City Publishing, Inc.
Joan Marter and Margaret Barlow, co-editors
Published semiannually—May and November—since 1980, Woman's Art Journal continues to represent the interests of women and art worldwide. Our articles and reviews
cover all areas of women in the visual arts, from antiquity to the present day. Each issue presents current research on a variety of topics, featuring "portraits" of women artists, "issues and
insights," and discerning reviews of recent books and exhibition catalogues. Each article is well researched and clearly written. Our authors are international scholars in their fields. A typical
60-page issue contains 20-25 color plates and 25-35 black-and-white illustrations.
WAJ is indexed on all major art indexes and bibliographies, and is used as a supplementary text in many university courses on women and art. The journal is found in university and major
libraries worldwide and in selected museum bookshops, including the Metropolitan (New York), Philadelphia, and Nelson-Atkins (Kansas City), and the National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington,
D.C.). The full text is also available in the electronic versions of the Art Index and through JSTOR’s Arts & Sciences III Collection.
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