On the Cover
Alice Aycock , Ghost Ballet (2005-07), the East Bank Machineworks,
(Nashville, Tennessee) aluminum, neon,
thermoformed acrylic shapes,
c. L.100' x H.100' x D. 60’.
Courtesy of the artist.
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GUIDELINES
PREVIOUS ISSUE
PARALLEL PERSPECTIVES
By Joan Marter and Margaret Barlow
PORTRAITS, ISSUES AND INSIGHTS
CELEBRATING THE PUBLIC ART OF ALICE AYCOCK
By Mary M. Tinti
STRATEGIC MODERNISTS:
WOMEN ARTISTS IN POST-REVOLUTIONARY MEXICO
By Tatiana Flores
ELFRIEDE LOHSE-WÄCHTLER:
AFEMINIST VIEW OF WEIMAR CULTURE
By Britany L. Salsbury
MOTHERHOOD, MEMORIALS, AND ANTI-MILITARISM:
BASHKA PAEFF’S SACRIFICES OF WAR
By Jennifer Wingate
THE CONSTRUCTION OF MISTRESS AND SLAVE RELATIONSHIPS
IN LATE ANTIQUE ART
By Marice E. Rose
REVIEWS
Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution
EDITED BY CORNELIA BUTLER AND LISA GABRIELLE MARK
Reviewed by Karen Kurczynski
Blaze, Discourse on Art, Women and Feminism
EDITED BY KAREN FROSTIG AND KATHY A. HALAMKA
Reviewed by Pamela H. Simpson
After the Revolution:
Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art
BY ELEANOR HEARTNEY, HELAINE POSNER, NANCY PRINCENTHAL,
AND SUE SCOTT
Reviewed by Janet Marquardt
Russian Modernism Between East and West:
Natal’ia Goncharova and the Russian Avant-Garde
BY JANE ASHTON SHARP
Reviewed by Cheryl Kramer
May Stevens
BY PATRICIA HILLS
Reviewed by Gylbert Coker
The Figurative Sculpture of Magdalena Abakanowicz:
Bodies, Environments and Myths
BY JOANNA INGLOT
Reviewed by Mary Ball Howkins
Cindy Sherman
EDITED BY RÉGIS DURAND
Cindy Sherman
EDITED BY JOHANNA BURTON
Reviewed by Michelle Meagher
Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980-2005
BY SIRI ENGBERG, WITH CONTRIBUTIONS BY LINDA NOCHLIN,
LYNNE TILLMAN, AND MARINA WARNER
Reviewed by Patricia Briggs
In this issue we present two articles on public projects that give form to big ideas. Alice Aycock creates enlightened and energetic responses to celestial discovery and our technological world in works like Star Sifter, a large project completed in 1998 for Terminal One at New York’s JFK Airport. Mary Tinti writes: “Like a shuttle poised to reenter the earth’s atmosphere, Star Sifter inspires fanciful connections between earth and cosmic travel.” Aycock calls her fascination with flight a “natural obsession,” and here focuses “on the essence of flight, physics, astronomy, and celestial discovery.” Three more projects completed in 2007, including Ghost Ballet for the East Bank Machineworks (Nashville, Tennessee), pictured on our cover, display Aycock’s continuing quest to stay “fiercely true to herself and her ever-expanding intellectual and cosmic queries.”
Sacrifices of War, created in 1926 by Boston sculptor Bashka Paeff for the Maine World War I Sailors and Soldier’s Memorial, at Kittery, honors mothers as advocates of peace. Jennifer Wingate claims that “Rather than celebrating the more conventional notions of patriotic motherhood promoted in popular media, Paeff’s design echoed the position of Jane Addams and the Woman’s Peace Party, which held that women, as mothers, had a special responsibility and authority as advocates of peace.” The subject of women protecting their young from the violence of battle appears only rarely in American World War I imagery, and Wingate compares Paeff’s memorial with contemporary works such as Käthe Kollwitz’s group of mothers shielding young children from the ravages of war, inspired by the death of her son Peter.
Tatiana Flores introduces a number of women artists who not only helped bring modernism to Mexican painting, photography, and other art forms in the 1920s, but also sought to bring social value to their country’s art. Besides presenting an early work by Frida Kahlo, Flores examines how Lola Cueto, Tina Modotti, Rosario Cabrera, Chabela Villaseñor, and Nahui Olin “rejected academic traditions and pondered through visual means what should be the purpose of Mexican art in the post-revolutionary moment.”
The life and art of Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler reflect the spirit of liberation for bohemian women in Weimar Germany during the 1920s and 1930s. While her colleague Otto Dix created grim, harshly sexualized portrayals of women, Lohse-Wächtler's approach to street subjects such as the bold, brash Lissy "demonstrates the artist's sympathetic relationship with her disenfranchised subjects, and ultimately suggests a more empowering discourse for Weimar prostitution,” writes Britany Salsbury. Lohse-Wächtler cleverly navigated the male-dominated professional art world, and as a young artist gained critical acclaim for her strong, garishly colored watercolors until her career was cut short by madness, and she was annihilated during the Third Reich.
Scenes of late Roman and early Byzantine women and their possessions, including their female slaves, may have had “positive associations for both the slave and the elite female viewers,” claims Marice Rose. She argues that such images “were intended to reinforce domestic order and construct female behavior,” and “that the impact of such “visual language was powerful, and that female viewership of such language was neither neutral nor passive.”
Three of the books reviewed in this issue offer historical approaches to the “Feminist Revolution” from the multiple perspectives of their numerous essayists. The exhibition catalogue Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, reviewed by Karen Kurczynski, presents a broad spectrum of “what has become canonical second-wave feminist art,” including an international selection of more than 120 women artists who made feminist work between 1965 and 1980. Reviewer Janet Marquardt questions the selection of just a dozen artists who are the subjects of After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art, which “draws out the question of whether ‘genius’ and ‘greatness’ [as defined in 1971 by Linda Nochlin] are still at issue or whether the revolution has changed the paradigm.” Reviewer Pamela Simpson notes a lively “spirit of dialogue between young feminists and the pioneers” found among the thirty-two essays in Blaze, Discourse on Art, Women and Feminism.
All but one of the monographs reviewed here concern artists still working today. The exception is Russian Modernism Between East and West: Natal’ia Goncharova and the Russian Avant-Garde. Reviewer Cheryl Kramer says of this first book on the artist in English since 1979, that author Jane Ashton Sharp “expertly conveys the complexity of Goncharova’s work” by exploring her dialogue with Eastern and Western sources.
Lengthy conversations with May Stevens on her life and art became the basis for Patricia Hills’s monograph. Reviewer Gylbert Coker comments on how Stevens’s relationships with her parents played into the development of her Ordinary/ Extraordinary and Big Daddy series. Reviewer Mary Ball Howkins finds that Joanna Inglot’s volume on Magdalena Abakanowicz not only grounds this sculptor’s oeuvre “in the unique evolution of the twentieth century Polish landscape,” but also “reveals the degree to which Abakanowicz deftly shaped her public artistic identity in international circles, effectively mythologizing it and her art.” Michelle Meagher reviews two books on Cindy Sherman: a “comprehensive” catalogue that accompanied a 2007 retrospective at the Galerie Jeu de Paume in Paris, with two (of three) essays that “fall into the convention of discussing Sherman’s work in a gender-blind manner”; and a compilation of scholarly essays, “which traces the critical discourses that have been inspired by” this American photographer. Reviewer Patricia Briggs describes Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980-2005 as “itself a beautiful object that mirrors the aesthetic of the artist,” with essays by Linda Nochlin and others that explore the dark side of Smith’s “tortured” figures while “highlighting the artist’s “sensitivity to the poetic and conceptual resonances of her materials.”
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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
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