This module takes you around the globe and study women artists of the late-twentieth to twenty-first centuries. We examine art and identity and the international voices of women making art worldwide.
Consider this: What is the difference between migration and diaspora? Migration may be defined as "the movement of persons from one country or locality to another." Diaspora may be defined as "the forcing of any people or ethnic population to leave their traditional homelands, the dispersal of such people, and the ensuing developments in their culture." These two scenarios are important to a deeper understanding of the women artists and works we'll explore.
By end of this module, you should able to
In this section of Women in World History, international contemporary women artists and influential cultural issues are discussed.
Walker's work explores race and gender and the best-known examples are large-scale silhouettes.
Alison Saar is the daughter of Betye Saar whose work also transforms found objects. Her sculptures address identity and race.
Abromovic is Serbian-American performance artist who recently had a major retrospective at MoMA.
Neshat is an Iranian artist who studied in the United States. Her work addresses women's identity in a fundamentalist Islamic society.
Houshiary is an Iranian sculptor and her work combines Islamic motifs with minialism.
Essaydi was born in Morocco and her meticulously created images featuring the female body confront the western concepts of orientalism and exoticism.
Mutu is a Kenyan born artist who works in New York. She typically creates collages and her work was recently selected for the facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Mehretu was born in Ethiopia and grew up in Michigan. Her paintings are labor intensive and address identity and cultural history.
Kusama is a Japanese artist whose best known projects are large-scale installations in which the viewer is completely immersed. Her career was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition that traveled to several museums across the country.
Mayer is a Mexican conceptual artist.
Salcedo is a Columbian sculptor whose work addresses memory and trauma.
Hashmi is an Indian printmaker who resides in New York.
She paints from photographs and collages, creating fragmented portraits that display colorful shapes and patterns, often in a flat graphic style.
A visual artist who works with hand-made chalk-based pastels, glass artworks, paintings, and prints.
Zhang Dun is a Chinese-born contemporary artist. She is one of the artists featured in this exhibition review in ArtAsiaPacific magazine. Her work features the decrepit structures of declining industries in Northeast China. While a potentially depressing subject matter, Zhang’s techniques and compositions lend quiet beauty to her fallen city.
Mithu Sen is another international contemporary artist featured in ArtAsiaPacific magazine. She lives and works near South New Delhi and has won the Skoda Prize for contemporary Indian art for her series of large mixed-media and watercolor drawings on paper. Visit the two links near the bottom left of the web page: “Where I Work” and “I Dig, I Look Down.”
Mella Jaarsma is Dutch born and studied art in Jakarta. She is known to use highly unusual materials in her art and tends to focus on social and political issues in Indonesian society. Images and text are included in this site.
There are several international artists/publishers web pages posted. Review these Internet resources, return here and respond to the instructions below:
1. Select one work of art from the Week 7 International Resources links posted in Course Content.
2. Potential discussion topics: