Judy Chicago was a leader and a forerunner of feminist art in the US. Searching through the Archives of American Art this week for something else, I stumbled upon this 1977 manifesto she wrote as part of the programming she devised for the Los Angeles Women's Building (largely the subject of the historic exhibition WACK at MoCA some years back).
It's hard to wrap our minds around anything today but the looming civil war in the middle east or the CDC's no mask or Columbia's resurgence of violence or the premiere of Barry Jenkins adaptation of The Underground Railroad.
But Chicago's posit "that the basis of our culture is grounded in a pernicious fallacy which causes us to believe that alienation is the human condition and real human contact unattainable..."sounded like it could apply to all of the above and is not a truism in any way relegated only to feminist art.
Suellen Rocca, an art heroine of the sixties, dies
Suellen Rocca, a founding member of the Hairy Who Chicago art collective active in the sixties has died. Her art was feminine and feminist at the same time. She repurposed advertising imagery, female icons and color in a distinctive way. I love the way she and her art appear in this image as one. . When asked about the sources of her imagery, Rocca cited “the cultural icons of beauty and romance expressed by the media that promised happiness to young women of that generation.” I don't know if the show of her work due this summer in Vienna will be held. She deserves attention. Images Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.