Word: spero
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Josh Freshwater (H) tied Charles Spero...
Chipping away at the cultural canon, feminist artists beginning in the 1970s sought to rewrite art history to include overlooked female talents. Miriam Schapiro, Judy Chicago, Nancy Spero and other U.S. artists and historians, along with colleagues in Europe, began to exhume female artists of the past. They included medieval mystics and such Renaissance artists as Cremona-born Sofonisba Anguissola, who painted at the court of Philip II of Spain, and Artemisia Gentileschi of Rome, a painter's daughter who, like her father, was influenced by Caravaggio's eye-popping naturalism. To feminist admirers, the value of these women...
While the scholars squabble, practicing artists such as Schapiro, Chicago and Spero have tried to create a new, women's art. Their work has incorporated techniques of traditional "women's work" -- quilting, embroidery, crafts -- or explored female sexuality. Inspired by Islamic and Near Eastern designs, Schapiro, Joyce Kozloff and others have produced large works resembling huge swatches of patterned fabric. Their tableaux infused geometric abstraction's smooth, minimalist surfaces with an explosion of zigzags and curlicues. Thus during the 1970s emerged the style called pattern and decoration...
...discourse has broadened to consider the social, historical and political contexts in which art is produced. Rediscovered female artists are not listed in every syllabus, but more and more students, art educators point out, are eager to learn about ignored talents. How to select which ones to study? Says Spero: "It's so subjective. It always comes down to that old chestnut, quality." Whether feminists like it or not, the viewer's quest for quality may be as fundamental, and inevitable, as the artist's urge to create...