I recently joined a group of women (rather, identifying as female or non-binary) artists. A bluestocking group of Cedar Rapids Iowa City ladies who get together once a month to encourage each other, organizes shows, help each other, and teach each other. During the month of September, I participated in a feminist art show at PS1 with 14 other feminist artists. The theme was loosely female centered, as our first art show the emphasis was to step outside our comfort zones and try something new. After many years of making art in the classroom for my students, or for intended for other people, it was extremely difficult to find my voice. What did I have to say, after so many years?

            As the article “Why are there no great women artists?” and Mary Kelly describes, the 60’s were a time when civil rights, war protesting, women’s rights and queer rights were all happening at once. “There were a lot of firsts.” Mary Kelly says as she recounts milestones of women breaking through barriers. The same was true for African Americans and Queers in the country. The white man’s objectively good art, as Greenberg claimed, was just his subjective taste. People who weren’t white, and who weren’t men wanted to see themselves represented in artwork, in popular culture and as voices of authority.

            I think of my own progression as an artist, much like the progression of the feminist art movement, starting in middle school and continually progressing, started with what Kerry James Marshal explains as meeting the masters at their level, rising to their level to be seen and heard. I copied the masters, and like most people my age or older, I was taught that the masters were all old dead guys. Then, like the art forum article from 1971 points out, the question becomes, what is good art?

In high school my feminist art teachers, the public library, my mother, my frequent trips to museums, and my punk rock friends introduced me to feminist artwork. I started to emulate them. I embraced craft, multimedia and sculpting.  I made multiple life sized nude busts starting at age 14. I took welding with the rednecks in high school and made sculptures instead of gun racks. I climbed rooftops with the skateboarding graffiti boys and their aloof girlfriends. Instead of putting on costumes, makeup and taking photos like Cindy Sherman, I hung out with new groups of people, listened to all sorts of music, experimented with all sorts of things, and explored my identity by constantly creating new ones.  Much like Cindy Sherman, I had a bit of obsession breastfeeding, the grotesque, and pop culture. Weird huh.

I went to art school, so much like Kerry James Marshal said, at some point I realized that I couldn’t ignore politics, I couldn’t ignore art history and I couldn’t ignore my history. So I found an artistic voice using my body and exploring the materials my heroes explored, metal, plaster, latex, rubber. I created instillations, dabbled in video and performance, but stuck with the meditative act of creating with my hands. The work of Mona Hatoum, Anne Hamilton, Hannah Wilke, and my professor Isabel Barbuzza impacted me. I learned how to metal smith, weld, cast bronze, work wood, wood fire clay, I carved stone until my hands bled, I equated working hard, and physically taxing my body to good art. Like one iteration of feminist art that recalls the toil of domestic work, or the art that women were encouraged to participate in, I labored until I developed symptoms of carpal tunnel and arthritis, strained eyes, sore back.

After college, I continued to place myself in positions that challenged female norms, working on construction crews, cooking in kitchens instead of waiting tables, until I found myself substitute teaching. I resigned to the profession, knowing that I would be good at it, that I would never make art to sell, and that I was unqualified to do much else that I could physically maintain past my 40’s at the rate I was going. During my teaching certification and through my first years of teaching I was dismayed at how little my art teacher peers knew or cared about contemporary art. Like Kellie Jones, I was surprised that people didn’t know living artists. What is the purpose of art but to respond to the world you live in? What is art but a tool for change? Teaching the elements and principles of art missed the entire point. Though Kerry James Marshal and his theory of “Mastry” to compete with the status quo is absolutely relevant, so is the necessity to represent yourself and your culture in the larger world. Our jobs as teachers seems to be to create that opportunity for our students.

Like Shahzia Sikander, I cannot escape my personal love for the history of craft in my family’s culture. For the blue stocking art show my favorite piece was the piece that is on the home page of this website. It shows my sister, throwing up a moth that represents her dormant alcoholism, in my mother’s wedding dress, holding geodes from my grandmother’s hometown. The part of my artist’s self that wants to share myself to create a connection with the viewer is not exclusively feminist, but when I do it, it is.