Details from the BLVRD Features app: Artemisia Gentileschi, Self-Portrait as a Lute Player, 1616; Samuel Joseph Beckett, Loïe Fuller Dancing, c. 1900; Howardena Pindell, Autobiography: Water/Ancestors/Middle Passage/Family Ghosts, 1988. (Full image credits located within the app).
When we released our 8th BLVRD Features AR installment several days ago, it suddenly occurred to me that the last 3 stories Boulevard Arts has focused on have been about women - fascinating and extraordinary women: Artemisia Gentileschi (a 17th c. Italian painter), Loïe Fuller (a late 19th-early 20th c. American performer, who lived in Paris), and Howardena Pindell (a contemporary multi-media artist). Reflecting upon this unintentional, but serendipitous sequence of female creators reminded me of art historian Linda Nochlin’s groundbreaking 1971 exhibition/catalogue titled “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Nochlin’s bold query (now seen through the lens of half-a-century of hindsight) was, of course, meant to challenge people to come up with the names of famous women artists and grab their attention. But, more importantly, her provocation (a word Linda loved to use!) was meant to establish a useful framework for identifying, understanding, and exposing myriad cultural and institutional barriers faced by women artists across the centuries–not to mention further challenges posed by race. Her point was NOT that there have been no great women artists, but instead that women’s art should be understood as embedded in a matrix of gendered social expectation and reception, and that their identities and narratives have been much less explored and celebrated than those of their male counterparts. (Just check out art history text books from the 1970s, look at how few women appear in the Western art historical canon… and you’d think there had been “no great women artists” too!). Undoubtedly, both society, as a whole, and the discipline of art history have come a long way since Nochlin first lobbed her early feminist battle cry at the Brooklyn Museum (and to her students at Vassar) in the early 1970s. But, it’s still important today to champion the work and stories of Great Women Artists! We would love for you to check out our free BLVRD Features app (available in the Apple App Store) and engage with these three incredible artistic innovators in #augmentedreality!