Offering a radical rewriting of the history of contemporary art from a feminist perspective, four distinguished authors explore the lineages of performance, abstraction, craft and ecofeminism in ways that reveal the debt these important genres owe to the work of pioneering women artists. Tracing these influences over time, Mothers of Invention underscores the enormous impact of feminist ideas on the work of contemporary artists of all genders. The painters, sculptors and performance artists featured here have shaped ideas now dominating the art world: the vulnerability of the environment, the rise of activist art, the challenge to the reign of high technology (including digital culture), and the development of a new language of abstraction. Having demolished the linear narrative of modernism, the privileging of a white male ethnocentric vision, the division of high and low art and the separation of art from larger social issues, feminist artists laid the groundwork for the globalised, multi-media, postmodern art world of today. Illustrated with a spread of work from the last sixty years (and including contextual discussion of earlier practitioners), this book makes a compelling case for placing feminist art and artists at the heart of contemporary art.
Eleanor Heartney is Contributing Editor to Art in America and Artpress. Recent publications include: Doomsday Dreams: the Apocalyptic Imagination in Contemporary Art (2019). Helaine Posner is Chief Curator Emerita at the Neuberger Museum of Art, SUNY, Purchase College, New York. She is the author of monographs on the artists Kiki Smith, Louise Fishman, and, most recently, Donna Dennis: A Poet in Three Dimensions (2023). Nancy Princenthal is a writer whose most recent book Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s (2019) was named one of the best art books of the year by the New York Times. She is also the author of Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art (2015), which won a PEN America award for biography. Sue Scott is an independent curator and writer. She was Adjunct Curator of Contemporary Art at the Orlando Museum of Art from 1989 to 2008 and founder and director of Sue Scott Gallery in New York City. All four writers are co-authors of the award-winning book After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art (2007) and of The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium (2013).
'Breaking the Rules, Rewriting the Script: Feminist Influences on Contemporary Art - A Roundtable Conversation with E. Heartney, H. Posner, N. Princenthal and S. Scott'; 1. 'Performance Art and Action', H. Posner; 2. 'Handmade: Art, Craft and Feminism', N. Princenthal; 3. 'Beyond Tragic and Timeless: Women, Abstraction and Feminism', S. Scott; 4. 'Confronting Dominionism: How Women Rewrote the Role of Humans in Nature', E. Heartney; Epilogue; Further Reading; Acknowledgments and Index
