Certain images might spring to mind when we think of feminist art: Ana Mendieta’s Siluetas (1973–78), for example, or Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party” (1974–79) — work that in form and content immediately reads as “feminist.” But Mothers of Invention: The Feminist Roots of Contemporary Art (2024), a new book from authors Eleanor Heartney, Helaine Posner, Nancy Princenthal, and Sue Scott, considers how a surprising range of movements, media, and styles of the past 50 years are inspired by feminism, from performance and abstraction (yes, surprise!), to craft (probably less surprising?) and ecological art. While the book is inclusive in terms of movements, however, it’s less so when it comes to the individual artists and thinkers it chooses to highlight.
The four authors, who have collaborated on two previous books about women and contemporary art, are knowledgeable, thoughtful, and thoroughly grounded in the history of art generally and of feminist art in particular, making them admirable guides to a history that we might never associate with feminism. I was especially interested in Scott’s chapter on the development of Euro-American abstraction, from the now-famous example of Hilma af Klint to later artists like Alma Thomas and Anne Truitt. The authors persuasively demonstrate how feminist contributions have been discounted in real time, from Minimalist artist and public theorist Donald Judd writing that Truitt’s sculpture “looks serious without being so” to Hilton Kramer deeming Hilma af Klint’s work “essentially color diagrams” in his review of the first major exhibition of her paintings in the United States, adding that she “would never have been given this inflated treatment if she had not been a woman.” The authors demonstrate, too, that erasure is both in the art historical past and ongoing. In this sense, the book is a significantly new history of art.
In the United States, this book comes at an important time, with the recent reversal of Roe v. Wade and a terrifying election on the horizon. It has much to offer. But it also, perhaps unconsciously, reveals some difficult issues still alive in feminism and in the art world. I felt my first twinge of unease in the opening chapter, when Posner writes, “I’ve come to question the scorn I once felt for essentialism” — that is, the sense that there are distinct and intrinsic qualities to woman-ness. I wanted to know much more about how it might reveal itself, or be understood, in the context of contemporary art. While certain essentialist notions of the 1970s — favoring the circle as more innately female than, say, the rectangle — sound a little suspect, work that was once belittled for being too overtly feminine, such as the Pattern and Decoration (P&D) movement broadly or Judy Chicago’s pastel-colored early minimalist sculpture, feels brave and prescient now.
The question of essentialism as it pertains to feminism is, well, essential to how we understand intersectional feminism — the theory that different dimensions of inequality interact — today. On the one hand, the authors are clear in their approach. In the first chapter, Princenthal writes: “In the 21st century we know that we can’t limit our definition of women to people who are identified as female at birth.” The authors therefore include not only trans and nonbinary artists, but also work by male artists that they conclude is explicitly or implicitly feminist, including the AIDS Quilt, which was conceived by Cleve Jones (not named in the book), P&D, and conceptual artists like Mel Chin. This big tent is made even bigger when Scott proclaims that “innovation is, in its own way, a feminist statement. It’s about taking power back and creating something new.”
Such thinking, along with statements such as one by Heartney that “feminism broke things open,” is the hopeful and often inspiring heart of the book. And a big part of the fun with a survey of this kind is discovering new artists and connections, such as Jan Mun, whose oyster “The Fairy Rings @ ExxonMobil Greenpoint Petroleum Remediation Site” (2013) utilizes oyster mushrooms to neutralize toxic chemicals in a contaminated site, or Marguerite Wildenhain, a Bauhaus-trained artist who founded Pond Farm Pottery, not far from where I live now. It’s invigorating and truly pleasurable to find yourself going down hours-long rabbit holes, expanding your to-read pile.
On the other hand, while the book’s broad scope is admirable, the story of feminist art told here often feels mostly White. For example, as the authors note in the epilogue, each chapter opens “with a photograph of a key figure in each of our narratives.” Yes — and each chapter opens with the image of a White artist. Similarly, the book’s cover is a photograph of Ann Hamilton’s “The Event of a Thread” (2012) that depicts a blonde woman who at least reads as White. And the pull quotes highlighted throughout the book look also to be from uniformly White voices. Such a cover, chapter openings, and quotations telegraph more than the authors might realize, and less than we might hope from intersectional feminism and feminist art.
My observations here are not about quotas or counting up scores, but about challenging White feminism to meaningfully broaden its view, which requires a plurality of voices, perspectives, images, and imaginations. This is perhaps most keenly felt in the book’s final paragraphs, when the authors write about Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s unquestionably significant work:
“The idea of interconnection and interdependence runs through the entire body of Ukeles’s work. This makes her the ideal figure [italics mine] with which to introduce the discussion of ecofeminism’s challenge to longstanding and destructive assumptions about the relationship between humankind and nature. Ukeles’s call for an ecological consciousness that stresses collaboration, reciprocity and connection reverberates through the work of a growing group of younger eco-minded artists.”
I don’t at all question Ukeles’s importance as an artist and instigator, and there is so much in Mothers of Invention that is rich in important historical information — but describing Ukeles as “the ideal figure” in a global artworld where artists such as Mendieta, Kay WalkingStick, Cara Romero, Britta Marakatt-Labba, and Bernice Akamine have incisively explored Indigeneity and eco art, as just one example, demonstrates a too-monofocal vision of feminist art in history and today. Just as the story of contemporary art can’t be told without the feminist movement, the story of feminism can’t be truly told by centering White artists.
Mothers of Invention: The Feminist Roots of Contemporary Art (2024), written by Eleanor Heartney, Helaine Posner, Nancy Princenthal, and Sue Scott and published by Lund Humphries is available for purchase online and in bookstores.
