For further reading and resources that look at gender and art, follow the artists below:

Deanna Lawson

Lawson’s photography draws on Western and African portraiture conventions, as her pieces consider “the body’s ability to channel personal and social histories, drawing on the various formal and informal languages of the medium and its archival capabilities”. For more, visit Lawson’s work, here, or view the clip, below.

Delita Martin

Working with printmaking, drawing, sewing, collaging, and painting techniques, Delita Martin’s portraits “fuse the real and the fantastic” as she “combines signs and symbols to create a visual language. By fusing this visual language with oral storytelling [Martin offers] other identities and other narratives for women of color”. Visit Martin’s pieces, view the clip below, and visit her work, here.

Emma Moss

Emma Moss’ work includes printmaking, tapestries, drawings, and paintings, which “dislodge, question, and tweak prejudices, rules, and notions relating to art and who makes it, poses for it, shows it, and buys it”. In 1980, Amos was hired as an assistant professor at the Mason Gross School of Art, Rutgers University, and earned tenure in 1992, before being promoted to Professor II, and served as chair of the department from 2005 to 2007. She continued teaching there until she retired in June 2008. For more on Moss’ work, visit her website, here.

Mickalene Thomas

Mickalene Thomas draws on collages, photography, video, and painting “that draw on art history and popular culture to create a contemporary vision of female sexuality, beauty, and power […] while subtly confronting our assumptions about what is feminine and what defines women”. Thomas is based in Brooklyn, and has been awarded multiple prizes and grants, including the USA Francie Bishop Good & David Horvitz Fellow (2015); Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2013), and the Brooklyn Museum Asher B. Durand Award (2012), among others. For more, visit Thomas’ work, here, and view her interview, below.

Bushra Almutawakel

Boushra Y. Almutawakel was born in Sana’a, Yemen, and studied in the USA and Yemen, and co-founded Al-Halaqa in the 1990s, an artists’ group which created a space for discourse and exhibitions and forged links with international artists. Through her photographs, Almutawakel considers the global perception of gender issues and representations of Muslim/Arab women and their clothing. For more, visit her images, here.

Guerrilla Girls

Drawing on posters, books, stickers, and audio-visuals productions, the Guerrilla Girls are feminist activist artists whose work has included a 2015 stealth projection on the façade of the Whitney Museum about income inequality and the super rich hijacking art. An anonymous group, their work uses,

“facts, humor and outrageous visuals to expose gender and ethnic bias as well as corruption in politics, art, film, and pop culture. Our anonymity keeps the focus on the issues, and away from who we might be: we could be anyone and we are everywhere. We believe in an intersectional feminism that fights discrimination and supports human rights for all people and all genders. We undermine the idea of a mainstream narrative by revealing the understory, the subtext, the overlooked, and the downright unfair.”

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For more, visit their website here, or view the clip, below.

Mona Hatoum

Mona Hatoum is a Palestinian artist born in Lebanon, who currently lives in London. Through her many works, she addresses exile, identity, politics, gender, and displacement via audio-visual productions and installations, including Measures of Distance (1988), Look No Body! (1981), Keffieh (1993–99), and Corps Étranger (1994). For more, view her brief interview, below.

Claudia Claire

Claudia Claire is a ceramic artist whose works reflect on feminism, gender, migration, and sexual violence. Using drawing, ethnography, writing, photography, and film-making, Claire’s pieces include the 2011 performative piece in Hyde Park, Remembering Atefeh; Shattered: Contemporary Women’s Stories of Surviving Sexual Violence (2007), and Collection for the Zsolnay Sisters (1999).

Cooper Lee Bombadier

Cooper Lee Bombardier is a writer and visual artist from Boston, and has been named by The Huffington Post as one of “10 Transgender Artists Who Are Changing The Landscape Of Contemporary Art.” His has featured in The Kenyon Review, Nailed Magazine, and The Rumpus, as well as the Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology The Remedy–Essays on Queer Health Issues (2016), (edited by Zena Sharman) and Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Speculative Fiction From Transgender Writers (2017), (eds. Cat Fitzpatrick and Casey Plett) winner of the 2018 ALA Stonewall Book Awards/Barbara Gittings Literature Award and a 2018 Lambda Literary Award Finalist.

Judith Bernstein

Judith Bernstein‘s is a founding member of the all-women’s cooperative A.I.R. Gallery in New York, and has been active in the Guerrilla Girls, Art Workers’ Coalition, and Fight Censorship Group. Her work includes public drawings, installations, and paintings that draw on feminist and anti-war activism to reflect on aggression and humor. Among her pieces are Supercock (1964-1967), Fun-Gun (1967), and Rising (2014).

Betye Saar

Betye Saar was a leading artist in the black arts movement, and is known for her work in the medium of assemblage. Saar is also a visual storyteller and printmaker, and through her work, she mixes surreal, symbolic imagery with a folk art aesthetic to interrogate stereotypes from folk culture and advertising. For further reading, see also: Betye Saar: the artist who helped spark the black women’s movement.

Senga Nengudi

Born in 1943, Senga Nengudi was one of the first artists to exhibit at Just Above Midtown, New York’s first gallery to regularly feature African American artists. Nengudi expresses her ideas about the human body through performance-based sculptures, videos, and installations, including Répondez s’il vous plaît (RSVP) (1977), Vestige-The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus (1981), The Performing Body (2014), and The Material Body (2014).

Carrie Mae Weems

Carrie Mae Weems has investigated family relationships, cultural identity, sexism, class, political systems, and the consequences of power via photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation, and video. Among her pieces are Family Pictures and Stories (1981–1982), Ritual and Revolution (1998), Afro-Chic (2009), and The Obama Project (2012).

the “i’m tired” project

the “i’m tired” project (2015) was created by Paula Akpan and Harriet Evans, and uses photography, the human body and written words “as a tools [that] highlight the lasting impact of everyday micro-aggressions, assumptions and stereotypes”. Using platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram, Akpan and Evans works to create a positive space in which individuals can share their stories. In 2016, the project received the Points of Light Award that recognises “people who are making a change in their community”.

Cassils

Cassils is a visual artist working in live performance, film, sound, sculpture and photography. Listed by The Huffington Post as “one of ten transgender artists who are changing the landscape of contemporary art,” Cassils draws on conceptualism, feminism, body art, gay male aesthetics, to forge a series of powerfully trained bodies for different performative purposes. Their work includes Becoming and Image (2012-), Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture (2011-2013), and Tiresias (2011).