Deeply influenced by studies of female iconology, the medieval, the subconscious, and hybrid bodies, Faith Wilding's art is instantly recognizable. In keeping with Wilding's own artworks, this book is a bricolage: memoirs and watercolors sit alongside critical essays and family photographs to form an overall history of both Wilding's life and works as well as the wider feminist art movement of the 1970s and beyond. This collection spans fifty years of Wilding's artistic production, feminist art pedagogy, and participation in, and organizing of, feminist art collectives, such as the Feminist Art Program, Womanhouse, Womanspace Gallery, and the Woman's Building. Featuring contributions from scholars and artists, including Amelia Jones, the book is the first of its kind to celebrate the career of an artist who helped shape the feminist art of today. Intimate, philosophical, and insightful, Faith Wilding's Fearful Symmetries is a beautiful book intended for artists, scholars, and a broader audience.

Deeply influenced by studies of female iconology, the medieval, the subconscious, and hybrid bodies, Faith Wilding's art is instantly recognizable.. In keeping with Wilding's own artworks, this book is a bricolage: memoirs and watercolors sit alongside critical essays and family photographs to form an overall history of both Wilding's life and works as well as the wider feminist art movement of the 1970s and beyond. This collection spans fifty years of Wilding's artistic production, feminist art pedagogy, and participation in, and organizing of, feminist art collectives, such as the Feminist Art Program, Womanhouse, Womanspace Gallery, and the Woman's Building. Featuring contributions from scholars and artists, including Amelia Jones, the book is the first of its kind to celebrate the career of an artist who helped shape the feminist art of today. Intimate, philosophical, and insightful, Faith Wilding's Fearful Symmetries is a beautiful book intended for artists, scholars, and a broader audience.

Interpreting the meaning of hospitality in an unwelcoming political moment Amid xenophobic challenges to America’s core value of welcoming the tired and the poor, Irina Aristarkhova calls for new forms of hospitality in her engagement with the works of eight international artists. In this first monograph on hospitality in contemporary art, Aristarkhova employs a feminist perspective to critically explore the artworks of Ana Prvački, Faith Wilding, Lee Mingwei, Kathy High, Mithu Sen, Pippa Bacca, Silvia Moro, and Ken Aptekar and asks who, how, and what determines who is worthy of our welcome. Spanning a diverse range of contemporary art practices, Arrested Welcome shows how artists challenge our existing notions of hospitality—culturally, philosophically, and politically. From the role of “microcourtesies” in social change to the portrayal of waiting as a feminist endeavor, Aristarkhova looks deeply into topics such as gender stereotypes of welcome, ways to reclaim civility, and the means by which guests (sometimes human, sometimes animal) push the limits of our hosting traditions. Blending a feminist analysis of hospitality with in-depth case studies on how contemporary artists stimulate personal reflection and political engagement, Aristarkhova initiates these important conversations at a critical time of national and international hospitality crises.

This book focuses on the performance art of Marilyn Arsem, an internationally acclaimed performance artist known for her innovative and experimental work. Arsem’s work addresses women’s history and myth-making capacities, the potency of site and geography, the idea of the audience as witnesses and the intimacy of one-to-one works. One of the most prolific performance artists working in the United States today, Arsem performs carefully choreographed durational actions that are developed site-responsively and range from deceptively simple interventions to elaborately orchestrated actions. This edited volume seeks to extend Arsem’s legacy beyond the audiences of her live performances and enter her work into the lexicon of the art world. Accompanied by 200 images, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of performance studies, feminist performance, feminist art history and performance history. It will also contribute to the history of alternative spaces and galleries, which is only now being written. I have had the privilege of knowing Marilyn for over 30 years. Her work has given me so many epiphanies about live art, time-based art practice and durational performance practice. How and why do you choose a single action and enact it over an extended period of time? How do you respond to site and create a sacred meditational zone; a reflexive space about the human condition? And most importantly, how do you teach future generations about the importance of living while making art as a spiritual and philosophical practice? This book is yet another example of Arsem’s legacy. Fundamental, I’d say. Guillermo Gómez-Peña Watching Marilyn Arsem perform can be a slow, careful, vulnerable and heart-stoppingly profound experience. To see her is to know better the complex, intermingling particularities of body, space, time, being and action. Reading this comprehensive, lucidly written and deeply insightful book – the first significant publication on Arsem’s practice as a performance artist – will enable new perspectives on a major artist’s work. It also sheds vivid light upon enduring themes for the critical encounter with art: duration and doing, materiality and nothingness, truth and representation, commitment and experiment, togetherness and solitude, experience and endurance. Dominic Johnson, Queen Mary University of London

DIVA collection of writings from the influential feminist art journal M/E/A/N/I/N/G, with a forward by Johanna Drucker./div

Performance artist Linda Montano, curious about the influence childhood experience has on adult work, invited other performance artists to consider how early events associated with sex, food, money/fame, or death/ritual resurfaced in their later work. The result is an original and compelling talking performance that documents the production of art in an important and often misunderstood community. Among the more than 100 artists Montano interviewed from 1979 to 1989 were John Cage, Suzanne Lacy, Faith Ringgold, Dick Higgins, Annie Sprinkle, Allan Kaprow, Meredith Monk, Eric Bogosian, Adrian Piper, Karen Finley, and Kim Jones. Her discussions with them focused on the relationship between art and life, history and memory, the individual and society, and the potential for individual and social change. The interviews highlight complex issues in performance art, including the role of identity in performer-audience relationships and art as an exploration of everyday conventions rather than a demonstration of virtuosity.

Deeply influenced by studies of female iconology, the medieval, the subconscious, and hybrid bodies, Faith Wilding's art is instantly recognizable. In keeping with Wilding's own artworks, this book is a bricolage: memoirs and watercolors sit alongside critical essays and family photographs to form an overall history of both her life and works, as well as the wider feminist art movement of the 1970s and beyond. This collection spans fifty years of her artistic production, feminist art pedagogy, and participation in, and organizing of, feminist art collectives, such as the Feminist Art Program, Womanhouse, Womanspace Gallery, and the Woman's Building. Featuring contributions from scholars and artists, including Amelia Jones, the book is the first of its kind to celebrate the career of an artist who helped shape the feminist art of today.

Judy Chicago's monumental art installation The Dinner Party was an immediate sensation when it debuted in 1979, and today it is considered the most popular work of art to emerge from the second-wave feminist movement. Jane F. Gerhard examines the piece's popularity to understand how ideas about feminism migrated from activist and intellectual circles into the American mainstream in the last three decades of the twentieth century. More than most social movements, feminism was transmitted and understood through culture—art installations, Ms. Magazine, All in the Family, and thousands of other cultural artifacts. But the phenomenon of cultural feminism came under extraordinary criticism in the late 1970s and 1980s Gerhard analyzes these divisions over whether cultural feminism was sufficiently activist in light of the shifting line separating liberalism from radicalism in post-1970s America. She concludes with a chapter on the 1990s, when The Dinner Party emerged as a target in political struggles over public funding for the arts, even as academic feminists denounced the piece for its alleged essentialism. The path that The Dinner Party traveled—from inception (1973) to completion (1979) to tour (1979-1989) to the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum (2007)—sheds light on the history of American feminism since 1970 and on the ways popular feminism in particular can illuminate important trends and transformations in the broader culture.