Sophie Calle
One of France’s leading Conceptual artists, Calle’s life and work redefines the role of the artist or author. Her influence can be seen in the work of later “first-person” artists, whose lives and art are also intertwined.
Category Archives: Photography
Continue reading
Annie Leibovitz
Annie Leibovitz is known as a celebrity portrait photographer, and has become just as famous as the people she photographs. A master at capturing popular culture icons in dramatic and innovative ways, she has paved the way for other contemporary commercial photographs, like those of Mario Testino, to also be seen as legitimate works of art.
Laurie Simmons
Simmons’ use of dolls to explore prescribed gender roles and representations of femininity has opened up space in which other feminist artists can work, facilitating the legitimacy of styles of cultural critique that do not fit within masculine molds.
Mary Kelly
Kelly’s pioneering, diaristic approach to making art through gradual, methodological practices has been especially influential on following generations of women artists, both directly and indirectly. Parallel approaches and methods can be seen in work by these younger women artists, for example, whose careers’ followed Kelly’s.
Sherrie Levine
Sherrie Levine, along with Richard Prince, Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman and a small cadre of other artists came to define “The Pictures Generation.” Their collective efforts wrestled with age-old questions surrounding authorship, citation, and originality in art. Her acts of artistic appropriation drastically renegotiated what was permissible both creatively and legally in an unprecedented way.
Sanja Iveković
Iveković is a role model for artists working within the constraints and restrictions of an oppressive regime.
Martha Rosler
RRosler became a leading figure in the Feminist art movement because much of her work revealed the divide between how women were portrayed as individuals whose only place was within the confines of home, marriage, kitchen, and motherhood and the way they actually felt by being pigeonholed into said domestic roles. She also used brave new technologies such as video to differentiate herself from the male art stars and their traditional mediums that had come before.
Barbara Kruger
Barbara Kruger’s work has an integral place in the history of feminist, postmodern, and conceptual art. Connected with this, Kruger dissects contemporary culture in her unique combinations of image and text, often targeting multiple oppressions or hypocrisies.
Hannah Wilke
Though her art was strongly and explicitly feminist, Wilke’s work was often misunderstood by feminist and other critics who saw it as narcissistic, and reaffirming of women’s position as an object of desire.
Diane Arbus
Arbus’s short and troubled life resulted in a body of work that was, and continues to be, both celebrated for its compassion and condemned for its objectification.