Feminism and Art History Now ─ Radical Critiques of Theory and Practice

Four decades of feminist art history have prompted a radical rethinking of the discipline. This volume asks how feminism’s interventions and propositions are relevant to contemporary scholarship today. To what extent have developments in global politics, artworld institutions, and local cultures reshaped the critical directions of feminist art historians? The significant new research gathered here engages with the rich inheritance of feminist historiography since around 1970, and considers how to maintain the forcefulness of its critique while addressing contemporary political struggles.

Taking on subjects that reflect the museological, global and materialist trajectories of twenty-first-century art historical scholarship, the chapters address the themes of Invisibility, Temporality, Spatiality and Storytelling. They present new research on a diversity of topics that span political movements in Italy, urban gentrification in New York, community art projects in Scotland and Canada’s contemporary indigenous culture. Individual chapter analyses focus on the art of Lee Krasner, The Emily Davison Lodge, Zoe Leonard, Martha Rosler, Carla Lonzi and Womanhouse. Together with a synthesising introductory essay, these studies provide readers with a view of feminist art histories of the past, present and future.

Victoria Horne is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art and teaches courses on contemporary art at the University of Edinburgh. In 2012, she established the Writing Feminist Art Histories research initiative.Lara Perry is the Academic Programme Leader for History of Art and Design at the University of Brighton. She is the author of History's Beauties: Women and the National Portrait Gallery, 1856-1900 (2006) and co-editor of Politics in a Glass Case: Feminism, Exhibition Cultures and Curatorial Transgressions (2013)