Mid Century Women Printmakers

A artistic tribute to 25 influential mid-century women featuring a quote and a original, colorful, and hand-painted painted portrait reflecting each woman's contribution to the visual arts. Includes a short biography on each person

This timely reexamination of the experimental New York print studio Atelier 17 focuses on the women whose work defied gender norms through novel aesthetic forms and techniques.

The history of the Folly Cove Designers (1941-1969)--one of America's longest-running artist collectives--is explored through their work. The Folly Cove Designers were a mid-20th-century group of American artists block printing in Gloucester, Massachusetts, on Cape Ann. Their blocks were carved into linoleum, and then primarily printed on fabric. Through historical ephemera and photographs, Sarni explores the history, the work, and the group dynamics of the Folly Cove Collective, through its founder, renowned children's book author and illustrator Virginia Lee Burton Demetrios (of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel fame).

"I was in high spirits all through my unwise teens, considerably puffed up, after my drawings began to sell, with that pride of independence which was a new thing to daughters of that period."—The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote Mary Hallock made what seems like an audacious move for a nineteenth-century young woman. She became an artist. She was not alone. Forced to become self-supporting by financial panics and civil war, thousands of young women moved to New York City between 1850 and 1880 to pursue careers as professional artists. Many of them trained with masters at the Cooper Union School of Design for Women, where they were imbued with the Unity of Art ideal, an aesthetic ideology that made no distinction between fine and applied arts or male and female abilities. These women became painters, designers, illustrators, engravers, colorists, and art teachers. They were encouraged by some of the era's best-known figures, among them Tribune editor Horace Greeley and mechanic/philanthropist Peter Cooper, who blamed the poverty and dependence of both women and workers on the separation of mental and manual labor in industrial society. The most acclaimed artists among them owed their success to New York's conspicuously egalitarian art institutions and the rise of the illustrated press. Yet within a generation their names, accomplishments, and the aesthetic ideal that guided them virtually disappeared from the history of American art. Art Work: Women Artists and Democracy in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York recaptures the unfamiliar cultural landscape in which spirited young women, daring social reformers, and radical artisans succeeded in reuniting art and industry. In this interdisciplinary study, April F. Masten situates the aspirations and experience of these forgotten women artists, and the value of art work itself, at the heart of the capitalist transformation of American society.

This text examines the collection of feminist art in the Museum of Modern Art. It features essays presenting a range of generational and cultural perspectives.

In 1910, Bertha Jaques co-founded the Chicago Society of Etchers and helped launch a revival of American fine art printmaking. In the decades following, women artists produced some of the most compelling images in U.S. printmaking history and helped advance the medium technically and stylistically. Paths to the Press examines American women artists' contributions to printmaking in the U.S. during the early to mid twentieth century. It features work by internationally and nationally recognized figures such as Isabel Bishop, Louise Nevelson, and Elizabeth Catlett; well-known regional figures such as Chicago artist Bertha Jaques, New Mexico artist Gener Kloss, and Louisiana artist Caroline Durieux; and relatively unknown printmakers such as Chicago artist Fritzi Brod, San Franciscan Pele deLappe, and Texan Mary Bonner. The contributors include David Acton, Nancy E. Green, Melanie Herzog, Helen Langa, Bill North, Mark Pascale, and Mark B. Pohlad.

Taschen's inventive layout is effective in presenting the provocative works, words, and biographies of the nearly 100 women artists gathered here. Grosenick, a freelance art historian in Germany, has selected women artists working in Germany, the US, South Africa, Japan, Poland, France, Scandinavia, and Spain, among other countries. The entry for each artist is six pages, with much of the space devoted to good- quality color photos of her work. c. Book News Inc.

The fiftieth anniversary edition of the essay that is now recognized as the first major work of feminist art theory—published together with author Linda Nochlin’s reflections three decades later. Many scholars have called Linda Nochlin’s seminal essay on women artists the first real attempt at a feminist history of art. In her revolutionary essay, Nochlin refused to answer the question of why there had been no “great women artists” on its own corrupted terms, and instead, she dismantled the very concept of greatness, unraveling the basic assumptions that created the male-centric genius in art. With unparalleled insight and wit, Nochlin questioned the acceptance of a white male viewpoint in art history. And future freedom, as she saw it, requires women to leap into the unknown and risk demolishing the art world’s institutions in order to rebuild them anew. In this stand-alone anniversary edition, Nochlin’s essay is published alongside its reappraisal, “Thirty Years After.” Written in an era of thriving feminist theory, as well as queer theory, race, and postcolonial studies, “Thirty Years After” is a striking reflection on the emergence of a whole new canon. With reference to Joan Mitchell, Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, and many more, Nochlin diagnoses the state of women and art with unmatched precision and verve. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” has become a slogan and rallying cry that resonates across culture and society. In the 2020s, Nochlin’s message could not be more urgent: as she put it in 2015, “There is still a long way to go.”