State of the Art: Art has been a powerful medium for feminist activism

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the experience of being a woman. Due in part to conversations circulating in the social justice sphere and my “Gender, Media and Communication” course, topics of identity and femininity have been on my mind often this semester.

I recently emerged from another Sylvia Plath phase, spontaneously purchased Barbara Kruger postcards for my room and spent an afternoon watching Ruth Bader Ginsburg interviews and documentaries. To top it all off, by a stroke of luck and whim, I attended The Wrap’s first annual Power Women Summit last Friday and heard from dozens of female powerhouses in the media and entertainment industry.

The day was a whirlwind of awe-inspiring speakers, empowerment and hot pink. I witnessed Anita Hill galvanize a majority female audience to be resilient, saw Dolores Huerta engage everyone in a chant for feminist power and heard Emily Ratajkowski delineate the unique role women occupy in contemporary politics. In between events, I mingled among CEOs, film producers, actors, writers and activists — all of them women.

Unsurprisingly, my favorite part of the event were the art pieces and installations by female artists littered throughout the conference space. From photographic portraits to rotating neon signs, the works all celebrated the power and strength of femininity.

As I examined oil paintings by The Kaplan Twins that ruminated on the complexities of celebrity culture through nude depictions of millennial celebrities, I couldn’t help but consider what it took for us to get to this point. Part of the answer, as you can probably guess, is art history. The groundwork for contemporary feminism and events like the Power Women Summit was laid decades ago by and through feminist artists.

On many levels, a revolution was stirring in the late 1960s: Second-wave feminism gripped the country and women’s art finally rose to the prominence it deserved. In full force for the first time, women produced their own images of women rather than allowing male artists to objectify and misinterpret female forms as they had for centuries prior. Budding social movements borne from the publication of Simone De Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” and Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” were buttressed by coinciding artistic movements. In some cases — like with Yoko Ono’s performance “Cut Piece” during which she allowed strangers to cut her clothes off until she was naked to protest violence against women — art spoke louder than literature or academia.

Art soon came to be regarded as a powerful medium for women to convey their experiences — to describe their lives, to flaunt ownership of their bodies, to shout their socio-political beliefs from the rooftops and have people actually listen, or at the very least be unable to ignore them. The symbiotic relationship between art and politics in their shared goal of inspiring change means that art has remained feminism’s most powerful tool, and perhaps most overlooked.

In the art world, women created opportunities for themselves outside of male-dominated institutions by opening their own feminist art schools, curating independent publications and establishing their own galleries. Not only did these early feminists greatly strengthen and advance feminism as a political movement, they actually achieved a self-sufficiency and visibility within their field that women today are still struggling to reach. At the very least, the art industry is one of the few that boasts mainstream representation and recognition of its female standouts.

In many ways, the arts did as much for feminism as feminism did for the arts. Before feminism, the art world was a notorious boys’ club and the cultural push for rights enabled women artists to create pipelines for themselves. Concurrently, art gave feminism a digestible and upfront medium through which to broadcast its message of empowerment.

As I stared at an acrylic-on-canvas rendering of Amber Rose’s nipple piercings, I couldn’t help but feel oddly exhilarated by how far we have come. In a matter of decades, we have gone from one-dimensional female art models to Judy Chicago, The Guerilla Girls, Kara Walker, Jenny Saville, The Kaplan Twins — female artists who do everything on their own terms. I feel so lucky to live in a time when hundreds of women can congregate in a hotel ballroom to celebrate themselves and invigorate one another, and I see it as a testament to the inseparability of art from socio-political movements. And whenever I glance up at the Barbara Kruger postcard on my wall — a reimagined female masochistic silhouette that reads “You thrive on mistaken identity” — it’s also a reminder that our work is still only beginning but we have our fearless forebears to thank for that.

Catherine Yang is a junior majoring in communication. She is also the associate managing editor of the Daily Trojan. Her column, “State of the Art,” runs every other Tuesday.