Numerous American women artists built successful professional careers in the mid-twentieth century while confronting challenging cultural transitions: shifts in stylistic avant-gardism, harsh political transformations, and changing gender expectations for both women and men. These social and political upheavals provoked complex intellectual and aesthetic tensions. Critical discourses about style and expressive value were also renegotiated, while still privileging masculinist concepts of aesthetic authenticity. In these contexts, women artists developed their careers by adopting innovative approaches to contemporary subjects, techniques, and media. However, while a few women working during these decades have gained significant recognition, many others are still consigned to historical obscurity. The essays in this volume take varied approaches to revising this historical silence. Two focus on evidence of gender biases in several exhibitions and contemporary critical writings; the rest discuss individual artists' complex relationships to mainstream developments, with attention to gender and political biases, cultural innovations, and the influence of racial/ethnic diversity. Several also explore new interpretative directions to open alternative possibilities for evaluating women's aesthetic and formal choices. Through its complex, nuanced approach to issues of gender and female agency, this volume offers valuable and exciting new scholarship in twentieth-century American art history and feminist studies.

At the end of the 1970s, Eleanor Munro embarked upon a series of interviews with some of the leading visual artists in the nation, including Georgia O'Keeffe, Alice Neel, Helen Frankenthaler, Louise Bourgeois, and Jennifer Bartlett. The resulting portraits led to a book as significant and exciting as the artists within it. Now Munro has added a new generation of women -- including Kiki Smith and Julie Taymor -- and a new introduction to her landmark entry in the literature of visual art, ensuring its status as an invaluable resource well into the twenty-first century.

Includes material on the New York School, Pop art, Feminist Art Movement, and Latina artists.

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

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.