For centuries women and artists of color have had little voice in history and the art world. Today the art world is slowly accepting these artists and they are getting to tell their part of history.

1. Race &
Gender
in Art
Finding Their Place

2. Race and Art
• Art that Promotes Ethnic History and Values
• Art that Criticizes Racism
• Who is Looking at Whom?
• Gender Issues
• Clan
• Class

3. Fred Wilson (American, born 1954). Grey
Area (Brown version), 1993. Paint, plaster,
and wood, Overall: 20 x 84 in. (50.8 x
213.4 cm). Brooklyn Museum

4. Fred Wilson often
appropriates art objects to
explore issues of race,
gender, class, politics, and
aesthetics.
Made up of five portrait heads
of the Egyptian queen
Nefertiti, Grey Area (Brown
Version) refers to one of the
most copied works of ancient
civilization. The otherwise
identical plaster effigies, which
he purchased and painted,
illustrate a value scale ranging
in color from oatmeal to dark
chocolate.
Thus, Wilson raises, but does
not answer, controversial
questions about the racial
identity of ancient Egyptians.

5. Kara Walker
Kara is best known for exploring the raw intersection of race, gender, and sexuality
through her iconic, silhouetted figures.

6. With one foot in the historical realism of slavery and the other in the
fantastical space of the romance novel, Walker’s nightmarish fictions
simultaneously seduce and implicate the audience. Walker is at her most
provocative when interrogating the stereotyping that defined race
relations in the antebellum south, and still exists today.

7. Michael Ray Charles
His graphically styled paintings investigate
racial stereotypes drawn from a history of
American advertising, product packaging,
billboards, radio jingles, and television
commercials. Charles draws comparisons
between Sambo, Mammy, and minstrel
images of an earlier era and contemporary
mass-media portrayals of black youths,
celebrities, and athletes—images he sees
as a constant in the American
subconscious. “Stereotypes have evolved,”
he notes. “I’m trying to deal with present
and past stereotypes in the context of
today’s society.”

8. Caricatures of African-American experience, such as Aunt Jemima, are
represented in Charles’s work…In each of his paintings, notions of beauty,
ugliness, nostalgia, and violence emerge and converge, reminding us that we
cannot divorce ourselves from a past that has led us to where we are, who we have
become, and how we are portrayed.

9. Kehinde Wiley
Los Angeles native and New York based
visual artist, Kehinde Wiley has firmly
situated himself within art history’s
portrait painting tradition. As a
contemporary descendent of a long line
of portraitists, including Reynolds,
Gainsborough, Titian, Ingres, among
others, Wiley, engages the signs and
visual rhetoric of the heroic, powerful,
majestic and the sublime in his
representation of urban, black and brown
men found throughout the world.

10. Where once there were only
white kings and their queens,
Kehinde Wiley inserts the
"brown faces" long absent
from Western art.

11. Ice T
Kehinde Wiley, 2005
Napoleon I on His Imperial Throne
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
(French, 1780–1867)

12. Enrique Chagoya
When Paradise Arrived,
1989,
Charcoal & pastel on paper,
80 x 80 inches
Enrique Chagoya juxtaposes secular,
popular, and religious symbols in
order to address the ongoing cultural
clash between the United States,
Latin America and the world as well.
He uses familiar pop icons to create
deceptively friendly points of entry for
the discussion of complex issues.
Through these seemingly harmless
characters Chagoya examines the
recurring subject of cultural clash that
continues to riddle contemporary life.
Recently his work has been
addressing issues on immigration and
the economic recession.

14. 13.6 James Luna. The Artifact
Piece, USA, 1986.
Installation/performance at the
San Diego Museum of Man.
Museum of Man, San Diego.
The purpose of art is often to
make simple stereotypes more
nuanced and accurate. Luna’s
work is intended to debunk a
simplistic image of Native
Americans.
In The Artifact Piece, Native American James Luna challenged the
way contemporary American culture and museums have
presented his race as extinct and vanished.
Luna posed himself dressed only in a leather cloth. Various personal
items were displayed in a glass case.

15. Half Indian/Half Mexican, 1991

16. "Take a picture with a real Indian"
Luna challenged the viewer to
reconsider what museums teach about
cultures and what is a cultural artifact.

17. Contemporary Artist: Guillermo Gomez
Pena
• Guillermo Gómez-Peña
is a Chicano
performance artist,
writer, activist, and
educator, working in
multiple media,
including performance
art, experimental radio,
video, photography and
installation art.

18. Temple of Confessions
• Outrageous Stereotypes
• Confrontational art
• Interactive
• Viewers’ were encouraged
to “confess” reactions to
the displays
“Artist Statement
The installation of Temple of Confessions-- exhibited at
the Corcoran Gallery and conceived at the Detroit
Institute of Arts and the Scottsdale Center for the Arts…
…Creating a new ethnographic "diorama" based on
religious reenactments displayed in Colonial Mexican
churches, Gómez-Peña and Sifuentes exhibit themselves
for three-day periods in Plexiglas boxes as cultural
specimens and living saints from an endangered
Religion. From inside their display cases El
Mexterminator and El Cybervato challenge us to
reevaluate our beliefs and confess our prejudice”

19. Gender in Art
• Female artists have been
involved in making art in
most times and places.
• Many art forms dominated
by women have been
historically dismissed from
the art historical canon as
craft, as opposed to fine
art.
• Women artists faced
challenges due to gender
biases in the mainstream
fine art world.
Feminism & Feminist Art
• Beginning in the late
1960s and 1970s,
feminist artists and art
historians created a
Feminist art movement,
that overtly addresses
the role of women in the
art world and explores
women in art history.
Self portrait, Artemisia Gentileschi

20. Artemisia Gentileschi (1593 - 1652/1653),
daughter of well-known Roman artist,
Orazio Gentileschi (1563 - 1639), was one
of the first women artists to achieve
recognition in the male-dominated world of
post-Renaissance art. In an era when
female artists were limited to portrait
painting and imitative poses, she was the
first woman to paint major historical and
religious scenarios.
Judith and her Maidservant with the head
of Holofernes, by Artemisia Gentileschi

21. Created between 1974 and 1979 (with the help of several hundred volunteers), Judy
Chicago’s mixed media installation The Dinner Party consists of several colossal,
banquet-style tables. Included are 39 different place settings for mythical and historical
women, celebrating their cultural achievements. Each place setting features a unique
butterfly/flower-like sculpture rising from the plates, meant to symbolize a vulva. There
are 999 names of other important women inscribed amongst the installation.
Judy Chicago,
The Dinner Party

22. “I became a feminist because I
wanted to help my daughters,
other women and myself aspire to
something more than a place
behind a good man.”
-artist Faith Ringgold

23. “I’ve always sought to express a tension in
form and meaning in order to achieve a
veracity. I have come to the conclusion that
the art world has to join us, women artists,
not we join it. When women are in
leadership roles and gain rewards and
recognition, then perhaps ‘we’ (women and
men) can all work together in art world
actions.”

24. Anonymous activist group Guerrilla Girls have been asking important
questions about women and the art world since the mid ’80s (in gorilla
masks, even!) “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?”
demanded an explanation for female inequality on the walls of museums —
pointing to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Recent Guerrilla Girl
works have questioned the lack of female presence in Hollywood and other
messy politics.

25. In 1964, Yoko Ono invited audience members on stage for a
conceptual performance piece called Cut Piece. While kneeling
quietly on the floor in a traditional, passive Japanese pose, viewers
were offered the chance to cut her clothing away piece by piece until
she was naked. Audience members reacted differently (depending
upon what country the work was performed in) as Ono transformed
herself into a vulnerable object — a role she felt had long been
forced upon women in art and media.

26. Barbara Kruger’s works feature juxtapositions of images
and texts that address cultural constructions of power,
identity, and sexuality. Since 1980, the artist’s work has
developed a highly recognizable oeuvre of black, white,
and red photo-text montages.

27. Cindy Sherman, Centerfolds
Cindy Sherman hasn’t always described herself as a feminist, but the
metamorphic photographer has become an icon thanks to her memorable
female characters. Sherman’s 1981 Centerfolds series depicts female
stereotypes seen in the media. Untitled No. 96 — a garish portrait of an
orange-colored woman clutching a crumpled personals ad (pictured above)
— is one of several images that toy with cliché gender roles and
voyeurism, inspired by the center spreads in fashion and pornographic
magazines.