Benchmarks

An exhibition of work by Eileen Boxer, Elaine Lustig Cohen, Louise Fili, Lucille Tenazas, Paula Scher, Gail Anderson, Carin Goldberg, held in New York in June 2011.

Steven Heller: Why an exhibition now with this focus?

Abby Goldstein: As professor/director of the graphic design concentration at Fordham, part of my teaching approach is to curate exhibitions about design and typography. This exhibition came about from a discussion with Paul Shaw about what we felt was a lack of recognition of great women designers. Lindsay [Reichart] was taking a class in Feminism and Art and was looking to do a Senior Thesis project that combined her interests in Art History, Feminism in Art and Graphic Design. It seemed like the perfect combination.

Read the rest of the interview here.

Shirley Craven

Born in Hull in 1934, Shirley Craven studied art at Hull College of Art and then printed textiles at the Royal College of Art, 1955-58.

In 1959, aged 25, she started work at Hull Traders, a textiles firm founded two years earlier in Willesden, London, by entrepreneur Tristam Hull, who had ‘ambitious artistic aspirations’, (Jackson, 2007, p.104). In 1963, she became Chief Designer and a Director of the firm, where she worked for nearly two decades. In 1960 Design magazine described the company as having a ‘high reputation for producing adventurous and exciting designs’, which they attributed to the tight control of Craven, who displayed a ‘dramatic and original handling of colour and pattern’ (Design, 1960, p.185)

Check out the Flickr account that features some of her work here, or the book about the Hull Traders here.

Women in Graphic Design

Women in Graphic Design 1890-2012 is new publication edited by Gerda Breuer and Julia Meer from the Bergische Universität Wuppertal, published by Jovis Verlag, Berlin. Texts are in german and english, lots of illustrations…

Feminism: Activism: Modernisms

Call for papers

University College Cork, 14–15 September 2012

Deadline: 30 June 2012

Feminism and modernism have long had an uneasy relationship. The feminist position within modernism, an arguably masculinist complex of movements, is an ambiguous and problematic one which is further complicated when it comes into relationship with activism. Throughout the twentieth century, artists and writers aligned with feminism and the women’s movement have engaged with modernist tropes in a variety of ways, employing literary, filmic and artistic practices both to evaluate political positions and to prosthelytize for them. Much of the recent scholarship on these practitioners has neglected to contextualise their output as work that might operate against or within contemporaneous manifestations of feminist activism.

This conference seeks to explore how feminist activism has intersected with modernism and postmodernism in the arts, examining the tensions, connections, and contributions made to modernisms by participants in the women’s movement and by individual feminist activists. Looking at phenomena ranging from early futurist claims for the autonomy of the female practitioner to an artistic and literary engagement with the second wave of the women’s movement, and the relationship between feminism and poststructuralism, this conference seeks considerations of a variety of approaches from across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in order to interrogate activist feminism and its relationship to the modernist artworld.

Submit your paper now, more information here or download pdf here