Female pioneers of the Bauhaus

Self-portrait by Gertrud Arndt at the Bauhaus in 1926-27

‘Why did a supposedly progressive school turn out to be so misogynistic?’
Alice Rawstorn in the IHT.

Read the full article here

International Gender Design Network

A two-day conference on gender and design

The New School

Thursday 28 – Friday 29 March 2013

www.igdn.blogspot.co.uk

Yerim and Her Pink Things from: The Pink & Blue Project (2005)  by JeongMee Yoon

Barbara Nessim: An Artful Life

Check out this exhibition of feminist illustrator Barbara Nessim

Barbara Nessim
15 February – 19 May 2013
V&A Museum, London
Free admission

Watch an interview vimeo with her here

Women's Audio Archive

Women's Audio Archive is an online collection of audio recordings made by artist Marysia Lewandowska.

'The Women's Audio Archive began as a series of recordings, taped by Lewandowska after leaving her home country in 1984, grown out of an interest in language as a site of cultural displacement. These recordings document public events, seminars, talks, conferences, and private conversations as valuable records of a particular time in discourse, beginning around 1983 until 1990. Lewandowska denotes this period of time as one dominated by academics and artists close to October magazine and by feminist gatherings, including the participating of Judy Chicago, Mary Kelly, Barbara Kruger, Yvonne Rainer, Jo Spences, Nancy Spero, Jane Weinstock, etc.'

Read more about the project here.

Barbara Jones

Go see the exhibit at the Whitechapel gallery in London on Barbara Jones' Black Eyes and Lemonade 1951 exhibition on British popular and traditional arts.

Stefi Kiesler

   

Stefi Kiesler, American born Austria, 1900–63

Stefi Kieser was a participant in and theorist of De Stijl (the Style), a group of European artists and architects who advocated for a standardized and technical art that would transcend personal taste in favor of what its members saw as art's geometric founding principles. Kiesler argued that, to achieve true objectivity, members of De Stijl should abandon traditional painting. She employed this methodology in creating 'typo-plastic' drawings using only a typewriter. Kiesler published several of these works in the journal De Stijl, under the male pseudonym Pietro de Saga. By 1931 she and her husband, the artist, architect, and designer Frederick Kiesler, had settled in New York. There Stefi Kiesler worked at the New York Public Library, where she helped Katherine S. Dreier, cofounder of the Société Anonyme, conduct research for the collection's catalogue. A little bit more info here or here.

With thanks to Antony Hudek for the tip.

Women's Work

A nice review from Teal Triggs on  Women in Graphic Design, 1890–2012 (eds. Gerda Breuer 
and Julia Meer, Jovis/D.A.P.) can be read on the Print website.

Especially helpful is Teal’s list of previous books on the subject:

• Isabelle Anscombe’s, A Woman’s Touch (Viking, 1984) 
• Liz McQuiston, Women in Design (Rizzoli, 1988)
• Pat Kirkham, Women Designers in the USA, 1900–2000 (Yale University Press, 2000)
• Bryony Gomez-Palacio and Armin Vit, Women of Design (HOW Books, 2008)

The book can be bought here.

Working Girls

Member of the European parliament Licia Ronzulli of Italy takes part with her daughter Vittoria in a voting session at the European parliament in Strasbourg. Photograph: Vincent Kessler/Reuters. Source: The Guardian online.

The Daily Graphic

A newspaper by the suffragettes, called The Daily Graphic. Images from the British Library website.

See Red Women's Workshop

An exhibition about the See Red Women's Workshop collective and their associated ephemera of protest and Women's Liberation.

Dedicated to the ideals of the second wave feminist movement, and with the founding objective of designing and producing images that explored and questioned the role of women in society – ‘the personal is political’ – See Red Women's Workshop was an alternative screen print collective focused on solidarity and revolt.

5 December 2012 – 13 January 2013
Institute of Contemporary Arts
The Mall
London SW1Y 5AH

The Invisible War

‘The groundbreaking film The Invisible War exposes the shocking level of sexual abuse against women in the US military. Its concerns about rape are echoed in the UK.’ 

‘There is absolutely no balance in the movie world. It is so bleak there are so few women directors, it's still very much an all boys club. It's just horrible.’ says its director, Amy Ziering

Read more on The Guardian 

Shulamith Firestone dies at 67

Shulamith Firestone, a leading thinker of second-wave feminism and co-founder of the New York Radical Women group, has died at the age of 67.

Firestone, a radical feminist and activist, was the author of the groundbreaking 1970 book,
The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. She left politics in the early 1970s and later fell into obscurity.

An article on The Atlantic.

Jo Spence

Image of someone setting type for The Hackney Flashers Collective, a collective of feminist and socialist women who produced exhibitions such as ‘Women and Work’ and ‘Who’s Holding the Baby’. More information on the recent exhibition of the work of Jo Spence, founder member of the collective, can be found on the website of Studio Voltaire.

Gunta Stölz

A weaving student at the Bauhaus. More info on www.guntastolzl.org and wikipedia.

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

For the women in London

In London, the inequality gap between women and men is wider than the national average.
Sign the Fawcett Society's petition for the Mayoral and London Assembly candidates here.

Via Dogana

In June 1991, the Libreria delle donne published the first issue of Via Dogana: a four-monthly magazine of political practice. The name chosen is that of the bookshop’s street, because “the women’s movement prefers to use metonymic names which, in Milan, are street names so there are no metaphorical implications”. 

Each issue started with an open meeting, the so-called “enlarged editorial office”. In order not to lose any copies, distribution followed the choice of a bookshop for each city, thereby creating a “map of bookshops preferred by women”. The topic of the first edition was significant: “Politics is Women’s Politics”. The second, “Opportunity is Uneven” spoke in favor of acknowledging FEMALE DIFFERENCE and openly challenged equal opportunity policies. Issue 37, “Freedom in the Workplace” (1998) announced the end of precarious work and the assumption of FEMINIZATION OF WORK AS WORK TOUT COURT. 

In 2001 the Libreria delle donne changed its location but the magazine continues to under the name of Via Dogana.