Women’s Contributions to Art

By: Kristin Cheasty Miller

Through Women’s Eyes, By Women’s Hands is both an internationally and locally significant event in the world of fine art. Hosted by The Women’s Center, the show will display some of the finest current work by female artists in North Carolina. The event, which runs from February 20 through 27 at the Sheraton Hotel in Chapel Hill, not only highlights local talent, but also draws attention to the tremendous progress female artists have made in gaining both critical and commercial recognition over the past few decades.

Dr. Libby Buck is an art historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and works closely with The Women’s Center art show. “Wealthy and powerful women have been significant contributors to the art world throughout history,” she said, “but up until the 19th century, their role was largely constrained to that of patroness and sponsor.” Women like Catherine de Medici and Madame de Pompadour left lasting imprints upon their times by their active patronage of the arts. Indeed, these prolific investors are just as famous today as many of the artists they sponsored.

By no means, however, was this behavior confined to the Renaissance. In the modern era, it was three wealthy American women (one of whom was Mrs. John D. Rockefeller) who founded New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1927. “The persistent social and financial capital they applied toward this project had tremendous impact in changing attitudes toward contemporary American art,” said Buck.

From Patroness to Painter – and More
Beginning in the late 1800s, women slowly began to gain a foothold in the art world as artists themselves. Academies like the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, one of the first American academies to accept female students, did much to contribute to the mainstream professional acceptance of female artists.

While women were initially allowed to study art in the late 19th century, they were trained simply as copyists, and were not allowed to paint the nude – a prerequisite for becoming a fully trained professional painter. There were exceptions, of course, to the exclusively male-dominated world of art. Mary Cassatt and Frida Kahlo, for example, became famous female artists ahead of their time, but their success was unusual, and due largely to several mitigating factors. As with these women, successful female artists prior to the late 20th century were either financially self-sponsored, or self-trained, and simply painting for their own pleasure, without commercial aspirations.

Coincidental with the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s, however, artists like Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, Susan Rothenberg, Eva Hesse, and Carolee Schneeman, to name a few, began to gain critical acclaim and widespread recognition for their work. Movements such as the Abstract Expressionist movement, performance art, and the New Image School were the staging ground for the emergence of critically and commercially successful female artists.

A Woman’s Touch
Though their entrance into the fine arts is fairly recent, their contribution has been significant. “Female artists have become critically powerful in what amounts to a very short time,” Buck explained. “One of the reasons their art is so powerful is because it is also very personal.

“Female artists,” she continued, “have managed to ask very interesting questions about imagery and its relationship to gender, an issue that has great traction in the political and social sphere of the late 20th century.”

The blending of the public, private, and professional aspects of a woman’s life is a frequently repeated theme in women’s art. “That intense personal take on art is part of what sets female artists apart from their male colleagues,” Buck said. “Men have historically separated their art from the personal, and women have really embraced art as a means of expressing the personal. In doing so, they create imagery that is hard to ignore.”

A Local Legacy
Within North Carolina, as in the rest of the world, women’s art has come to the forefront, encouraged by shows like Through Women’s Eyes, By Women’s Hands, and other exhibits of female artists sponsored throughout the state.

“North Carolina has a fascinating art history,” Buck said. “Of course, the influence of schools like the Penland School of Craft up in the Blue Ridge Mountains has been tremendous in validating the work of female artists in North Carolina.”

The Penland School, founded in 1923 by Lucy Morgan, was originally dedicated to the artistic craft of North Carolina women. Folk art -- a traditional outlet for women and long excluded from the canon of fine art -- continues to gain critical recognition. The school’s focus is on artifactual art – sculpture, textiles, paper, pottery, and iron working.

Now co-educational, Penland’s impact as one of the first places North Carolina women could go for formal training and to learn a saleable craft is undeniable.

Today, Through Women’s Eyes, By Women’s Hands celebrates the legacy of women in the arts and promotes their future.

The show, in its 20th year, is the largest of its kind in the Southeast. “This show is really a unique tradition,” Buck said. “Historically it celebrates the emergence of women artists as powerful and critical contributors to the contemporary art world, and geographically it celebrates the specific contributions of female artists in North Carolina.”

Kristin Cheasty Miller is a writer and teacher living in Durham.

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