What does it mean to paint like a woman?

The Feminist Art Project (TFAP)—originally started by Arlene Raven, Judy Chicago, and Susan Fisher Sterling—will present a day of free and public sessions on Saturday, February 13th at the 2010 College Art Association Annual Conference in Chicago, Illinois. Organized by Professor Maria Elena Buszek of Kansas City Art Institute, the five scheduled panels will showcase the collaborative efforts of artists, activists, theorists, and critics, as they examine contemporary feminist concerns and praxis. These issues range from investigating the role of abnegation in feminist art to gendering representations of medical interventions. Many of the presentations will be delivered in the form of a dialogue and/or performance.

Because I am currently piecing together a paper on visualizing a feminist formalism (in the Greenbergian sense of the term), this panel struck me as particularly brend:

“Feminist Painting”

Julia Bryan-Wilson, Associate Professor, University of California-Irvine
Johanna Burton, Associate Director, Whitney Independent Study Program

In 1975, Alice Neel asserted: “I always painted like a woman, but I don't paint like a woman is supposed to paint.” What does it mean to paint “like a woman”—and how might that differ from painting as a feminist? Featuring Harmony Hammond, Carrie Moyer, Amy Sillman, and Paula Wilson, this session brings together four artists of different generations to discuss the political ramifications of applying pigment to surface. Each of these women grapples in her work with how painting has historically and might continue to signify a feminist practice. In what has been called a "post-medium” (and even "post-feminism") era, how can we look critically at the specific tools, methods, and means of painting, particularly abstraction, from within a feminist rubric?

Image: Carrie Moyer, Affiche #14 (Cherry Bomb), 2003, Acrylic on canvas, 50" x 42"