5 Women Artist- Sexuality Post

I decided that I wanted to focus on artist that have had traces of sexuality and sexual encounters in their artworks.

 Tracey Emin- Suffer Love 

I wanted to start with the famous Tracey Emin because she has a lot of different work that touch on sexuality. Tracey Emin was born in 1963 and is a british artist. Her artwork is usually provocative and she usually finds inspiration from her own sexual experiences. Some themes that she usually incorporates are rape and abortion. She wrote a book called Strangeland that she shares about her intimate experiences. She also does a lot of charity work that supports women and children in Uganda. She also does a lot of different works to bring attention to HIV/AIDS. Tracey Emin is one of just two women professors to be appointed at London's Royal Academy of Arts since the Academy was founded in 1768.

Suffer Love 

The specific art piece that I wanted to talk about is Suffer Love, executed in 2009, published by White Cube Gallery in London. This piece explores women empowerment because Emin put sexuality in the subject’s own hands. The women in the picture is not letting her pleasure be controlled by another person and is masturbating for herself. In an interview she did, she said that she took art classes for seven years so that her paintings were anatomically correct and therefore more powerful.

Judy Chicago- The Dinner Party 

Judy Chicago was born on July 1939. As a teen she studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and then later on studied UCLA. Judy Chicago was one of the most important contributors to the feminist art movement of the 1970’s. She was inspired to start her feminist work because she was rebelling against a male dominated at world. She wanted to present femininity and women sexuality in her artworks, representing their individual accomplishments. Art forms such as needlework, ceramic decoration, and glass art are central to Chicago's work, often included alongside traditional high art media, such as painting. She has authored different books including “Beyond the Flower: The Autobiography of a Feminist Artist” and “Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist.”

Virginia Woolf's Plate Setting at The Dinner Party 

One of Judy Chicago’s most famous works includes The Dinner Party, 1974-1979. The Dinner Party is a triangular table with 39 place settings honoring powerful women in history, acknowledging them as “guests of honor.” It also has the names of 999 other powerful women on the base of the exhibition. I believe that this exhibit focuses on women sexuality because all the plates are designed with a vulvar theme. I want to mention the plate of Virginia Woolf. Virginia Woolf was an author during the 20th century. Virginia Woolf empowered other women, especially women authors that felt that they were suppressed by the male dominated literature world.



Jenny Saville- The Odalisque



Jenny Saville is a British artist and was born on May 1970. She studied at the Glasgow School of art in the late 1980’s. She also had the opportunity to study at the University of Cincinnati for six months. She went back and forth living between the US and the UK, and presenting artwork in each.Around 2003 she moved to Italy and in 2014 she moved to Oxford. She includes themes of motherhood, art history, and ancient mythology. She focuses a lot on the representation of the human body.

The Odalisque

One of her great works is called The Odalisque 2012-2014. I think this artwork is very impressive because it touches upon race and sexuality. I think this painting is very obviously about different race but is yet a stand on the power of sex.



Hannah Wilke- Sweet Sixteen



Hannah Wilke was born on 1940 in New York.  Wilke studied fine art at Temple University in Philadelphia. Wilke is considered the first feminist artist to use vaginal imagery in her work. She wanted to encompass women stereotypes in her work. She would take pictures of herself and critics would confuse that as being egotistical instead of creative. Wilke is considered as a postmodern artist were you reject traditional ideas and challenge the definition of art. She was diagnosed with cancer which became part of her artwork.

Sweet Sixteen

Wilke’s artwork Sweet Sixteen (1978) was an important part of the feminist movement during the late 70’s. There are sixteen parts in this one piece, which all look like different forms of vaginas. This piece was about embracing femininity.





Betty Tompkins- Sex Painting #4



Betty Tompkins was born in 1945 in Washington DC. Tompkins mainly focuses of photographs of close-up imagery of both heterosexual and homosexual intimate acts. She attended Syracuse University and had a teaching job at Central Washington State College. In one set of artworks she used words that generally described women to compose the paintings. She had a series called Fuck Paintings that she made paintings with very close images of genitalia.

I found Sex Painting #4 very interesting because it shows an intimate act that many people consider a fetish.

Sex Painting #4