Can you name 5 women artists?

   During this course, there are several different female artists that are talked about. There are several women that portray a story through art. A story of things that they have gone through or something about their life. Today is it easier for women to share their work but in the past, it was harder for women to show off their work. During the 19th century, women were struggling to be an artist and be as well known as male artists. The women listed below are all contemporary artists from different time periods. When looking at these artworks, you can see that these women had found a unique way for them to express their opinion. Each of these women had started to make a point with their artwork and that something that was difficult for women to do. Even in today's day and age, women, artists are known less than men are. When coming down to naming any five artists, it easier to name five male artists than female. Throughout this course, there are a lot of important female artists that are talked about and these are only five.

   One women artist that was talked about was Barbara Kruger. She is an American conceptual/pop artist that is born in Newark, New Jersey.  She attended Syracuse University where she studied with fellow artists/photographers Diane Arbus and Marvin Israel. Kruger made one of her earliest work in 1969. She is best known for her silkscreen prints. This is where Kruger placed a directed concise caption across the surface of a found photograph. In order to catch the viewer's attention, she merges the slick facade of graphic design with unexpected phrases. As her career took off, she soon started to include site-specific installations as well as video and audio works. In the fall of 1976, Kruger moved to Berkeley, California, abandoning art making to teach at the University of California for four years. A year later she took on photography, producing a series of black and white details of architectural exteriors. By 1979, she had stopped taking photographs and instead she began to employ found images in her art. Recently, Kruger has extended her aesthetic project, creating public installations of her work in galleries, museums, municipal buildings, etc. Pictured below is one of Barbara Kruger's piece from 1981 names, Untitled (Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face). This is one of the pieces that is part of her silkscreen prints.

Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face), 1981

   Another women artist was Cindy Sherman. Sherman is originally from Glen Ridge, New Jersey. She is one of the best-known and most important photographers working today. She has built a name of being one of the most respected photographers of the late 20th century. Majority of her photographs are pictures of herself. However, none of those photos revealed anything about her as a person. The position of her body would be the way that artists have seen women for centuries. These series of photographs were titled "Untitled" which had depersonalized the images. The photographs had very few clues about Sherman's personality. Each one is so unique and ambiguous that the viewer is left more confused than clarity over Sherman's true personality. In 1980, Sherman completed the "Untitled" project and allowed her to have her first solo show at the nonprofit space, The Kitchen, in New York City. In that same year, she also created a series called "Rear-Screen Projections+ in which she dressed up and paraded against a projected slide background. In 1992, Sherman embarked on a series of photographs which is now referred to as "Sex Pictures". Instead of photographing herself, she uses dolls and prosthetic body parts in highly sexual poses. Today, Sherman has returned to using herself as a model. Recently, she has displayed a series of portrait-like images of herself in the guise of women from California in her recent show at the New York gallery.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 1979

   Yoko Ono is a famous artist that is also well known today. Ono was born into a wealthy family in Japan and grew up mostly in Tokyo. In 1952, Ono was the first woman admitted to the philosophy program at the Gakushūin University in Tokyo. She married singer-songwriter named John Lennon. When the band, the Beatles, fell apart, she was accused to be the reason behind why they broke up. After the son of their son, Sean, Ono and her husband started to live a private life. In some of her earliest works were often communicated to the public in verbal or written form. One of her most famous pieces was a performance piece called Cut Piece (1964). For this piece, she sat passively while she invited audience members to come up and cut off parts of her dress with a pair of scissors. Ono is an artist of different forms. She embarked her music career in 1970 with Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band. She continued to make music even after the death of her husband. After the death of her husband, she worked on various memorials for him.

Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, 1964

   Kara Walker is another well-known artist that was born on November 26, 1969, in Stockton, California. She is an American installation artist who used intricate cut-paper silhouettes, together with collage, drawing, painting, performance, film, etc. In 1994 Walker's work appeared in a new-talent show at the Drawing Center in New York. She contributed a 50-foot mural of life-size silhouettes. She explains that the use of the silhouette by stating, "the silhouette says a lot with very little information, but that's also what the stereotype does." At the age of 27, Walker received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation "genius grant." The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City featured her exhibition titled After the Deluge in 2006. Walker's first sculptures were commissioned for a temporary installation in the former Domino Sugar processing facility in Brooklyn, New York. Below, this is one of the paper installations that she made that is an exhibition in the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Kara Walker, Endless Conundrum, An African Anonymous Adventures, 2001

   Sonia Delaunay was born on November 14, 1885, in Gradizhsk, Ukraine and died on December 5, 1979. Delaunay's original name was Sofia Illinitchna Terk. Delaunay grew up in St. Petersburg. She studied drawing in Karlsruhe, Germany. Later in 1905, she moved to Paris where she was influenced by the Post-Impressionists and the Fauvists.  She married Cubist painter Robert Delaunay and like him, she "soon became firmly convinced that modernity could best be expressed through a dynamic interplay of color harmonies and dissonances which replicated the rhythms of modern urban life" (Chadwick 260). In 1910, she was painting in the style known as Orphism. This involved the harmonious juxtaposition of areas of pure color. During the 1920s, Delaunay had designed textiles and dresses with the use of abstract color harmonies. Her work with textiles and embroidery encouraged her to break down forms and emphasize surface structure. With this, she started designing book covers, posters, lampshades, curtains, cushion covers, etc. The picture below is one of Delaunay's first abstract work. This is a quilt that she made that was influenced by Russian peasant designs.

Sonia Delaunay, Couverture, 1911

Work Cited:
http://www.cindysherman.com/biography.shtml
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kara-Walker
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Yoko-Ono

Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, and Society. 5th Edition. 2012