Chadwick, Ch. 12, 13, 14, 15 + 16, 11/19 -BinChao Yang

Chadwick, Chapters 12

Women in the arts were raising questions—from where to exhibit as women and how to find space for working, to political, theoretical, and aesthetic issues.

    - Women were not only fighting for exhibition opportunities but were questioning the entire structure of the art world—how artists worked, how value was assigned, what counted as “serious” art, and how political struggles intersected with aesthetics. It highlights that feminist art was never just about visibility; it was about transforming the systems that marginalized women in the first place.

Chicago and Schapiro warned that female imagery “should not be viewed simplistically as ‘vaginal or womb art,’ but… understood by providing a framework within which to reverse devaluations of female anatomy in patriarchal culture.”

    - They argued that their imagery was not about essentializing women but about reclaiming symbols that had been degraded or ignored in patriarchal culture. Their goal was to shift meaning—to turn what had been used to diminish women into a source of power, pride, and cultural visibility. 

Miriam Schapiro, Anatomy of a Kimono, 1976 (detail)

    Miriam Schapiro is one of the foremost pioneers in the feminist art movement in the United States. Schapiro, painter, sculptor, collage maker, and printmake. “Anatomy of a Kimono” is one of many “femmages” Schapiro created, starting in the mid-1970s, and is based on the patterns of Japanese kimonos, fans, and robes. Schapiro used the term femmage to describe works that combined collage, painting, fabric, embroidery and other “high art” and “decorative art” techniques, simultaneously highlighting women’s relation to those materials and processes. I chose this piece because it powerfully embodies feminist art’s challenge to art -historical hierarchies, asserting the value of women’s craft practices and domestic materials. Anatomy of a Kimono is one of Schapiro’s most iconic statements on how pattern, decoration, and fabric can carry cultural history, gendered labor, and artistic authority simultaneously.

Chadwick, Chapters 13

Exhibitions celebrating the ‘return’ to painting… were remarkable for their exclusion of virtually all women.

    - Even as women artists were becoming more visible, major institutions reinforced a male-centered art canon by promoting Neo-expressionist men while systematically excluding women. The phrase “return to painting” served as a coded way to recenter male dominance, suggesting that artistic innovation was once again a male domain.

Feminist critics remain sensitive to the dangers of confusing tokenism with equal representation.

    - institutions sometimes include a small number of women artists to appear progressive without actually challenging structural inequality. Tokenism provides the illusion of diversity while leaving power dynamics unchanged. Feminist critics warn that a few highly visible women do not equal systemic inclusion. True representation requires sustained commitment, equitable opportunities, and critical rethinking of the criteria used to value and select artists—not just symbolic gestures.

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

    Barbara Kruger is an American conceptual artist and collagist associated with the Pictures Generation. She is most known for her visual word art that consists of black-and-white photographs, overlaid with declarative captions, stated in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed text. Barbara Kruger's Untitled (Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face) (1981) combines a stark, high-contrast photographic image with bold text to expose the violence and power dynamics embedded in the male gaze. Using her signature visual language—appropriated imagery paired with declarative, confrontational statements—Kruger critiques systems of gender, consumption, and visual control. As a leading figure in feminist conceptual art, she transforms advertising aesthetics into tools of resistance and political commentary. I chose this piece because it is one of the most iconic and direct feminist interrogations of how women are visually constructed and objectified in culture. Paired with Schapiro’s Anatomy of a Kimono, it shows two distinct but equally powerful feminist strategies: one rooted in reclaiming women’s craft traditions, and the other in confronting the politics of looking and representation.

Chadwick, Chapters 14

Despite its breadth and dazzling juxtapositions of objects… ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ drew considerable criticism, since its good intentions were perceived by some commentators as patronizing, if not ‘neo-imperialist.

    - Although “Magiciens de la Terre” attempted to broaden the boundaries of contemporary art by including non-Western and folk artists, it did so through a Western curatorial framework that reproduced systems of power it claimed to challenge. By presenting cultural difference without context, the exhibition risked exoticizing non-Western artists and reinforcing colonial hierarchies under the guise of inclusivity.

It is tempting to assume that the so-called New Internationalism… has produced an international ‘level playing field’… But even a cursory review of the literature suggests a far more complex picture.

    - Although more women appeared in global exhibitions by the late 1990s, the structures that shape visibility—market pressure, curatorial priorities, national agendas, and Euro-American dominance—still create uneven conditions. The “level playing field” is a myth that obscures ongoing disparities in representation, critical attention, and institutional support.

Mona Hatoum, Over my dead body, 1988

    Mona Hatoum’s Over My Dead Body (1988) presents a dramatic close-up of the artist’s face in profile, with a tiny toy soldier aimed at her forehead—a powerful juxtaposition that exposes the absurdity and violence of militarized masculinity. Hatoum, a Palestinian-born artist known for exploring themes of exile, surveillance, displacement, and bodily vulnerability, often uses her own image to challenge political oppression and gendered power structures. This work blends humor with defiance, turning the phrase “over my dead body” into a visual declaration of resistance. I chose this piece because it sharply connects feminist concerns with global politics, demonstrating how personal identity and geopolitical conflict intersect in contemporary art.

Chadwick, Chapters 15

Emin’s ‘perfect places’ map geographies of intimacy and impersonality… rootedness and dislocation, trauma and renewal, popular culture, craft, and high art through images and artifacts.

    - Her installations use autobiographical materials—letters, fabric, videos—to translate deeply personal experiences into broader cultural commentary. By mapping “intimacy and impersonality” together, Emin shows that private experiences are never entirely private: they are shaped by class, gender, trauma, and media culture. Her practice exemplifies a contemporary shift in which personal narrative becomes a site for examining social norms, mediated identity, and the politics of visibility in a globalized world.

Often they provide one lens through which to view the increasingly powerful relationship between local/individual/subjective experience and the forces that drive real shifts and consolidations of power around the world today.

    - Artists—particularly women—use identity, memory, and embodied experience to reveal how global systems (migration, nationalism, religious politics, capitalism, media culture) shape everyday life. The statement acknowledges that personal expression in art cannot be separated from the larger power dynamics of globalization. It also highlights how contemporary women artists operate across borders, negotiating the tension between local specificity and global visibility—a dynamic at the core of “feminism without borders.

Guerrilla Girls, Benvenuti alla Biennale Femminista!, 2005

This work is a bold, poster-style intervention by the Guerrilla Girls—an anonymous feminist art collective known for exposing gender and racial discrimination in the art world. Using their trademark humor, statistics, and gorilla-mask anonymity, the piece critiques the persistent underrepresentation of women artists, even within major cultural events like the Venice Biennale. I chose this piece because it exemplifies how art can function as activism, using sharp visuals and wit to confront systemic inequities. It also highlights the Guerrilla Girls’ continued relevance in conversations about visibility, power, and gender in contemporary art.

Chadwick, Chapters 16

“Much of what we call postmodern art has feminist art at its source.” — Holland Cotter

    - Cotter’s statement highlights the foundational role feminist art has played in shaping late-20th-century and early-21st-century artistic practices. By foregrounding identity, challenging hierarchies of material and form, and interrogating institutions, feminist artists introduced strategies—such as performance, craft-based media, collaborative methods, and political critique—that became hallmarks of postmodernism.

“What was happening could not be known in advance; it was always a becoming.” — Griselda 

    - Pollock resists rigid periodization of feminist art into “waves” or sequential generations. Her emphasis on becoming underscores feminism as a dynamic, shifting project rather than an event with neat boundaries. This helps counter reductive historical models and acknowledges that feminist practice evolves through ongoing negotiation—across cultures, identities, and political conditions.

Amy Cutler, Army of Me, 2003

    This gouache painting depicts an all-female "army" The title Army of Me is both intriguing and layered with meaning. It’s a reference to the idea of the individual being part of something larger—like an army—while simultaneously highlighting personal strength and the burden of responsibility. In the context of Amy Cutler’s painting, it can be seen as a metaphor for the way women often carry the weight of domestic, emotional, and societal expectations, doing repetitive and sometimes exhausting labor that feels isolating, yet necessary. Each of the women in the painting seems to perform these odd tasks alone, yet as part of a greater, collective struggle. It’s as if each figure is part of a larger force, a "army" of women, silently navigating their roles in society—strengthened, but also confined by these expectations.

Post 6:Modernism (lina)

Artwork:

Pablo Picasso
Title: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)

Description to the piece: A fractured, angular depiction of five female figures set against a compressed, mask-like background. Bodies are distorted, space is splintered, and the classical ideal is aggressively overturned.

Two modernist features:

1. Radical formal experimentation–

breaks illusionistic space through sharp geometric fragmentation.

2. • Challenge to tradition — rejects classical beauty and incorporates non-Western visual influences to push painting beyond conventional representation.

Chadwick, Chapter 9
Quote 1: “Women were pushed to the margins.”
Response: Picasso’s departure from conventional feminine representation reflects the broader tension Chadwick identifies: the instability of female imagery in early modernism and the failure of male artists to question inherited gender hierarchies.
Quote 2: “Modernism exposed contradictions in gender roles.”
Response: The painting’s confrontational female figures contradict passive feminine norms, aligning with Chadwick’s point that modernist rupture also laid bare cultural anxieties about women’s shifting social presence.

Chadwick, Chapter 10
Quote 1: “New identities emerged in the avant-garde.”
Response: The mask-like faces connect to Chadwick’s focus on how modernist artists appropriated “otherness” to construct new identities—yet often without acknowledging the women or cultures represented.
Quote 2: “Art and politics intertwined.”

Response: Picasso’s distortion of the body functions politically, not just formally, echoing Chadwick’s argument that experimentation was inseparable from debates about race, sexuality, and power.

Chadwick, Chapter 11
Quote 1: “Women navigated hostile institutions.”
Response: The work’s fame contrasts sharply with the invisibility of contemporary women artists Chadwick emphasizes, highlighting how modernism celebrated innovation while excluding many of its practitioners.
Quote 2: “Representation said as much about viewers as subjects.”
Response: The aggressive gaze of the figures forces viewers into an uneasy position—reinforcing Chadwick’s claim that modernist imagery reveals cultural fears embedded in acts of looking.

Guerrilla Girls (pp. 59–91)
Quote 1: “The art world’s power structures were invisible but pervasive.”
Response: Picasso’s canonical status fits the critique: modernism’s revolutionary aura coexisted with gendered gatekeeping that shaped which artists were preserved and which were erased.
Quote 2: “History needs a rewrite.”
Response: Using this painting as a touchstone makes the Guerrilla Girls’ point clear: we must question why certain modernist works dominate syllabi and museums while equally innovative women artists remain marginalized.
If you want, I can format this as a blog-ready paragraph version or help you choose a different artwork.

Post 6 - Modernism (Jahkai)

 Chadwick

Chapter 9

“Russian art in the years before the Revolution of 1917 developed along two broad paths. While some artists worked primarily in two dimensions, others emphasized construction, texture, and design. Neoprimitivism, Cubofuturism, Rayonism, Suprematism, and Constructivism coexisted and artists looked to both Paris and Moscow for support.”

I like how this quote talks about Russian art before the revolution of 1917. I think it’s important to realize how much the revolution has impacted Russian art. How it changed art through its events. 

“The evolution of Delaunay’s fashion and textile designs, which by 1923 were being commercially produced, reflects both the French textile industry’s attempt to recover quickly from the slump caused by the War by identifying their designs with contemporary avant-garde art, and new ways of thinking about the body and display.”

I chose this quote because I really respect the way she uses both the fashion and textile industry with her designs. Not just that, but also this was just after the war, which the French were trying to recover from. Using the textile industry shows that.

Chapter 10

“The imagery of intellectually and physically powerful femininity and that of the lesbian New Woman of the early twentieth century intersect in Brooks paintings which rely on the imagery of cross-dressing.”

Romaine Brooks art highlights the individuality of women, defying social norms by “cross-dressing”. She paints women looking intelligent, strong & free. She uses art as self expression, and expresses self expression.

“Her nude self-portraits may be the first such paintings in oil by a woman artist, but as such, they reveal all the contradictions inherent in the woman artist’s attempt to insert her own image into existing artistic conventions.”

The reason I choose this quote is because it seems that Gauguin is a pioneer of women painting nudes of themselves. Doing something that I’d assume women weren’t allowed to do. Which was to represent themselves in this way. 

Chapter 11

“The elegant intimacy of Krasner’s “Little Images” may be linked to her fascination with Irish and Persian illuminated manuscripts, or with the Hebrew inscriptions familiar from her childhood.”

This quote talks about Krasner’s influences, and how they were shaped. By her childhood and cultural memory of these things. It also reveals how Krasner’s work challenges “mainstream” narrative, by using such homage that isn’t usually seen by the “mainstream” before. 

"Hesse and Bourgeois used materials that had hardly ever been used before in sculpture to form objects that were powerfully tactile and suggestive, yet relied on an abstract formal language." 

This is an important quote because it captures how women sculptors, through new materials and new relationships between the body, abstraction, and emotion-challenged the male dominated artistic norms of what sculpture could be.

Guerrilla Girls 

“Sonia Terk Delaunay (1885-1974) had her first painting show in 1908 and didn't have another until 1953. Why? Because her husband Robert Delaunay entered and hogged the picture”

I picked this quote because it shows how men were taking credit and overshadowing the women in the art scene. Not because they played any role, but just because they were the husband of the wife. The man, that's all.

“You have lost your identity because you happened to be the wife of Jackson Pollock?”

 

Another quote about how women are overshadowed by men, but this quote shows how women are forgotten or how the quote says they’ve “lost their identity”. 

Sonia Delaunay, appliquéd coat, 1920s

Sonia Delaunay's design is a coat with multiple different panels. Which are cut into different shapes.  featuring saturated reds, blues, blacks, oranges, and whites. 

Modernism Characteristics

Orphism

- The coat visually uses the principles of Orphism, using pure color, non-representational shapes, and rhythmic movement.

Rejection of Tradition

- Rather than use embroidering or tailoring that would model the natural shape of a body, the coat employs flat geometric shapes that de-emphasize the figure, in line with modernism’s push away from classical beauty standards.

SHORT POST MODERNISM 11/12 - BinChao Yang

Chadwick, Chapters 9

As he moved toward pure abstraction between 1909 and 1912, these new ways of thinking about surface plane became the carriers for the spiritual content which he believed would ultimately define the ‘new’ art and remove it from the domain of the decorative.

    - By abandoning realistic representation, he sought to make form and color themselves convey emotion and meaning. This marks a turning point in modern art — moving from depicting external appearances to exploring the inner, spiritual, or emotional essence of experience. The “surface plane” becomes a space for symbolic expression rather than mere decoration.

The publication of Clive Bell’s Art in 1914 with its emphasis on “significant form” also promoted an aesthetic in which design and color alone were to carry content.

    -  For Bell and his contemporaries, narrative or subject matter was secondary to the emotional or intellectual response provoked by form itself. This idea deeply influenced artists of the Omega Workshops, who aimed to merge fine and decorative arts by letting design and color become expressive tools rather than mere ornament.

Chadwick, Chapters 10

Modern artists from Renoir (‘I paint with my prick’) to Picasso (‘Painting, that is actual lovemaking’) have collaborated in fusing the sexual and the artistic by equating artistic creation with male sexual energy, presenting women as powerless and sexually subjugated.

    - This part exposes how early modernism often grounded its artistic identity in masculine power and erotic domination. The act of painting was mythologized as an expression of male sexual energy, while the female subject was reduced to a passive object of desire. Feminist art historians such as Carol Duncan have argued that this “sexualizing of creativity” reveals deep inequalities in how art history has defined genius and creativity as inherently male. By linking artistic mastery to virility, modernist discourse excluded women from the position of the creative subject and confined them to being represented rather than representing.

Valadon’s female nudes fuse observation with a knowledge of the female body based on her experience as a model. Rejecting the static and timeless presentation of the monumental nude that dominates Western art, she emphasizes context, specific moment, and physical action.

    - Suzanne Valadon’s radical redefinition of the female nude from a woman’s perspective. Instead of depicting women as idealized or passive figures for male pleasure, Valadon portrayed them as embodied, active, and self-possessed. Her firsthand understanding of the female body allowed her to challenge the traditional “male gaze” and to replace objectification with authenticity and agency. By situating her figures in everyday, domestic contexts and emphasizing physical presence over erotic display, Valadon reclaimed the female body as a site of lived experience and artistic truth, laying groundwork for later feminist explorations of women’s self-representation.

Chadwick, Chapters 11

Despite such achievements, women of color often faced formidable political and social barriers.

    - This statement speaks to the persistent marginalization of artists like Augusta Savage, Pablita Velarde, Mine Okubo, Elizabeth Catlett, and Lois Mailou Jones, whose race and gender limited their recognition even when their work was exceptional. Their stories reveal how institutional racism and sexism are intersected, pushing many to work abroad or outside mainstream art institutions. The quote highlights a broader truth in art history—that progress for women artists was often uneven and conditional, and that artists of color had to navigate both gendered and racial exclusions to claim space within the modern canon.

Women artists active in public arts programs during the 1930s found themselves on a less secure footing in the next decade as government patronage gave way to private art galleries, and as social ideologies promoted sexual difference as cause for removing women from productive labor.

    - The art world shifted from the collective, government-supported opportunities of the New Deal era to the exclusive, male-dominated private gallery system of the 1940s. As the art market became more commercialized and Abstract Expressionism took hold, women’s visibility and participation declined sharply. The ideology of “sexual difference” justified their exclusion, reinforcing the notion that professional artistic labor was masculine while women belonged in the domestic sphere. This systemic shift marginalized many women who had flourished under WPA programs and reveals how cultural and economic changes reinforced gender inequality in the art world.

Guerrilla Girls 59 - 91

Together they developed a theory of color they named simultanism, but he got most of the credit for it. Guerrilla Girls shake a hairy finger at any dense-headed critic or art historian who doesn't mention both of them in the same breath.

    - This statement exposes the gender bias that often shaped early modern art history. Sonia Terk Delaunay was an innovator whose exploration of color, rhythm, and abstraction was equally as vital as her husband Robert’s work. Yet, like many women artists of her time, she was overshadowed and under-credited. The Guerrilla Girls’ critique reminds us that artistic movements such as Simultanism were not created in isolation by male geniuses but were often collaborative. Recognizing both Sonia and Robert Delaunay equally restores a more accurate and inclusive history of modernism—one that values women’s creative and intellectual labor alongside men’s.

“Only artifice in me, so little primitive. Beneath this mask, another mask. I will never be finished lifting off all these faces.” — Claude Cahun

    - Claude Cahun’s lifelong exploration of identity as something fluid, performative, and endlessly changing. By photographing herself in a range of gendered personas, Cahun dismantled traditional ideas of masculinity and femininity long before such discussions were common. Her statement reveals a deep awareness that identity is layered and constructed—never fixed or “authentic”—anticipating postmodern and queer theories of the self.

SHORT POST MODERNISM

Marie Laurencin, Group of Artists, 1908

    In this painting, Laurencin portrays a group of elegantly dressed figures—three women and one man—along with a small white dog. The figures are arranged closely together in a shallow, flattened space, with soft, muted tones of brown, pink, cream, and blue. The flowers in the background add a decorative touch that complements the refined, lyrical quality of the composition. Laurencin’s figures have stylized, mask-like faces and elongated forms, emphasizing mood and harmony rather than realism.

Stylization and Abstraction of Form:

    - Laurencin simplifies and flattens the figures, moving away from realistic representation toward a decorative, abstracted style—a hallmark of early modernist experimentation.

Emphasis on Mood and Subjectivity Over Realism:

    - The painting focuses on aesthetic harmony, emotional tone, and the artist’s personal vision rather than naturalistic detail, reflecting modernism’s break from academic tradition and its embrace of individual expression.

Post 6 ch.9,10,11- Beshoy

Ch9.


“Abstraction in painting and sculpture developed simultaneously in a number of European capitals during the first decade of this century. Its course, inextricably bound up with the formal developments of Post-Impressionism and Cubism, and with a desire to break with nature and infuse the resulting art with a profound spiritual content, has been extensively traced”.

I chose this quote because it highlights how abstraction in art wasn't just a stylistic choice but more of a cultural/spiritual choice. I like how the author describes it as a “desire to break with nature”. Because photography became a thing, artists no longer had to focus on representing what they saw but now how they feel. Its that perspective is what helps explain why things like cubism opened doors for artists to a whole new reality.

“In early 1923, the Union of Russian Artists in Paris organized an evening of dance, performance, and exhibition at the Bal Bullier (a popular dance hall frequented by avant-garde artists). The participants included Delaunay, Goncharova, Larionov, and Fernand Léger. Delaunay designed a booth of modern fashions which displayed her scarves, ballet costumes, embroidered vests, and coats. It was her first presentation of clothing and design in a fully unified exhibition setting, and the first of many fancy dress events of the 1920s in which artists and socialites joined, fusing production and consumption of the new image of the modern”.

I like this quote because it really captures how art and fashion began to merge, especially through events and blurred the lines between everyday things and creativity. I find it really cool that Delaunays booth wasnt just about showcasing clothes but it showed a new way of thinking, art became something people can now wear.


Ch10.

“During the 1930s, European artists like Barbara Hepworth and Germaine Richier also elaborated the connections between nature’s cycles of generation and erosion in abstract and representational works.[175, 176] Hepworth (1903–1975), one of England’s leading sculptors, studied at the Leeds School of Art and at the Royal College of Art in London where she and Henry Moore became fascinated by the interplay of mass and negative space”.

Its interesting because it shows how artists like Barbara Hepworth connected with natural forms to their abstract work. I also like how the quote points out how she focused on mass and negative space, because its suggests that she was exploring the relation between what's there and what's not.

“During the 1930s, women artists came to Surrealism in large numbers, attracted by the movement’s anti-academic stance and by its sanctioning of an art in which personal reality dominates”.

I think this is an important quote because it shows how surrealism gave women artists a space to express themselves more freely at a time when the art world was still very male dominated. But I believe the idea of Surrealism is like one's personal reality, which would explain why it appealed by so alot of women, that encouraged them to explore like dreams, or inner experiences.

Ch11.

“Explanations for why so few women attempted to align themselves with Abstract Expressionism during its early years must be sought in the confluence of historical, artistic, and ideological forces in American Modernism. Lee Krasner’s career during the 1940s and 1950s, for example, points up the precarious place of the feminine within the rhetoric and institutions of Abstract Expressionism. Krasner was involved in the search by New York painters for a synthesis of abstract form and psychological content from the beginning. She trained first at the Women’s Art School of Cooper Union and at the National Academy of Design.”

I chose this quote because it highlights the challenges women faced in being recognized with major roles in the art movements. It shows how gender bias shape who has allowed to be seen as a serious artist during that time.

Short Post

The Artwork I chose is Isabel Bishop, Virgil and Dante in Union Square, 1932. What I see is two men, assuming from the painting name are Virgil and Dante walking through a busy City. I would also assume that its a working class area, with warm/gold tones. I think the fact that its focused on urban everyday life can be one example of why its a modernist painting. The second example is the fact that her human figures are a lot more defined and not so simplified

Post 6 - Modernism - Iris G

 

Marie Laurencin, Group Of Artists, 1908

This is an oil painting by artist, Marie Laurencin. The painting depicts her and her inner circle of other well known artists such as, Pablo Picasso, Fernande Oliver, Guillaume Apollinaire, and herself (from left to right).

The figures in the painting are intentionally flattened with no illusion of depth or consistent light. The forms are simplified and unrealistic with minimal shading and some colors are left unmixed and unblended. The artists being used as the primary subjects of the painting is also a common characteristic of Modernism.

Laurencin applies a "feminine" alternative to her paintings by using softer and lighter colors, like pastels. She also exchanges the rough angular and sharp lines in traditional Cubism, for more curvy and rounded lines. In an art movement that was heavily male dominated (like most art movements at this point) she created a space for a more feminine aesthetic to exist.

H.W. - 2 Quotes from readings and responses 11/12

Chadwick (class text)

By 1921 Productivism- the belief that art should be practised as trade and that the production a of well-designed articles for everyday use was of far greater value than individual expression or experiment-dominated the teaching of art in Russia.

Perhaps it makes sense that in a communist country, art made for the benefit of the people and community is encouraged more than art made for individual expression. With that said, I deeply disagree with this ideology, as I feel it removes what I consider valuable in art; the narrative, the expression, the thoughts, and emotions, the freedom to experiment and enjoy. I feel that it reduces art to a meaningless product for the masses with no true depth or weight from start to finish.

According to Stewart Ewen, those in industry in Western Europe and America were often the most enthusiastic proponents of the new womanhood for they realized that liberated women were more able consumers.

Here, I can see why countries in the west and in America would be enthusiastic about "liberated women", it's because they benefitted from them. They rely on these women to buy their product which gives them profit. In a capitalist system, this just makes sense, as the liberated woman herself is not important unless she's useful to businesses and cooperations; it's all about the money, not the women. (That's how I interpreted that text anyway.)

Confronted with Valadon's powerful nudes, critics were unable to sever the nude from its status as a signifier for male creativity, instead, they severed Valadon (not a respectable middle-class woman) from her femininity and allowed her to circulate as a pseudo-male, complete with "masculine power" and "virility."

In short, because of their inability to cope with the fact that women could create art just as powerful and great as men, critics were more comfortable seeing these women artists as "pseudo-men", because they're so stuck in their beliefs that only men could produce such brilliant art.

The ideology of the "third Sex" advanced by pioneering sexologists like Havelock Ellis and Kraft-Ebing was rooted in homophobic attitudes. These theories... did provide new models for artists and writers early in the twentieth century, enabling women to break the asexual mold of romantic friendship through which nineteenth-century women had expressed their relationships with one another.

Basically lesbians and sapphics were able to start breaking away from the default, "close friends" narrative that the heteronormative patriarchal society enforced on them and start leaning more into their true identities, sexual orientation, and attraction towards each other.

Guerrilla Girls

ATOMIC COWBOY 10/29- BinChao Yang

Nuke‑Cuisine

    This work consists of hundreds of aluminium soup cans labelled "Cloud of Mushroom Soup" (a pun on "mushroom cloud") — originally 835 cans (each representing an announced U.S. nuclear test from 1945-1992) when first shown in 1992. In the current exhibition iteration, the gallery displays a reduced number (120 cans) alongside wall-installation components: a data wall on atomic bombs, portraits of actors who were exposed to radiation, and related documentation. The cans are stacked in a large pyramid / massif display (in one version) or arranged en masse, giving visual weight and scale. The “Cloud of Mushroom Soup” pun draws an ironic connection between consumer culture (soup cans) and the destructive power of nuclear tests. This piece uses a deceptively banal object (soup cans) to represent something deadly and huge (nuclear tests). The "mushroom soup" label transforms the pop-culture commodity into a symbol of mass destruction and complicity: you could "buy" it, you could "consume" it, but the consequences are violent. By stacking the cans, Nagasawa visualises the sheer number of tests and the magnitude of the atomic program. The connection to consumerism (“Campbell' s-style" soup can imagery) underscores how nuclear weaponry, environment, and culture intertwine: it suggests that destructive technologies become packaged, normalized, even invisible in everyday life. this piece situates itself in the lineage of conceptual and installation art that critiques power structures, reminiscent of pop art (soup cans), but turned into socio-political commentary about nuclear culture, environment, and global responsibility.The work critiques the immense power of states (U.S. nuclear tests) and how that power is symbolically hidden behind consumer imagery.

Cowboy’s Dream

    This work is a grid of black & white headshots of film actors (notably from Hollywood western/cowboy films made in the U.S. desert near nuclear test sites). Beneath each photograph, Nagasawa lists the movies the actor made and the illness (cancer, brain tumour etc) they developed. One key example: the film The Conqueror (1956) starring John Wayne was filmed downwind of the U.S. nuclear testing site; many cast/crew (including Native American extras) later died of cancer. It is displayed as a wall installation: a sober, almost archival presentation of faces + data, turning Hollywood iconography into a ledger of consequence and loss. The cowboy is an American identity icon, linked to power, heroism, dominion over land. Nagasawa deconstructs this by showing that the land itself was contaminated by nuclear tests, and those heroes (and extras) were harmed by unseen forces. "The Atomic Cowboy: The Daze After addresses an array of Nagasawa’s ecological concerns by juxtaposing images of human frailty with the glitz and machismo of Hollywood’s “cowboy” genre" (SBU News). This piece sharply critiques the cultural mythology of the Western (cowboy) genre — the rugged hero, masculinity, conquest of frontier — by contrasting it with the vulnerability and mortality of those involved in its making. The inclusion of Native American extras in The Conqueror underscores colonialism, use of Indigenous labour, exposure to toxic fallout, and invisibility of these harms in mainstream culture. The cowboy myth often erases Indigenous presence; here that erasure is reversed, showing Indigenous people as victims.

Sources

"Nobi Nagasawa Joins Japanese Artists to Commemorate 80th Anniversary of Atomic Bombings October 20, 2025"

https://news.stonybrook.edu/university/nobi-nagasawa-joins-japanese-artists-to-commemorate-80th-anniversary-of-atomic-bombings/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

New NJCU Galleries Exhibition to Spotlight Consequences of Nuclear Weapons

https://www.njcu.edu/about/news/2025/08/new-njcu-galleries-exhibition-spotlight-consequences-nuclear-weapons?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Nobuho Nagasawa: "The Atomic Cowboy"

https://www.newjerseystage.com/articles2/2025/10/22/nobuho-nagasawa-the-atomic-cowboy/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Atomic Cowboy - jahkai

 

The Atomic Cowboy 

Cowboy’s Dream

This piece refers to the oddly high number of cancer deaths among the cast of the movie, “The Conqueror”. Which was filmed at a nuclear test site, which in my opinion plays a big role in these deaths. It shows that even “long” after these tests, let alone even using the bomb on people. These bombs still have an effect on people even today. These bombs ruin the air quality, leaving residue in the air for years and years. Which this points out, what I think the artist is trying to do is show the brutality of this bomb. How even people who weren't hit directly still can find their way to death and health issues by even being in the radius where this bomb was tested. You can take this information and try to imagine what it’s like for innocent people to get hit by something like this head on. It’s dehumanizing, it’s brutal, and honestly it’s scary. This to me shows that.  “It is also the crossover of production and representation that we can become most aware of what is not represented or spoken, the omissions and silences that reveal the power of cultural ideology” this quote ties in to this piece very well, it basically says to represent what isn't represented. I don’t think people talk about the everlasting effects of the atomic bomb on people and how it could affect families and take lives even long after it blew. 

"Cloud of Mushroom Soup"

These cans represent each announced nuclear test in America. This piece uses a popular soup brand to tell us to never forget. Particularly "Take it home, for (__) shall not repeat the error,". To me it means to not repeat the error of these bombs. To not repeat the cycle of violence that continues to beam through the world. Nagasawa takes the iconic Campbell's soup can, which I see as a staple of consumerism, & flips it to create discomfort. You’re supposed to be uncomfortable about seeing something like this. Using a “mushroom cloud” as a symbol for nuclear devastation. It takes a turn on Warhol’s cans and multiple things can be interpreted through it. Another thing I see through this is how the violence has become normalized. Using the mass amount of cans to show how violence has become just has normalized as the cans of soup we eat. Nagasawa makes me think of a quote that is kinda distant, but the quote is “De Pisan also raises all ambiguities about what form of expression a female voice might take” The reason why I bring this up is because Nagasawa takes a form that can be interpreted in multiple different ways. Well to me atleast, the cans and visuals through items and graphics are just really experimental and cool to me. It’s simple but spreads a vast amount of messages. Another quote that reminds me of these pieces is “As humanist ideas with their stress on nature and the Antique began to influence visual arts.” Which is what we are seeing here, views being pushed out through different types of visual arts. I just really like the cans and how they are edited with small details to create a message. Thank you Nagasawa.