Shall we draw a moustache on it? Humor as an artistic force for coping, critique, and change.

Why did the feminist art historian turn to comedy? To difference the canon, undermine misogyny, dismantle the patriarchy, broach difficult subjects, and keep both their friends and sanity.

As cultural mouthpieces for oppressed groups, artists, art historians, and curators have long relied on humor. It is a powerful force for education, advocacy, and change, as well as a means of coping–after all, we need something besides doom and gloom. To paraphrase journalist and comedian Caitlin Moran, “Let's all go and be feminists [or feminist art historians, artists, and curators] in the pub!”.

This presentation will explore both the use and importance of humor in visual art, much of which has familiar agency: from the Guerrilla Girls’ statistics of art world gender disparity, delivered in sarcastically-rosy prose, to British women’s suffrage posters portraying anti-suffrage men as greedy-yet-needy children.