Personal and Global: Current Directions in Feminist Abstractionist Art

Contemporary feminist abstractionist artists have been challenging prevailing and persistent histories of abstract art as non-representational art reflecting artists’ inner private selves. This panel will feature papers that survey how contemporary women and femme-identified artists are foregrounding abstraction in their work to as a means of feminist critique in addressing pressing social justice concerns and complex societal problems.

This session seeks to fill a gap in existing art historical scholarship and arts writing about recent feminist art focused on abstraction by seeking presentations privileging global or transnational connections as well as multigenerational and intersectional comparisons. It invites scholarly explorations of feminist visual art by artists of color, engagements with indigenous textile art, or those arising from the traditions of abstraction, especially from Africa, Asia, Oceania, Nordic lands, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and the Americas. It also seeks presentations about artists who have reinterpreted existing histories of abstract expressionism across mediums to address contemporary intersectional feminist issues and/or additional social justice issues such as environmental degradation and climate change from feminist perspectives.