Visual Art Archives - Page 52 of 52

Aasta Hansteen

In her younger days, Norwegian feminist Aasta Hansteen earned her living as a portrait painter in Kristiania (modern-day Oslo)’ she was in demand as the city’s only portrait artist. Her most famous painting is possibly her portrait of her father, which is on permanent exhibit at the National Gallery of Norway. Associated with the Düsseldorf school of painting, she exhibited her work at the 1855 World’s Fair in Paris. Well known in the Oslo’s intellectual circles, Hansteen inspired characters in dramas by Ibsen and Gunnar Heiberg. Her writings advocating for the rights of women, her opposition to religious authority, and her provocative behavior—she often appeared fpr public speaking engagements wearing men’s boots and brandishing a whip in a symbolic performance of the oppressor—led to such harassment that in 1880 she emigrated to the United States. Together with her foster daughter Theodora Nielsen, she sailed from Christiania on April 9, 1880. In Boston, she met leading feminists of the day, including Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe and Mary Livermore, and was deeply affected by the relative freedom of women in America. By 1889, when she returned to Norway, the feminist movement there was firmly established, and Hansteen was embraced as one of its pioneers. In 1889, she returned to Norway, joined the Norwegian Association for Women’s Rights (Norsk Kvinnesaksforening) and became an active contributor in the press on women’s rights
She also studied linguistics, with an interest in Norwegian dialects. In 1862 she published anonymously a small book written in Nynorsk, becoming the first woman to publish in the language.

Adah Robinson

Adah Matilda Robinson was an American artist, designer and teacher, who influenced many other artists, particularly architects, during the early and mid-1900s. She was the first art teacher at Tulsa High School, where her students would include aspiring artist Bruce Goff and future architect Joseph R. Koberling, Jr. In 1928, she was hired as the founder and chairperson of the University of Tulsa Art Department.
Robinson was primarily a painter and a printmaker, as well as an art teacher. Although she never considered herself an architect, nor did she have any formal training in the subject, she is best known for her role in designing Tulsa’s Boston Avenue Methodist Church. The building was later named a National Historic Landmark and considered an exceptional example of Art Deco architecture. During her lifetime, many people did not believe that a woman could be responsible for such a work, and argued that her student, Goff, was primarily responsible.
In 1948, after a University of Tulsa official disputed her role in the design of the church, she resigned her position after 20 years at the school and accepted a similar role at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, retiring in 1959.

São Schlumberger

Maria “São” Schlumberger (née da Concerção Diniz) was an American fashion and art patron and collector. She studied psychology at New York’s Columbia University, and then worked as a counsellor for juvenile delinquents in Lisbon, before studying art at the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga (the National Museum of Ancient Art in Lisbon).
In 1961, the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon awarded her a fellowship to research children’s programs in New York museums.
In Paris, she lived in an 18th-century hôtel particulier (a large townhouse) in the Rue Férou, restored by French architect Pierre Barbe, with interior design by Valerian Rybar in “a provocative mix of classic and modern styles”.
Schlumberger particularly liked the work of artists Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roy Lichtenstein. Her portrait was painted by Andy Warhol and Salvador Dalí, who also designed her an elaborate pearl-and-emerald necklace which she often wore.
She was a patron to the fashion designer John Galliano, and let him use her empty 17th-century Paris hotel particulier, for his autumn 1994 show.

Luisa Roldán

Luisa Ignacia Roldán was a Spanish sculptor of the Baroque Era, and the first woman sculptor documented in Spain. She is recognized by the Hispanic Society Museum as “one of the few women artist to have maintained a studio outside the convents in Golden Age Spain”. Like many other prominent female artists, she was trained by her father, with whom she collaborated. She combined a specialty in small polychrome terracotta figures – unique for its time – and carved wood reliefs. She struck out on her own in 1671, when she married against her parents’ wishes, and established an independent workshop with her husband. Around 1686, she moved to Cádiz to complete a cathedral commission, then relocated to Madrid in 1688 and boldly petitioned the king for the position of court sculptor (“Escultor de Cámara). The petition was granted in 1692 and she held the post until her death twelve years later. Like many artists of her time she died poor, signing a declaration of poverty shortly before her death. On the day she died, Roldan received the title of “Academician Merit” from Rome’s Academy of Saint Luke in Rome.
Her works are distinctive, possessing “clearly delineated profiles, thick locks of hair, billowing draperies, and mystical faces with delicate eyes, knitting brows, rosy cheeks, and slightly parted lips.” Roldán was a prolific sculptor. Much of her work was religious sculpture for churches, and she also made small terracotta works in the forms of religous scenes, human forms and animals that were popular with the petty bourgeoisie and could be used for personal.

Vanessa Bell

Vanessa Bell was an English painter and interior designer, and the sister of Virginia Woolf. Exhibiting in London and Paris, she was one of the most celebrated painters of the Bloomsbury Group of English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists. Bell rejected the restrictions of Victorian narrative painting and the focus on what were considered ideal and aberrant qualities of femininity. She also designed book jackets for all of her sister Virginia’s books that were published by Virginia’s publishing company, the Hogarth Press. In 1932, Bell and Duncan Grant were commissioned to produce a dinner service for art historian Kenneth Clark. Overseen by Kenneth’s wife Jane Clark, they created the Famous Women Dinner Service – 50 plates painted with portraits of notable women throughout history.

Vivienne Binns

Vivienne Joyce Binns OAM is an Australian artist known for her contribution to Australia’s Women’s Art Movement and her active advocacy within community arts. She has participated in countless exhibitions in her more than 50-year career, and her works are held in the collections of several major museums. She has worked across a variety of media, including painting, printmaking, performance, sculpture and drawing, and is respected among her Australian and global contemporaries, particularly within the feminist community.
Binns’ interest in community arts came from a desire to make the art world accessible to everyone, beyond the restrictions of art institutions. She believed creative expression was an inherent part of the human experience, and not allowing for this expression freely was a form of “social control”. In 1973 Binns worked as a field officer for the Australia Council for the Arts Community Arts Program, visiting regional areas to “investigate needs, resources and possibilities”.
In 1972 Binns collaborated with fellow artist on The Artsmobile, a travelling community arts project that brought Dada and Surrealist style performance work to centres along New South Wales’ north east coast. Described as “the offspring of a marriage between Fluxus and a local town council bookmobile”, the Artsmobile brought art-based activities to schools, seniors centres and public parks.
She later developed Mothers’ Memories, Others’ Memories in 1978 during her artist’s residency at the University of New South Wales. The project recalled the “lives of women and their means of expression in the domestic sphere”, by facilitating a space where participants could come and share stories of craft and needlework skills that they had been taught from their mothers and other members of their family. Described as “dense, fragmented, [and] multilayered” the final work was exhibited as a series of postcards installed on a postcard rack.
Binns began work on her next major community art project Full Flight in 1983, spending months in various towns of the Central West region of New South Wales, facilitating workshops, mural painting and skill sharing to celebrate “the creativity of ordinary people.”
Feminism was often present in Binns’ work, and she was a leader in the development of The Women’s Art Movement (WAM), which aimed to address discrimination and sexism within the art world through various actions and exhibitions. A major project was the documentation of women’s artwork through the development of the Women’s Art Register.
Binns’ first solo exhibition in 1967 in Sydney featured works such as Vag Dens and Phallic Monument and has been recognised as a key starting point for the development of feminist art in Australia. This exhibition was one of the first of its kind, predating Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party and “critically affirming the power of women’s sexuality whilst also provoking… a good measure of castration anxiety amongst the patriarchy”.
Binns was awarded an Order of Australia Medal in 1983 for Services to Art and Craft, and the Ros Bower Memorial Award for visionary contribution to Community Arts in 1985. Living in Canberra, she has been a Senior Lecturer in Painting at the Australian National University’s School of Art.

May Gibbs

Cecilia May Gibbs MBE was an Australian children’s book writer, illustrator, and cartoonist. She is best known for her gumnut babies (also called “bush babies” or “bush fairies”), and the book Snugglepot and Cuddlepie.

Thea Proctor

Alethea Mary Proctor was an Australian painter, print maker, designer and teacher who advocated for the ideas of ‘taste’ and ‘style’. Focusing on line, colour and form, she initially concentrated on drawing and painting in watercolours. Her decorative fans and drawings, typically watercolours on silk, were well received when they were exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts and the New English Art Club.
Having moved to London in 1903, Proctor returned to Australia in 1912, to exhibit in Sydney and Melbourne. The National galleries of Victoria and New South Wales bought works, but she was disappointed with the overall response and returned to England late in 1914. She soon produced her first lithographs which, although she continued to paint, established her reputation when exhibited by the Senefelder Club. She later exhibited with the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers and at the Goupil Gallery.
Returning to Melbourne in 1921, she tried to promote lithography, but found little interest and returned to Sydney and joined the Society of Artists. In 1926 she co-founded the Contemporary Group to encourage young avant-garde artists. Although Proctor’s work was relatively conservative, it was considered ‘dangerously modern’ by Australian standards and brought her recognition but little financial reward. In 1932 Art in Australia devoted an issue to her work. She taught design privately and at the Sydney Art School, introducing many young artists to linocut printing, as well as teaching drawing for the Society of Arts and Crafts in the 1940s.
Regarded as an arbiter of taste and always elegantly dressed, Proctor wrote on fashion, flower arranging, colours for cars and interior decoration. She organized artists’ parties in the 1920s, designed the fashionably modern Lacquer Room restaurant in 1932 for Farmer & Co. Ltd and produced theatre décor in the 1940s. In her later years she continued to encourage young and innovative artists, took on portrait commissions and exhibited regularly with the Macquarie Galleries.

Rosa Bonheur

The French Realist painter is considered one of the most famous female artists of the 19th century, known for her large-format paintings featuring animals.