Itell Colquhoun
Part of Colquhoun’s legacy in the art world lies in her use of automatism. While she did not invent many of the styles (she did invent some), she became a leader in all of these using many different approaches.
Category Archives: Writer > Poetry
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Edith Rimmington
Rimmington’s prolific practice in drawing, painting, writing, poetry, and photography gave significant substance to the British Surrealist movement, helping to secure its reputation both locally and overseas.
Emmy Bridgwater
“Her paintings show an ability to enter a personal dream world and transform the visions she experienced there into bold, unselfconscious, emotionally charged landscapes which more often than not strike into the very depths of one’s mind. Using a limited palette and painting thickly, she was able to bring together seemingly unrelated objects which she used to fill desolate landscapes, giving the paintings a narrative quality of her own making”. Along with the other female Surrealists, she gave the following generation of female artists the gift of role models and in turn, access to the notion that women are active art producers, not simply models tasked to provide inspiration for their male counter-parts.
Marie Laurencin
Laurencin’s influence can be seen across the work of a number of artists who have employed visual languages of femininity in order to explore the place of women and gender expectations in modern life. Louise Bourgeois, Laurencin’s most celebrated student, similarly used clothing and other symbols of womanhood in order to explore female relationships, using psychoanalytic ideas to consider familial relationships, the human body and emotional states.
Claribel Alegría
Claribel Alegría was a poet, essayist, novelist, and journalist who was a major literary voice in 20th century Central America. She won the 2006 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, among other awards.
Erinna
Erinna was an ancient Greek poet, who was in her time considered one of the great women poets, second only to Sappho.
Hồ Xuân Hương
Hồ Xuân Hương was a Vietnamese poet born at the end of the Lê dynasty (1428 to 1789). She wrote poetry using chữ nôm (Southern Script), which adapts Chinese characters to write demotic Vietnamese. She is considered one of Vietnam’s greatest classical poets.
Salomé Ureña
Dominican poet Salomé Ureña was an early advocate for women’s higher education in the Dominican Republic.
Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
Though she is little known, Baroness Elsa Freytag-Loringhoven helped to shape the direction of New York Dada with her eccentric public displays and performances as well as with her desire to fuse her sexuality with her art. In the face of accusations that she was “crazy,” Freytag-Loringhoven would simply state, “Every artist is crazy with respect to ordinary life.” Her gender bending and blatant displays of her sexuality anticipated Feminist art and performance of the mid-20th century. She was an innovative artist whose works paved the way for later experimental Performance art of the late 1950s and 1960s. A renowned poet and a proto-feminist, Elsa and her work have only recently been rediscovered by art historians who have recognized the importance of her contribution to New York Dada. Her provocative poetry was published posthumously in 2011 in Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. At the very forefront of developing the readymade and performance art, the Baroness holds a legacy as the “Mama of Dada,” as the New York Times critic Holland Cotter dubbed her.
Anacaona
Anacaona was a Taíno cacica, (female cacique or chief), religious expert, poet and composer of Xaraguá, in what is now Haiti.