Feminist Art and Contemporary Feminist

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The first feminist artists, around 1970, put women's experience, bodies and domestic labour at the centre: Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party (1974–79) and Martha Rosler's deadpan video Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) remain touchstones. In the 1980s the emphasis shifted towards images and power. Barbara Kruger laid bold red-and-white slogans over found photographs, as in Untitled (Your body is a battleground) (1989), and from 1985 the masked, anonymous Guerrilla Girls used posters to expose how few women appeared in exhibitions.

Later artists widened the frame to race, sexuality and global experience. Lorna Simpson pairs photographs of Black women with fragments of text, and Shirin Neshat's photographs and films of the 1990s examined the lives of women in Iran. Zanele Muholi photographs Black lesbian, gay and transgender South Africans, and Mickalene Thomas paints glittering, rhinestone-studded portraits of Black women. Look for work that makes looking itself part of the subject.