A few weeks ago I read an inspiring article on the Washington Post Website titled “What is Feminist Art?” (April 22, 2007). The piece was written by Blake Gopnik in response to the exciting and long overdue international feminist art survey, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Gopnik’s essay prompted me to recall the many reasons I am attracted to feminist art.

Gopnik writes, “The feminists cared less for art than for the important things it can be used to talk about. And because gender affects just about every aspect of human experience, feminist artists found occasion to talk about almost everything. They dealt with topics that leading artists have been broaching ever since: bodies, class, race, consumerism, the art market, colonialism, political and cultural power.”

I have always been drawn to art which acknowledges that “the personal is political,” to quote a popular feminist phrase from the 1960s. I have always been excited by art that is explicitly political as opposed to purely art-for-art’s-sake. The socially engaged, pop culture/mass media-inspired artworks of Barbara Kruger and the Guerilla Girls comes to mind.

Gopnik reminds us that feminist artists helped pioneer a non-competitive approach to artmaking, which differed from the more masculine tradition of “elbowing rival artists and approaches out of the way.”

While reading this article I was reminded of another significant group of artists whose work often goes unnoticed in public discussions about innovative artmaking practices that emerged in the 1960s. Chicano/Chicana artists made notable contributions to American art, yet they barely – if ever – get mentioned in art history college textbooks and are seldom – if at all – the focus of mainstream museum art exhibitions.

Chicano/a art grew out of the Chicano/a civil rights movement of the 1960s. They independently and simultaneously developed artmaking approaches and bodies of work that shared many similarities with feminist art. For example, Chicano/a art was equally collaborative in nature and highly engaged with important regional, national and international political debates of the time. Chicano/a artists and political activists formed art collectives or centros in Sacramento, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego to teach one another the art of printmaking. Together they developed methods for building and strengthening Chicano/a identity and community. Art was used as a cultural and political tool to call attention to larger issues such as immigrant and farm labor rights, police brutality, educational inequality and economic exploitation.

Many of these artists (Esther Hernández and Louie “The Foot” González, for example) were featured in a graphic art exhibition entitled ¿Just Another Poster? Chicano Graphic Arts in California, which was organized by the University Art Museum at UC Santa Barbara in the late 1990s. It was one of the first exhibitions to expansively examine the notable contributions and political activism of Chicano/a graphic artists from California. Hopefully it won’t be the last. And hopefully in the near future we’ll see more examples of Chicano/a art featured in mainstream art museums and included in American art history textbooks. As we’ve recently learned with the controversy over an upcoming television documentary on World War II, Latino/a contributions to American society are too often and unfairly overlooked.

Posted by Teresa España, Associate Curator of Programs. You can e-mail her at teresae@fresnomet.org