When describing the marriage of Sir William Hamilton to his second wife, Emma, in 1791, Horace Walpole remarked he had “actually married his collection of statues.” This remark encapsulates a view of Emma Hamilton as art object, and later as a caricature of sensual vice: her increasingly scandalous public reception in the press and society that tends to leave out the presence of her own narrative. In examining portraits of this complex figure, this paper seeks to bring more attention to portraits as an intersectional medium, and to images of Emma Hamilton as a rich historical resource in late eighteenth-century art and society. Themes of theatrical discourse and sensibility culture contribute to a more comprehensive view of women in liminal social positions crafting their own artistic images. Nowhere is Lady Hamilton’s involvement in the visual construction of her own identity more legible than in her portraits – particularly those by such contemporary masters as Romney, Reynolds, Kauffman, and Vigée-Lebrun. Each of these artists manipulates gender conventions and theatrical discourses of this historical moment. These representations intersect with her salon performances known as attitudes and connect to an eighteenth-century concern with a heightened consciousness of self and others, a sensitivity to finer feelings, characterized as “sensibility culture.” While contemporary engravings of the attitudes have sometimes been studied on their own, there is thus far less scholarly attention given to the range of painted portraits depicting Lady Hamilton. In these portraits the sitter negotiates a construction of her own identity with the artists. My hope is to enrich the discourse concerning Lady Hamilton within the field of art history, and to draw out a case for her as a conscious participant in a late-eighteenth century culture of sensibility, one which was anchored both visually and culturally.

The depiction of the female nude was thought to be the culmination of an accomplished art career. The issue of the female nude is unique in its paradoxical nature: women were often the subjects of fine art, but rarely the creators of it. Until the latter half of the nineteenth century, women were allowed inside the walls of the Royal Academy in Britain only as models for paintings, not as students. This pattern was disrupted in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the first women students were admitted to the French and British Royal Academies in an event referred to by some as the “female invasion.” British women artists in the nineteenth century fought and earned their rightful place in the professional field of art. The “New Woman” of British society was not only a mother or a wife, she could also be an artist. The issue of the female nude was radically redefined by painters Henrietta Rae, Annie Swynnerton, and others, who dared to exhibit paintings of nude women. These women infiltrated an artistic circle which was historically occupied by men and made something new. Women artists in nineteenth-century Britain helped to expand and reshape the definition of women as subjects of paintings, creators of fine art, and active citizens in British society.

In this presentation, I will discuss how Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt used collective maternal nostalgia and grief resulting from the creation of formula and the subsequent debate on bottle-feeding versus breast-feeding as a vessel to cultivate an audience for her artwork in the United States during the second Industrial Revolution. I’ll focus on Mother Louise Nursing, Louise Nursing Her Child, and Mother Feeding Child to apply this concept to the idea of motherhood as well as Cassatt’s creation method. Louise Havemeyer was a model, friend, and supporter of Cassatt, notably hosting an Impressionist exhibition in 1915. First, I briefly explore the external factors that impacted and accentuated longing for the past including mortality rates for infants and children during the late 1800s as well as child labor. I then discuss the idea of Scientific Motherhood, a concept that was introduced in the late 18th century and promoted the idea that mothers needed to follow expert medical and scientific advice to rear healthy, successful children. By portraying breastfeeding scenes and tender moments between mother and child, Cassatt successfully used these mothers’ collective rejection of innovation and scientific motherhood to her advantage. I also explore the comparison between the Impressionist process of painting and how children are raised. Cassatt’s paintings were characterized by non-traditional methods and she found her way around a painting by using large and multiple bold brushstrokes. Even if a brushstroke was a “mistake” it could be used in its own original way to contribute to the piece. Similarly, when raising a child, there is guidance, and nurturing that is provided by mothers. In this case these aspects are provided by the painter. Through a non-traditional role, Cassatt impacted the Impressionist art movement, influenced mothers, and pushed boundaries– therefore breaking standards and cultivating her own unique position and career.

Pioneering modern artist Georgia O’Keeffe is often interpreted from a contemporary feminist perspective for her erotic representation of flowers, an interpretation that the artist vigorously denied. Departing from these methods, this presentation revisits her close-up flower paintings with an animal studies approach.  Analyzing her floral works from the later 1920s, including Black Iris III (1926), Two Calla Lillies on Pink (1928), and Jack in the Pulpit IV (1930), I interpret O’Keeffe’s flower imagery using studies of insect vision to argue for a nonhuman visual experience. O’Keeffe, I suggest, includes details resembling the visual phenomena seen from compound eyes, which have low visual acuity and a different color spectrum than humans. For example, she radically simplifies the details and smudges the vibrant colors to create a misty and ambiguous silhouette. What is more, these floral paintings all highlight an upward gaze within gigantic flower petals, simulating the views of an insect inside or around a bloom. Her new vision brings the precisionist perspective outside of the industrial world, decomposing the complexity of nature into geometric simplicity. Additionally, it stimulates the imagination of the audience, allowing human viewers to imagine an animal experience within nature.

Despite employing over 5,000 women living around Milwaukee, Wisconsin, little scholarship has been dedicated to the women workers of the Milwaukee Handicraft Project (MHP), the federally funded Works Progress Administration program that was active between 1935 and 1942. Lawrence University’s Wriston Art Galleries in Appleton, Wisconsin owns several woodblock print samples from the MHP. The woodblock folk-inspired print samples are difficult to interpret, as they are isolated from their intended function in their current archival state. Using Bill Brown’s Thing Theory, I argue the necessity of analyzing these print samples in relation to the functional items of the MHP, such as tablecloths and curtains, along with information about the individual women workers who made them. The result of my research will indicate this addition of historical context allows viewers to understand the samples as objects and the women workers as people, rather than things. In addition, this presentation will emphasize the importance of researching the perspective of minority groups, specifically women and Women of Color who are currently undermined by the white male-dominated archival records of the Great Depression. This research on the materiality of MHP woodblock prints serves as one example of the lost information within art history, museum studies, and historical documentation methods, and how to approach mending these gaps to create a more diverse voice in the archive.

One of the focuses of feminist art criticism is the gendered connotations built into craft. As part of a distinctly feminine heritage, mediums such as embroidery, sewing, and weaving struggle in the gallery to rise to the distinction of fine art. Contemporary artist Liza Lou responds to this struggle in Kitchen, a full-scale replica of a suburban kitchen covered in glass beads that toes the line between craft and art against a backdrop of domestic labor. As a response to art institutions that deemed her use of beadwork unserious and overly feminine, Kitchen confronts and challenges artistic tradition in a uniquely feminist fashion. By bringing craft into the gallery, women artists have unearthed a history of labor that has been denied dignity and visibility. This paper examines the role of craft and labor in contemporary art through the lens of institutional critique to explore craft as an extension of female labor and its ability to take up space alongside traditional art forms in the gallery. In doing so, I argue that Kitchen manifests an ongoing dialogue between craft and fine art and makes visible the struggle of gendered artistic and economic labor.

In Alexander McQueen’s Spring/Summer 1999 show, McQueen’s final dress engages with traditional iconographies of the wedding dress. Through the runway performance, the presentation of the dress explains the frightening, but exciting new intersections between fashion, feminism, technocracy, and power on the eve of the twenty-first century.

By subverting couture tradition, making the wedding dress utterly useless, McQueen creates a subversive statement against the social conditioning for women getting married. Additionally, by drawing inspiration from action art of Pollock, the performative and engaging aspect of runway creates new language to discuss this work within the lens of Donna Haraway’s cyberfeminism, control, power dynamics, and posthumanism. Approaching a new century, the question of expanding technology, control, and democracy was on everyone’s mind. Using the language of cybernetics and cyberfeminism, while synthesizing with the subversion of couture tradition, McQueen and Harlow make a statement that men continue to oppress and dominate through technocratic supremacy. In the expanding world of information saturation and surveillance capitalism, this work remains tremendously relevant, revealing that we need to dismantle, reexamine, and rebuild technocratic networks that actively oppress us today.

Issey Miyake’s death in August of 2022 prompted a thorough reexamination of the designer’s legacy. His work was characterized by its light and mobile effervescence, technological innovation, and layered simplicity. But one design differs drastically from the rest. Miyake’s 1980 Plastic Body is unique amidst his work, seemingly antithetical to all his design principles. It is fitted where he valued space, rigid where he valued fluidity, and standardized where he valued individuality. However, as this paper will explore, the bodice does fit into Miyake’s body of work, employing the designer’s distinctive wit to approach several of his most abstract philosophical inquiries into the nature of clothing from a highly literal angle. Miyake was fascinated by the relationship between body and cloth, envisioning clothing as a “second skin”; the Plastic Body materially acts out this complex theoretical and philosophical concept, its surface shifting from a mimicry of flesh to a mimicry of fabric. Miyake also explored how fashion functions as a form of architecture, which the Plastic Body expresses through its sculptural dimensionality. Lastly, Miyake designed with the individual wearer in mind. The Plastic Body, created for his muse Grace Jones, perfectly captured the singer’s fierce and larger-than-life persona by evoking the aesthetics of comic books and superheroes. Through it, Miyake created a modern and self-aware costume fit for a modern and self-aware Wonder Woman. As a designer, Miyake was engaged in a constant and thoughtful dialogue — with himself, with his contemporaries, with the cultures and places he encountered throughout his life, and with both the traditions of the past and the promises of the future. Despite its aesthetic divergence, the Plastic Body functions as a part of this dialogue. Like a line of poetry, it rhymes, and this gives it a resonant and lasting power.

This paper analyzes the work Free, White and 21, by Howardena Pindell. This work was created in 1980 during Pindell’s 12-year tenure in The Museum of Modern Art’s curatorial department. This work was created eight months after Pindell was in a car accident that left her with partial memory loss. This performance art piece is in conversations with many topics around race, struggle, and representation within the predominantly white institutions that Pindell was a part of during the 20 years of her coming of age through 1960s America. This piece not only reflects on Pindell’s past experiences as a young Black woman moving through the world of Fine Arts during a time of immense institutional and fundamental challenges around racism, inequity, and access into these places, but it is a piece that was a way for someone to retrace their past in an attempt to remember all of the pain, confusion and triumph that formulated who they had become in that present moment. In Free, White and 21, Pindell’s use of disguise by using white make-up to cosplay as the white women whom she interacted with as a Black woman in her experience was cathartic and accurate to how Black women in the world and her profession were seen. In the video, Pindell touches on her experiences and how they made her feel in the moment, in a therapeutic light, releasing all the struggles she had to overcome.