Volume 1 -- Edited for the Web
Elizabeth Garber, Yvonne Gaudelius, and Mary Wyrick
We were recently asked to discuss before a group of students the relevance of women's issues to teaching in the schools.(1) The opportunity arose when, in one of the classes of a colleague, university art education majors began developing units of art instruction around women's issues. Their unit titles included:
- Women and the concept of beauty in art
- Women's traditional roles in art Prejudice, women, and art; and Poverty, women, and art (reflecting recent statistics).(2)
The school day is already full, teachers are over-burdened, and resources on women's issues and women artists are not available through Shorewood nor through standard introductory art history texts.(3) Moreover, some of the issues raised in student units imply a challenge to conventions that define the standard fare of art education: "Is this appropriate for public education?" There is need, then, to justify " more" and "other" and "nonconventional." We have developed four arguments in response to these platforms.
Our first argument pertains to relevancy. Incorporating women's issues into the curriculum is incorporating "real life" issues. Amburgy (1991) has argued that the content of liberal education most public schools strive to give their students is concerned with knowledge, skills, and understanding that help us understand the meaning of life and to act as empowered persons. Real life includes the lingering effects of the segregation of the sexes. Girl children still perform better academically in elementary school than do boy children, with scholastic achievement reversing by the end of high school (Levy, 1972 and Levy and Stacey, 1973). Boy children receive more of a teacher's attention than do girl children - and this difference is not just because girl children conform to behavioral expectations for the classroom more than do boy children (Pogrebin, 1980; Klein, 1985). Girls who do not conform receive less attention than their male nonconformist counterparts - at all ages; boys who conform behaviorally receive more attention than conforming girls. Once adults, women still earn 66 cents to the dollar men earn. Many women work in lower paying, less skilled jobs than men. Women in higher paying professions hit a. "glass ceiling" - a bias barrier that keeps many women from moving beyond middle management, with the wage gap in business widening the higher a woman advances (Wallis, 1989, p. 85). In art, women comprise over 50% of the students, but are included in major museum and solo gallery exhibitions less than 25% of the time; women artists earn on the average 1/3 of what men artists do (Withers, 1988). Relative percentages are lower for women artists of color. These statistics signal real life issues that will affect the lives of our students as children and as adults.
As the above statistics imply, legislation does not eliminate prejudice. Our second argument, then, is that children need to be aware of and become sensitized to the lives and issues of under-represented groups. Expanding the worlds and limitations of our everyday lives is one of the commitments of public school education. Empowering individuals to live fully, yet sensitively, is an underlying goal. Both sexes need to become sensitive to and respectful of the lives and issues of women; of persons of different racial, ethnic, and national groups other than their own; of other classes than their own; and of additional under-represented groups. Art, as a conveyor of life experiences and of cultural values and. aesthetics, is an important means through which such sensitivity and respect can be nurtured.
Third, we argue that children need to learn strategies to
identify and confront sexist practices. They are often not aware of subtle conditioners
that direct our self-images and our impressions of others. While older children may
recognize them, they are too often victims of "double think," in which they
actually conform to and are limited by negative social conditioners despite their
recognition. Strategies of identification include scanning media, textbooks, art journals,
and any other presentations of art (including art curricula) for exclusion, stereotyping,
or demeaning presentations of women and other under-represented groups. Confrontation can
entail students requesting inclusion of these groups (through letter writing or
interviews) and "righting the wrongs" themselves through research and
presentations (with information gathered from secondary sources such as book and magazine
articles; or from primary sources, such as the ethnographic study designed by Patricia
Stuhr [1990] and carried on by her students at The Ohio State University). Confrontation
may even
include "guerilla actions" such as those employed by The Guerilla Girls (see
Withers, 1988) to raise the consciousness of the art world to gender, racial, and economic
inequities, or those espoused by Tony Schwartz in his video "Guerilla Media."
In addition to the above arguments, we offer our fourth and final argument, which is more traditional. As teachers of art, we convey valued and important cultural heritage. Art educators have long argued one of the values of art lies in its ability to convey the "highest of human achievements" (Eisner, 1985, n.p.). But as Ellen Dissayanake (1991) reminded us in her keynote talk at the National Art Education Association Convention in Atlanta, art is found in every society and fulfills a basic human need. Persons from all strata of a society engage in forms of artmaking. We need to preserve and affirm a cultural heritage in which representatives of many groups of people - including women, people of color, rural and urban dwellers, and persons of different socioeconomic classes - are makers, not objects of depiction. A synthesis of recognized canonical artworks that are perceived important to a foundation of " cultural literacy," when interwoven with lesser known artworks from contemporary and historical contexts, add a dimension of understanding that stresses art as a culturally relevant activity done under a variety of circumstances for different reasons.(4)
Throughout these arguments you have heard a conflation of women with social issues affecting other under-represented groups. This is because, in an ideal sense, we believe that women's issues are part of this broader class of the culturally underrepresented. We do recognize, however, that issues within each group vary. We recognize, however, a very real threat in doing this - that women's issues will be subsumed and lost; history supports this scenario.
In translating these life issues to the art classroom, we can:
A counting activity, comparing numbers of female and male artists represented in various art world publications and art history books will still reveal (except in special subject issues or publications) substantially less women artists, even though population figures indicate about half of practicing artists are women. Similar comparison should be made between inclusion of female and male artists of color and Caucasian male artists. In a count some of our students made of male: female artists in advertisements of a recent issue of a leading art journal, they found 161 males and 43 females. Of five feature articles, four were about male artists and I about a female. These findings can lead to examination of why this situation exists.
Students can both brainstorm and research this question. Scholars have investigated three possible answers: "Women artists don't make as good art;" "Women are not full-time professionals;" and "Woman artists have expended their energies making craft and minor arts." A sampling of their findings follows.
"Women artists don't make as good art:" Art historians Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock have compared artists Judith Leyster and Frans Hals. Leyster has been disparagingly compared to Hals; in 1964 James Laver, writing on women artists of the seventeenth century wrote, "some women artists tried to emulate Frans Hals but the vigorous brush strokes of the master were beyond their capability, one has only to look at the works of a painter like Judith Leyster (1609-1661) to detect the weakness of the feminine hand" (Laver, 1964, p. 19). Yet many works of Leyster's were once attributed to Hals (see, for example, Leyster's Self Portrait, 1635). In fact, Leyster was rediscovered as an artist in 1892 when a painting attributed to Hals was discovered to bear her signature (Parker and Pollock, 1981, p. 8).
Other comparisons include Kathe Kollwitz with Edvard Munch (Comini, 1982), the women surrealists and the male surrealists (Chadwick, 1985), art couples (e.g. Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock), the early work of Faith Ringgold to work done at the same time by Jasper Johns or pop artists, and Adrian Piper's or Suzanne Lacy's performances with those of Vito Acconci.(5)
Women often are not full-time professionals: Some writers have asked if professionality is a necessary requisite for making good art (Perreault, 1987). For eighteen years, Faith Ringgold divided herself between making art, full-time teaching in the New York public schools, and rearing children, Bettye Saar describes making art in her kitchen while home with her children. Both artists are now widely recognized in art world terms.
Many contemporary women artists find that they must work at a second job in order to support their artmaking (remember that they earn, on the average, 2/ 3 of what men do and in art, 1/3 of what male artists earn). This translates that more women artists will be part-time professionals than their male counterparts. It sometimes also means the woman artist does not have enough time to market her art. Art that does not conform to the narrow terms on which art receives recognition in New York, and that is not marketed correctly receives less recognition.
Women artists have expended their energies in making craft and minor arts: The crafts that women have traditionally made, due both to social expectations, the shelters of domestic life, and practical needs of their families include clothing, quilting, embroidery, needlepoint, and, (for the well off), china painting. Both the intrinsic qualities of the objects made and the contexts in which they have existed have been examined by researchers on women's arts. Tremendous information exists on quilts, for example. Different types of quilts were made (utilitarian vs. memory and gift quilts), they have been made by a variety of classes of women (from the very poor to the well off), and recognition of them as an expressive form has changed in different eras. Quilt patterns usually carry names: religious names such as Jacob's Ladder, frontier inspired names such as Log Cabin, and historic names such as Lincoln's Platform. There are also names such as Drunkard's Path, that indicate women used their quilts not only as records of their personal and spiritual lives, but as responses to social, economic, and political developments of their times. Drunkard's Path refers to the women's temperance movement in the late nineteenth century (Ferrero, Hedges, & Silber, p. II). Names of patterns changed with the times; the pattern known for years as Jacob's Ladder came to be called by many women Underground Railroad when slavery became an issue passionately debated throughout the country (p. 69).(6) The point is that, although women were assigned, through social convention and utilitarian need, to making crafts and "minor" arts, they were able to convey personal, spiritual and social expressions through these arts.
The issue in the classroom becomes, in these investigations, not "why are there no great women artists?" as Linda Nochlin asked in 1971, but "Under what circumstances have women made art? What are the criteria for defining "art" and "artist"? "Who writes the books that set precedents for these criteria and definitions?" and "What artistic products have women produced?"
Why are needle arts and fibers (called minor arts) more often thought of as "women's work" and painting and sculpture (called major arts) more often considered the domain of men? The answer lies in social conventions (Parker & Pollock, 1981; Parker, 1984). Moreover, why are these thought of as "minor" arts that are less valuable than painting and sculpture? Are these not associated with how we have defined "great" art in the West in the last hundred or so years? With our students, we can investigate concepts associated with "great art," such as originality and abstraction of an idea, compare collectively made women's artforms such as patterned quilts to paintings completed in the ateliers of Peter Paul Rubens and Andy Warhol.
Historical conditions made being an artist exceedingly difficult for most women. During the Renaissance, women were excluded from artists' workshops and from conventional forms of training. Most female artists in the Renaissance were of nobility, a class where artmaking in a woman was considered a mark of finesse and acculturation. "The great majority of women artists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries," Parker and Pollock (1981) tell us, "came from families of painters in which the absence of sons or the availability of materials and free teaching gave daughters an entry to an artistic career that would otherwise have been far less accessible to them" (p. 20). Artemesia Gentileschi's father was an artist, as were the fathers of seventeenth century painters Clara Peeters and Lavinia Fontana. During the nineteenth century, when femininity was an exceedingly important characteristic for women to have, femininity was associated with child-bearing and family. As Parker and Pollock note, artists also became associated with everything that was anti-domestic, outsiderness, anti-social behaviour, isolation... disorder and the sublime forces of untamed nature. As femininity was to be lived out in the fulfillment of socially ordained domestic and reproductive roles, a profound contradiction was established between the identities of artist and woman. (p. 99).
Women were not allowed to study drawing from the nude figure in the nineteenth century, where such exclusion meant a lack of skill prerequisites for making "great" art. They painted mothers and children and flowers -people and objects accessible to them - rather than "history paintings" of battles and so-called "worldly deeds."
Many art historians have been engaged in a re-interpretation of art that examines the social relevance of artworks to their historical contexts. These studies provide pertinent background information for teaching a socially relevant curriculum. Eunice Lipton (1986) in a study of Edgar Degas titled Looking Into Degas, for instance, examines how Degas' representations of middle and lower-class Parsian women (the laundresses, the ballet dancers, the bathers, the racetrack spectators) convey the incipient democratization of turn-of-the-century Paris. Linda Nochlin, in her 1989 collection of essays Women, Art, and Power, considers how the representation of women in art has reproduced societal assumptions of gender difference concerning women's weakness, passivity, and sexuality, and their associations with nature and the body instead of with culture and the intellect. Her point is that the traits of gender differences are learned, not innate.
In many contemporary art critics' and art historians' writings, relevance to broader philosophical questions, "big questions" as Patricia Amburgy (1991) calls them, forms the basis of their discussions of artworks. These discussions are not fabricated by critics: the issues are imbedded in the artworks and our times. These discussions are a ready source for an issues-based school arts curriculum. From May Stevens' examination of both ordinary and extraordinary aspects of the lives of a housewife and a German political theoretician to Suzanne Lacy's performances on aging and women, the current art world is caught up with " real life" issues that can provide the basis for teaching art in a manner relevant to living in today's world. Discussions can include the relationship of content and form to meaning.
In teaching elementary teachers how to teach art, we have worked with students to develop issues they feel are important for children to understand. Their issues have led them to teach about a wide variety of artists. A few of the issues and artists they have looked at are:
Images of women in advertising:
Silvia Kolbowski and Vikki
Alexander
How images control our ideas and stereotypes about women: Barbara Kruger
The cultural heritage of chicanas: Santa Barraza
Aging: Suzanne Lacy and Mary Kelly
Homelessness: Suzanne Lacy Stereotypes and negations of black women: Lorna Simpson Appreciation of black women and
black community: Faith
Ringgold
Relationship between men and women: Phyllis Bramson Mother and child relationships: Mary Kelly
This list goes on, of course, too. Our elementary majors develop teachable units around themes that include issues such as these.(7) As the recent work of Jennifer Pazienza (1991) indicates, children readily respond to art taught in this manner.
The curriculum is constantly in flux, evolving as the needs of students and society change, and as research brings to light fuller understandings of our subject matters. Current calls resound with the need for education in the U.S. to incorporate into its structure the plurality of American people. Our remarks are made within this context, aimed at increasing our knowledge and understanding of the relevance of women's art to art education today.
References
Endnotes
Dr. Elizabeth Garber is assistant professor of art education at
The Pennsylvania State University
Yvonne Gaudelius and Mary Wyrick are doctoral candidates in art education at
The Pennsylvania State University.
| Publications List | Vol 1 Contents | Top of Page |