Last semester I took a course on North American Indigenous art history, in which I wrote an essay on contemporary Inuk artist Shuvinai Ashoona. After doing research for the essay, I got a little obsessed with Inuit graphic arts. I was fascinated with the subject matter, the style, and the history behind it. In recent decades, Inuit graphic art has…
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The Great Women Portrait Artists
Despite the institutional and societal limitations women artists have faced, portrait art has long been regarded as a feminine preoccupation. Since ancient times, female artists have excelled in portraiture. While male portrait artists are more celebrated, women seem to excel in this over other genres of art. This post was born after I read two essays: Linda Nochlin’s Why Have There…
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Artist Highlight: Who is Adrian Piper?
This month’s post is another artist highlight, about the incredible performance artist, philosopher, conceptual artist, and photographer Adrian Piper! Her work, which poignantly addresses themes of gender, otherness, race, ostracism, and self-analysis, has greatly impacted Post-Modern, Feminist, and Conceptual art. Her genre-defying, multifaceted, revolutionary work spans various disciplines and media, and her ongoing career has lasted six decades. Born in…
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Reclaiming the Canvas: Suzanne Valadon
From sculptures of Greek goddesses in ancient temples to high-fashion models on Vogue covers, we can see women everywhere in art; rich or poor, young or old, impeccably dressed or completely naked. However, less common are the females behind the canvas: history provides us with a dearth of well-known female names. I’ve talked about this in previous posts – I…
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Behind the Movement: The Women of Surrealism
My latest art obsession is Surrealism, especially the female artists involved with the movement. Several courses I took last semester were about modern art, and I finally started paying attention to Surrealism, which I’d previously written off, having only knowing its male participants and their infamous sexism. Surrealism was certainly rooted in a chauvinistic and phallocentric narrative, but many women…
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Behind the Movement: the Harlem Renaissance
Creating this blog, I set out to both get personal experience in art writing, but also to use my (hopefully) career to bring focus to diverse figures in the history of art. I noticed the lack of exposure towards artists of color, queer artists, and women artists, both in my studies and in the world of art in general, and…
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Female Nudes and The Male Gaze
The artistic convention of the nude has been around since ancient times, and its sexist undertones have always accompanied it. The naked female body has long been a source of pleasure to the male eye. It is commodified and assigned value through its sexual attractiveness to the male eye. The conventions of nudes have shifted to please male audiences throughout…
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Cultural Appropriation in Modern Art
One of the classes I’m taking this semester is about art since around 1900, from Post-Impressionism to Contemporary Art. As a class at the University of Toronto or any traditional institution, the class is taught from a very Eurocentric point of view. However, many European artworks from this time were starting to gain influences from other parts of the world.…
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Artist Highlight: Who was Hannah Höch?
My first encounter with Hannah Höch was through my first year introductory Art History class. From the start, I was hooked; whether it was her politically charged Dada artwork, her innovation in the style of photomontage, her feminist values, or her bisexuality, something about Höch resonated with me. Both an incredible and unique artist and someone with important political views,…
