A Big-Tent Vision of Feminist Art That’s Still a Bit Too Small

Mothers of Invention tells the story of how the movements, media, and styles of the past 50 years were inspired by feminism — through mostly White artists. 

Hilma af Klint, "Group IV, The Ten Largest, No. 2 Childhood" (1907), tempera on paper, mounted on canvas 124 x 92 inches (315 x 234 cm) (image courtesy Lund Humphries)

Certain images might spring to mind when we think of feminist art: Ana Mendieta’s Siluetas (1973–78), for example, or Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party” (1974–79) — work that in form and content immediately reads as “feminist.” But Mothers of Invention: The Feminist Roots of Contemporary Art (2024), a new book from authors Eleanor Heartney, Helaine Posner, Nancy Princenthal, and Sue Scott, considers how a surprising range of movements, media, and styles of the past 50 years are inspired by feminism, from performance and abstraction (yes, surprise!), to craft (probably less surprising?) and ecological art. While the book is inclusive in terms of movements, however, it’s less so when it comes to the individual artists and thinkers it chooses to highlight.

The four authors, who have collaborated on two previous books about women and contemporary art, are knowledgeable, thoughtful, and thoroughly grounded in the history of art generally and of feminist art in particular, making them admirable guides to a history that we might never associate with feminism. I was especially interested in Scott’s chapter on the development of Euro-American abstraction, from the now-famous example of Hilma af Klint to later artists like Alma Thomas and Anne Truitt. The authors persuasively demonstrate how feminist contributions have been discounted in real time, from Minimalist artist and public theorist Donald Judd writing that Truitt’s sculpture “looks serious without being so” to Hilton Kramer deeming Hilma af Klint’s work “essentially color diagrams” in his review of the first major exhibition of her paintings in the United States, adding that she “would never have been given this inflated treatment if she had not been a woman.” The authors demonstrate, too, that erasure is both in the art historical past and ongoing. In this sense, the book is a significantly new history of art.

In the United States, this book comes at an important time, with the recent reversal of Roe v. Wade and a terrifying election on the horizon. It has much to offer. But it also, perhaps unconsciously, reveals some difficult issues still alive in feminism and in the art world. I felt my first twinge of unease in the opening chapter, when Posner writes, “I’ve come to question the scorn I once felt for essentialism” — that is, the sense that there are distinct and intrinsic qualities to woman-ness. I wanted to know much more about how it might reveal itself, or be understood, in the context of contemporary art. While certain essentialist notions of the 1970s — favoring the circle as more innately female than, say, the rectangle — sound a little suspect, work that was once belittled for being too overtly feminine, such as the Pattern and Decoration (P&D) movement broadly or Judy Chicago’s pastel-colored early minimalist sculpture, feels brave and prescient now.

The question of essentialism as it pertains to feminism is, well, essential to how we understand intersectional feminism — the theory that different dimensions of inequality interact — today. On the one hand, the authors are clear in their approach. In the first chapter, Princenthal writes: “In the 21st century we know that we can’t limit our definition of women to people who are identified as female at birth.” The authors therefore include not only trans and nonbinary artists, but also work by male artists that they conclude is explicitly or implicitly feminist, including the AIDS Quilt, which was conceived by Cleve Jones (not named in the book), P&D, and conceptual artists like Mel Chin. This big tent is made even bigger when Scott proclaims that “innovation is, in its own way, a feminist statement. It’s about taking power back and creating something new.”