IF YOU CONSIDER YOURSELF A FEMINIST, WOULD YOU RESPOND BY USING ONE 8 1/2 BY 11" PAGE TO SHARE YOUR IDEAS ABOUT WHAT FEMINIST ART IS OR COULD BE.

In 1976 feminist in the arts received pink postcards with this prompt typed on the front. They replied with hundreds of submissions, which ranged from simple handwritten notes to intricate drawings and collages. The submissions were then exhibited at the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles in 1977. In 2019 the Archives of American Art revived the project, and it too yielded an outpouring of responses as well as an exhibition that paired the twenty-first century creations with those made nearly forty years prior.

The “What is Feminist Art?” project embodies the multiplicity of meanings and potentials encompassed by the term “feminist art.” Moreover, it is both a work of contemporary art history that surveyed the state of the field (twice) and also a creative exploration that produced striking visual displays. In this, the project enacts the feminist methodology of artistic practice as research, blurring the lines between those who make art and those who study it. We have seen multiple examples of this methodology in our course; one prominent example is Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, a monumental art installation that presents historical research on recovered female figures and reclaimed craft practices.

The final assignment for our class invites you to take up the methodology of creative research. You will begin by examining the submissions from the 1970s and 2010s and considering how these primary sources supplement or challenge what you have learned so far. You will then respond to the prompt, crafting a visual response that shares your own ideas about “what feminist art is or could be.” Since this is not a studio class, your response will not be graded on artistic “quality,” but rather on the basis of your critical thinking and extension of the concepts encountered in the course. Finally, you will reflect on your creative production through analytical writing that situates your response in relationship to the theories of feminist art and visual culture we studied throughout the semester.

The learning goals of the assignment are that you:

- Learn how to access and interpret primary sources
- Experiment with creative making as a process of knowledge production
- Reflect on and synthesize course content by situating yourself in relationship to it
- Further develop two key skills of art history writing: effective visual description and use of secondary sources to support an argument about a work of art