Woman/Artist Conference

Thursday, December 2, 2021 - 5:30pm to Saturday, December 4, 2021 - 5:00pm
Registration Link

Woman/Artist Conference

Keynote Address: December 2nd 

Conference: December 3rd & 4th

“Woman/Artist” seeks to interrogate the two terms of the category “woman artist,” as famously addressed fifty years ago in Linda Nochlin’s groundbreaking essay of 1971, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” In 1971, the “woman artist” was largely a white, Western, naturalized category. But with the critiques addressed to the category of “woman” from black feminism, from third- and fourth-wave feminisms, from postcolonial and queer theory, and from the LGBTQ and other global communities, combined with the recent rise of curatorial and art-market interest in women artists, we must turn back to Nochlin’s question in order to rephrase it. This two-day conference invites some of the generations of women who have passed through Yale’s portals since 1869/1969, as students and/or faculty, as artists, architectural and art historians, to ask: what is the meaning and utility of the category “woman artist” now?

Cosponsored by The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund, The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale, Yale University Art Gallery’s Martin A. Ryerson Lectureship Fund, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Whitney Humanities Center

Please register here: https://yale.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_36QJR4KLR_uLEUNv8tc1Xg

Schedule of Events
Thursday, Dec. 2
5:30pm: Anne Wagner, keynote, “Identity in Parenthesis, or The Unspeakable Male”

Friday, Dec. 3
Panel I: Categories/Intersections (9:00 a.m.–11:30) (Respondent, Andrianna Campbell-LaFleur)

  • Jill Richards, “Claude Cahun and the Transgender Archive”
  • Robin Dembroff, “Finding Women among Women Artists”
  • Esther Da Costa Meyer, “Between Exclusion and Complicity”  
  • Rizvana Bradley, “The Weathering of Form: Jennifer Packer’s Abstract Figures”`

Ann Hamilton in conversation with Jenni Sorkin (11:30-12:30 p.m.)

Lunch, 12:30-1:30 p.m.

Leslie Hewitt in conversation with Courtney J. Martin (1:30-2:30 p.m.)

Break: 2:30-3:00

Panel II: Artists/Mediums (3:00-5:30 p.m.) (respondent, Joanna Fiduccia)

  • Carol Armstrong, “Choosing ‘Women Artists’: Gallagher Leonard Frankenthaler”
  • Barbora Bartunkova, “Refiguring Bodies: Gender, Identity and Desire in Toyen’s Surrealist Oeuvre”
  • Vanessa Chung, “Fancier Work: Photography and the Paper Arts in the Victorian Album”  
  • Jenni Sorkin, “Hairwork/Women’s Work, c. 1993”

Saturday, Dec. 4

Howardena Pindell in conversation with Kymberly Pinder (9:00 a.m.-10:00)

Panel III: Woman/Work (10:00a.m. – 12:30) (respondent, Siobhan Angus)

  • Michelle Donnelly, “Making Paperwork: Joan Lyons’s Haloid Xerox Prints and Feminized Labor”
  • Laura Wexler, “La Toya Ruby Frazier and the Art of Women’s Work”
  • Aly Thomas, “Work Wives: (Post)Colonial Domesticity, Maintenance Art, and Queer African Feminism”  

Lunch, 12:30-1:30 p.m.

Marie Watt in conversation with Anna Smist (1:30-2:30 p.m.).  

Break: 2:30-3:00

Panel IV: Desire/Affect (3:00 – 5:30 p.m.) (respondent, Margaret Homans)

  • Marni Kessler, “Berthe Morisot and the Materiality of Longing”
  • Isabella Galdone, “The Spectral Male Body: Objects of Religious and Sexual Desire in the
  • Work of Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall”
  • Adela Kim, “Tearing Up in the Work of Andrea Fraser”
  • Marina Molarsky-Beck, “Seeing the Unseen: Sapphism and Subjectivity in the Art of
  • Interwar Paris”

Julia Trotta, Linda Nochlin video, in conversation with Carol Armstrong (5:30-6:30 p.m.)