Artist and animator Signe Baumane created the outrageous animation Teat Beat of Sex, a funny and courageous fifteen-part series of lectures from a woman’s point of view. Watching these semi-autobiographical shorts makes one realize how little animation there is that expresses a personal viewpoint about sex.
Imogen Cunningham occupies a singular position in the history of American art of the 20th century. For over half the history of photography, she explored with innovation and news perspectives all the major traditions associated with the medium as fine art.
Cunningham has been most widely acclaimed for the photographs made during the 1920s and 1930s, particularly close-up images of plants and nudes. She also made portraits which are now considered classics in photography, including images of Alfred Stieglitz, Spencer Tracy, and Martha Graham.
She was a founding member of the West Coast-based Group f.64, which championed an un-manipulated, direct approach with the camera, or “straight” photography. Her photographs are represented in major collections and museums around the world.
(Font: Imogen Cunningham Trust)
Penis Puppets by Pam Kray, 1987
Marilyn Minter is a contemporary American artist whose personal brand of Photorealist painting examines traditional and mainstream notions of beauty. Often depicting narrowly cropped female bodies laden with jewels, dirt, and couture accessories, Minter's work uses hypersexualization to critique contemporary culture while reducing the human figure to a series of grotesque and tempting body parts.
“When I think about my work, I mostly think about the paradox that goes on when you look at these images," she has said. “How much pleasure glamour gives us but at the same time, how we know we'll never look like that, and even [models] don't look like that. There's this constant distortion that's happening between all of us - men and women - there's a sense of failure. But at the same time, all of this pleasure.”
Born in Shreveport, LA in 1948, Minter first found artistic popularity in the early 1990s, and her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions like the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2005 and a major retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Houston in 2015. Minter currently lives, works, and teaches in New York, NY.
(Font: Artnet.com)
Alice Guy-Blaché was a trailblazer in every aspect of cinema. She was the first person to be a film director and writer of narrative fiction films. She experimented with Gaumont's Chronophone sound syncing system, color tinting, interracial casting, and special effects.
From 1896 to 1920, she directed over 1,000 films, some 350 of which survive, and 22 of which are feature-length films.
Guy was one of the first women (along with Lois Weber) to manage and own her own studio: The Solax Company.
In the late 1940s, Guy-Blaché wrote an autobiography, and in 1976 it was published in French. It was translated into English in 1986 with the help of her daughter Simone and daughter-in-law Roberta Blaché and film writer Anthony Slide.
Guy-Blaché was tremendously concerned with her unexplained absence from the historical record of the film industry. She was in constant communication with colleagues and film historians correcting previously made and supposedly factual statements about her life. She crafted lengthy lists of her films as she remembered them, with the hope of being able to assume creative ownership and get legitimate credit for them.
Video by Catherine Stratton, strattonfilms.com.
(Font: Sophia Wallace)
CLITERACY is a new way of talking about citizenship, sexuality, human rights, and bodies. The project reveals the – phallic as neutral – bias in science, law, philosophy, politics, mainstream and even feminist discussion, and the art world - which is so saturated with the female body as subject.
