'Reclaiming Feminine Agency' identifies female agency as a central theme of recent feminist scholarship & offers 23 essays on artists & issues from the Renaissance to the present, written in the 1990s & after.

Women, Art, and Power?seven landmark essays on women artists and women in art history?brings together the work of almost twenty years of scholarship and speculation.

This new biographical look at Leonardo da Vinci explores the Renaissance master's groundbreaking portrayal of women which forever changed the way the female form is depicted. Leonardo da Vinci was a revolutionary thinker, artist, and inventor who has been written about and celebrated for centuries. Lesser known, however, is his revolutionary and empowering portrayal of the modern female centuries before the first women's liberation movements. Before da Vinci, portraits of women in Italy were still, impersonal, and mostly shown in profile. Leonardo pushed the boundaries of female depiction having several of his female subjects, including his Mona Lisa, gaze at the viewer, giving them an authority which was withheld from women at the time. Art historian and journalist Kia Vahland recounts Leonardo's entire life from April 15, 1452, as a child born out of wedlock in Vinci up through his death on May 2, 1519, in the French castle of von Cloux. Included throughout are 80 sketches and paintings showcasing Leonardo's approach to the female form (including anatomical sketches of birth) and other artwork as well as examples from other artists from the 15th and 16th centuries. Vahland explains how artists like Raphael, Giorgione, and the young Titan were influenced by da Vinci's women while Michelangelo, da Vinci's main rival, created masculine images of woman that counters Leonardo's depictions.

"Since its inception nearly 25 years ago the Feminist Art movement has presented a challenge to mainstream modernism that has radically transformed the art world. In The Power of Feminist Art, coeditors Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, professors of art history at The American University in Washington, D.C., bring together many of the influential art historians, critics, and artists who participated in the events of the 1970s. Together, they have created this landmark volume, the first history and analysis documenting this fertile and dynamic period of artistic growth." "We learn about the first feminist art education programs, with artists Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro helping to lay the foundation; about the now legendary Womanhouse project; and about such banner exhibitions as "Women Artists: 1550-1950," organized in 1976 by art historians Linda Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris. We follow the development of the movement as seen in the various feminist organizations, networks, exhibitions, and publications it generated; and most particularly in the emergence of feminist art. Performance art, social protest and public art, and collaboration; exploration of such formerly taboo aesthetic areas as "Pattern and Decoration"; and subjects such as divinity and the body viewed from female perspectives are among the multiple aspects of the Feminist Art movement. The last section of the book traces the ups and downs of the movement, as experienced through the backlash of the 1980s and the resurgence of women's issues in the 1990s." "Uncompromising, probing, thoughtful, and as provocative and exciting as the period itself, The Power of Feminist Art is an immensely stunning book. Reproductions of hundreds of works of feminist art from the 1970s and beyond - by such artists as Judith Baca, Harmony Hammond, Joyce Kozloff, Barbara Kruger, Ana Mendieta, Alice Neel, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Miriam Schapiro, Cindy Sherman, Nancy Spero, May Stevens, and Hannah Wilke - and the meticulously researched essays make this an invaluable source book and major contribution to American art and social history."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The Updated and Expanded edition of The Art of Feminism charts the birth of the feminist aesthetic and its development over two centuries that have seen profound and fast-paced change in women's lives across the globe. Including over 350 remarkable artworks, ranging from political posters and graphics to stunning and provocative pieces of painting, sculpture, textiles, craft, performance, digital and installation art, the book begins with poster images produced by the Suffrage Atelier in the nineteenth century, moving on to developments of both World Wars before arriving at the `birth' of feminist art in the 1960s. More recent artworks describe the development of feminism from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the present day, including examples by Zanele Muholi, Paula Rego, Lenka Clayton, Sethembile Msezane, Andrea Bowers, Tanja Ostojic, Aliaa Magda Elmahdy and Zoe Leonard. Other featured artists include Valie Export, Ketty La Rocca, Ewa Partum, Carolee Schneemann, Sanja Ivekovic, Senga Nengudi, Eva Hesse, Lynda Benglis, Suzy Lake, Barbara Kruger, Sophie Calle, Nancy Spero, Marina Abramovic, Mary Kelly, Judy Chicago, Faith Ringgold and Sonia Boyce. UPDATED AND INCLUSIVE: This edition of the book features an even more diverse array of artists and artworks than the original, from the beautiful figurative paintings of Hungarian-Indian artist Amrita Sher-Gil to the thoroughly researched and extravagantly costumed self-portraits of American photographer Ayana Jackson. Edited by Helena Reckitt, with texts by Lucinda Gosling, Hilary Robinson and Amy Tobin, The Art of Feminism also includes a preface by Maria Balshaw, Director, Tate, and a foreword by Xabier Arakistain, former director of del Centro Cultural Montehermoso Kulturunea, Spain.

An updated edition of the Sunday Times Bestseller Britain's best-known classicist Mary Beard, is also a committed and vocal feminist. With wry wit, she revisits the gender agenda and shows how history has treated powerful women. Her examples range from the classical world to the modern day, from Medusa and Athena to Theresa May and Hillary Clinton. Beard explores the cultural underpinnings of misogyny, considering the public voice of women, our cultural assumptions about women's relationship with power, and how powerful women resist being packaged into a male template. A year on since the advent of #metoo, Beard looks at how the discussions have moved on during this time, and how that intersects with issues of rape and consent, and the stories men tell themselves to support their actions. In trademark Beardian style, using examples ancient and modern, Beard argues, 'it's time for change - and now!' From the author of international bestseller SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome.