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15 Women Artists Who Rewrote the Rules

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Bridget Riley was the first woman to win the International Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale, Tracey Emin astounded the world with her unmade bed and Leonor Fini painted the first erotic male nude created by a woman. In celebration of Women's History Month, we have chosen 15 of our favorite pioneering Modern and contemporary artists. Click ahead to learn more about these groundbreaking women.

15 Women Artists Who Rewrote the Rules

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    Tracey Emin (b.1963)
    British-born artist Tracey Emin is perhaps as well known for her provocative, and sometimes outright controversial artistic practice as her tempestuous personality (she has frequently been referenced as the “enfant terrible” or “bad girl” of British art). She became involved with a number of young avant-garde artists, including Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas, and the group was eventually called the Young British Artists. In 1999, she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize, and she exhibited what is perhaps her most famous work My Bed (1998). For this work, she installed at the Tate Gallery a portion of her bedroom, including her unmade bed—dirty sheets and all—a small nightstand, various liquor bottles, cigarette butts, and condoms among other personal items.
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  • Bridget Riley at Sotheby's Collector's Dinner. Photo: Sotheby's/Lara Arnott
    Bridget Riley (b.1931)
    An icon of British art of the 1960s, Bridget Riley is best known for her dynamic black and white geometric paintings. Exploiting optical phenomena to evoke compelling sensations of movement, color and three-dimensionality, Riley’s canvases interrogate not only how we see, but the phenomenological experience of seeing. In 1968, she represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale, where she became the first woman to win the International Prize for Painting. While her early paintings were executed in an Impressionistic style, she soon evolved toward an interest in the Pointillism of Georges Seurat and his theories of light and color. As her practice matured, Riley began to experiment more boldly with optical phenomena, and by the early ‘60s, she was creating clean-lined geometric patterned paintings in the style for which she is now known. In 1967, Riley began to introduce color into her painting and a 1981 trip to Egypt led to a fascination with the dynamic use of color in ancient Egyptian art. Today, her investigations into the physical, psychological and social aspects of visual sensation and perception continue unabated.
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  • Leonor Fini (1906–1995)
    While most women in the Surrealist circle were relegated to the idealized position of muse or the passive position of model, Leonor Fini was a vital creative force in the movement for many decades. Powerful images of women dominate her dreamscapes, but she is also notable for producing, in 1942, what has been called the first erotic male nude ever painted by a woman.

    Born on August 30, 1907 in Buenos Aires, and raised in Trieste, on the Italian–Slovenian border, an ocular disease in her adolescence forced Fini to wear bandages over both eyes, and after recovering her vision she resolved to become an artist. In Paris, she came to know de Chirico, Picasso, and Dalí and was often seen and photographed in cafe society dressed in men's clothes or in nothing but white boots and a feathered cape. She participated in Peggy Guggenheim's watershed Exhibition by 31 Women alongside such artists as Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, Louise Nevelson, Dorothea Tanning, and Maria de Silva—all of them still in their twenties. When she died on January 18, 1996, leaving behind a pair of live-in lovers and a clowder of Persian cats, her obituary in the Independent began, “In the 17th century, Leonor Fini would have been burnt as a witch.”
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    Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929).
    Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama is known for her installations, sculptures and paintings and numbers among the most influential living contemporary artists. Born in Nagano in 1929, Kusama began creating art and writing poetry at a young age. Soon after relocating to Seattle in 1957, she headed to New York City where she became friends with the artists Donald Judd and Joseph Cornell. It was during these years that she originated her Infinity Net paintings, intricate webs of paint comprising repetitive brushstrokes. In the early 1960s Kusama rose to prominence through a series of Happenings and Pop performances. Kusama has continued to develop an expansive and prolific practice, cultivating her specific visual lexicon that is at once whimsical, erotic and participatory. In 2017 the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC, organized the highly acclaimed Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, an exhibition featuring six of her iconic Infinity Rooms, which opened to overwhelming public success.

    Learn more about Yayoi Kusama here.
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  • Frida Kahlo (1907–1954).
    Frida Kahlo was born on the outskirts of Mexico City in 1907. As a child Kahlo planned to study medicine, however in 1925, at the age of eighteen, she was involved in a bus accident that nearly killed her and from which she never fully recovered. Confined to her bed for months afterwards, she began experimenting with the self-portraiture that would define her oeuvre. From this time on, she devoted herself fully to art and her arduous, and often painful, convalescence would become a recurrent theme in her work. She married the painter Diego Riviera in 1929. Her works combined Mexican folkloric imagery with Surrealist imagery that dwelled on her identity, sexuality, illness and marriage. While some considered her a Surrealist, and Rivera described her as a realist, Kahlo never identified with any specific movement, instead saying “The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.”

    Learn more about Frida Kahlo here.
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    Kara Walker (b. 1969).
    Contemporary artist Kara Walker investigates themes of race, identity, sexuality and the legacy of slavery through a range of media. She is best-known for her room-installations of cut-paper silhouettes, which feature harrowing vignettes of violence and trauma taken from the history of the American South. She is also regarded for her video, painting, print-making and sculpture. Her profound synthesis of historical genres with theatrical installation produces effective, a biting critique of American history.

    In 2014, Walker exhibited her first site-specific sculpture in the former Domino Sugar warehouse in Brooklyn, New York. Subtlety presented a massive Sphinx woman coated in white sugar, surrounded by thirteen boys in brown cast sugar or resin; the very use of sugar effectively and poignantly brought attention to complex and problematic sugar trade. Walker’s innovative use of media consistently challenges the connotations and realities of history and the world around us.

    Learn more about Kara Walker here.
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  • Cindy Sherman (b. 1954).
    American artist Cindy Sherman is a photographer and filmmaker famed for her conceptual self portraits. Sherman is considered one of the defining artists of the Pictures Generation, a group of artists who, beginning in the 1970s, synthesized shrewd explorations of identity with the changing face of mass media and popular American culture.

    Raised in Long Island, New York, Sherman began studying painting at Buffalo State College in 1972, eventually giving up the medium in favor of photography. She completed her best-known work at the age of 23, Untitled Film Stills, a series of 70 black-and-white photographs of the artist dressed as a variety of women characters and caricatures, including bombshells, seductresses, ingénues and housewives. Through a critical and often humorous lens, these images brought attention to the male gaze. Sherman directed, starred in, and photographed each image, subverting the gaze of the male réalisateur and viewer, and emboldening herself, while questioning the notion of representing and performing womanhood.

    Learn more about Cindy Sherman here.
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    Yoko Ono (b. 1933).
    Yoko Ono is a Japanese-born American is a multimedia artist who works in music, performance, experimental film and sculpture among other media. Ono was married to the musician John Lennon, with whom she collaborated on a number of albums, art projects and demonstrations for peace. In 1989 she was the subject of retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which contributed to a increased interest in her work. She has created several works of public and participatory art, often with anti-war themes. In 2015 she was the subject of a critically acclaimed retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
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    Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010).
    Louise Bourgeois was a prolific 20th-century artist who experimented with a wide range of media, materials, subjects and themes; as such, categorizing or situating her work in one distinct artistic movement remains nearly impossible. She has been linked to Surrealism, American Abstraction and Feminist Art and is well known for her large-scale sculptured and installations, though she also produced many paintings, drawings and textiles. Her work mined themes of family, motherhood, sexuality and the subconscious and the experience of the female body.

    Learn more about Louise Bourgeois here.
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    Barbara Kruger (b. 1945).
    Barbara Kruger’s artistic practice has consistently sought to deconstruct the methods of advertising and mass media. After studying at Parsons in the early 1950s and taking courses with Diane Arbus, Kruger cultivated an impressive career in graphic design; she designed for Condé Nast Publications such as Aperture, and eventually became the head designer for Mademoiselle magazine. She turned to photography in the mid-1970s, and by the 1980s, had defined agitprop style that calls upon the visual language of mass media and advertisement. Using found photographs in addition to her own, and playing with the interplay of text, image and typography, she places concise, ironic phrases in bold, red font, in purposeful arrangements over black and white photographs, often of women and female models.

    Learn more about Barbara Kruger here.
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    Marina Abramović (b. 1946).
    Marina Abramovic is a pioneering performance artist, who engages her body as medium in lieu of traditional materials and modes of artistic production. Born in Belgrade and raised under Yugoslavia’s oppressive Communist dictatorship, Abramovic has spent much of her career responding to authority; her parents had ties to the regime and she has spoken about her severely strict, violent, and militaristic childhood.

    Since the early 1970s, Abramovic has experimented with her body as a means to explore the nature of memory, evoke the traditions of ritual and prod at the effects of trauma. In 2010, the Museum of Modern Art held a legendary major retrospective and performance recreation of Abramovic’s career, the largest performance art exhibition in the history of the museum. During The Artist is Present, Abramovic sat in the center of a large room, and invited visitors to the chair opposite her, so that she may engage in prolonged one-on-one eye contact. The artist sat with 1,545 sitters including, some celebrities. The project widened engagement and participation to a wider audience of newly interested viewers.

    Learn more about Marina Abramovic here.
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    Judy Chicago (b. 1939).
    Perhaps the quintessential Feminist artist, Judy Chicago pioneered a new form of art during the 1970s, one that focused on the lives, experiences and physical realities of womanhood. Channeling the narrative of modernism, Chicago sought to redress and enshrine women at the heart of the narrative of art history. These motivations are perhaps best encapsulated by her most famous work The Dinner Party (1979), in which she created triangular dinner table set with unique ceramic table setting (which incorporated vaginal imagery), each devoted to a significant historical or mythical female persona.
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    Cecily Brown (b. 1969).
    Cecily Brown is a London-born contemporary artist based in New York City, who combines figuration with abstraction to explore themes of sexuality, pornography and attraction. Brown studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London before relocating to New York at the age of 25 in order to distance herself from the Young British Artists and their focus on new media. Her approach to abstract painting questions and satirizes the masculinity that has been historically linked to Abstract Expressionism.

    Learn more about Cecily Brown here.
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    Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986).
    One of the most successful artists of the 20th century, Georgia O’Keeffe enjoyed a long and varied artistic career in which she introduced many new aesthetic perspectives and approaches in Modernism. Born in Wisconsin in 1887, she studied at the Art Institute of Chicago beginning in 1905 before taking teaching position in South Carolina, Virginia and Texas. She moved to New York City in 1918 at the age of 31 where she became part of the artistic milieu of her future husband photographer Alfred Stieglitz. O’Keeffe is best known for her paintings of the natural environment — namely flowers, animal skulls and the desert landscape, which she fully explored after moving to New Mexico. She stripped her subjects to their purest forms and colors to heighten their expressive power. She reduced the curved planes and contours of the flower to a symphony of basic colors, shapes, textures, and rhythms, simplifying the forms almost to the point of complete abstraction.

    Learn more about Georgia O'Keeffe here.
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    Adrian Piper (b. 1948).
    Adrian Piper is an important conceptual artist, who addresses important issues of race, otherness and cultural ostracism. Born in New York City in 1948, Piper attended the School of Visual Arts in 1969 and went on to study philosophy at City College in 1974. Her work bridges a range of media, from writing and drawing to performance, music and film. Within her artworks, she often engages her audience in interactions, making them subscribe to commitments or activities that attempt to force the viewer to orient themselves within the world. Piper has said that her work has the intention of bringing to her viewers awareness their own racist or sexist points of view.
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