More than thirty years after the birth of the modern women's movement and the beginnings of feminist art-making and art history, the time is ripe to examine the legacies of those revolutions. In Women Artists at the Millennium, artists, art historians, and critics examine the differences that feminist art practice and critical theory have made in late twentieth-century art and the discourses surrounding it. In 1971, when Linda Nochlin published her essay "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" in a special issue of Art News, there were no women's studies, no feminist theory, no such thing as feminist art criticism; there was instead a focus on the mythic figure of the great (male) artist through history. Since then, the "woman artist" has not simply been assimilated into the canon of "greatness" but has expanded art-making into a multiplicity of practices with new parameters and perspectives. In Women Artists at the Millennium artists including Martha Rosler and Yvonne Rainer reflect upon their own varied practices and art historians discuss the innovative work of such figures as Louise Bourgeois, Lygia Clark, Mona Hatoum, and Carrie Mae Weems. And Linda Nochlin considers changes since her landmark essay and looks to the future, writing, "We will need all our wit and courage to make sure that women's voices are heard, their work seen and written about."
Preface / Carol Armstrong -- Introduction / Catherine de Zegher -- Yvonne Rainer -- I. Legacies. "Why have there been no great women artists?" : thirty years after / Linda Nochlin ; Rethinking the artist in the woman, the woman in the artist, and that old chestnut, the gaze / Griselda Pollock ; Mediating generation : the mother-daughter plot / Lisa Tickner ; Responding : questions of perspective / Molly Nesbit -- Martha Rosler -- II. Spaces. Duchess of nothing : video space and the "woman artist" / Ewa Lajer-Burcharth ; Drawing drawing : Agnes Martin's infinity / Briony Fer ; The inside is the outside : the relational as the (feminine) space of the radical / Catherine de Zegher ; Responding : dwelling on spaces / Brigid Doherty -- Ann Hamilton -- III. Subjectivities. Hairlines / Tamar Garb ; The she-fox : transference and the "woman artist" / Mignon Nixon ; Difference and disfiguration, or Trockel as mime / Anne Wagner ; Responding : a referendum on theory and feminism / Emily Apter -- Mary Kelly -- IV. Identities. Francesca Woodman : a ghost in the house of the "woman artist" / Carol Armstrong ; Taunting and haunting : critical tactics in a "minor" mode / Abigail Solomon-Godeau ; Sally Mann : the price of success / Anne Higonnet ; Responding : scandalous matter : women artists and the crisis of embodiment / Maria Dibattista -- Ellen Gallagher.