Feminist Activist Art, a Roundtable Forum, August 24-31, 2005

Forum Participants

Mary Flanagan is a game designer, artist, and media theorist based in New York City who leads the Tiltfactor research group at Hunter College. Flanagan's artwork has been shown internationally at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art, ACM SIGGRAPH (Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques), Ars Electronica, the Moving Image Centre in Auckland, ARCO Madrid, and the Guggenheim. She is author or co-editor of three books, including a book on the popular Sims™ game.

Jennifer González teaches in the History of Art and Visual Culture Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with courses on museums and the politics of display, feminist theory and art production, semiotics and visual culture, activist art since 1960, the camera and the body, surrealism to postmodernism, environments, installations, and sites. Selected publications include "The Appended Subject" in Race in Cyberspace (2000), "Envisioning Cyborg Bodies: Notes from Current Research" in The Cyborg Handbook (1995), and "Autotopographies" in Prosthetic Territories: Politics and Hypertechnologies (1995).

The Guerrilla Girls (www.guerrillagirls.com) use provocative text, visuals, and humor in the service of feminism and social change. They create projects about the art world, film, politics, and pop culture, including their large-scale installation for the 2005 Venice Biennale, anti-Hollywood billboard and sticker campaigns, and their books Bitches, Bimbos and Ballbreakers: The Guerrilla Girls' Illustrated Guide to Female Stereotypes (2003) and The Guerrilla Girls' Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art (1998). They travel the world talking about their experiences as feminist masked avengers and reinventing the "F" word into the twenty-first century.

Margo Machida is an Hawaiian-born scholar, independent curator, and cultural critic who specializes in contemporary Asian American art and visual culture. She is a faculty member in Art and Art History and Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. Most recently, she co-edited an anthology of critical writing, Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Art (2003).

Marsha Meskimmon is Reader in Art History and Theory at Loughborough University (UK). She has published numerous books and articles on women's art and feminist theory, including The Art of Reflection: Women Artists' Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century (1996), We Weren't Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German Modernism (1999), and Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics (2003). Current work includes a new volume on contemporary transnational art and the concept of "home," as well as a number of book, film, and exhibition projects in collaboration with artists.

Martha Rosler works in several forms, as well as writing about art and culture. Her work centers on everyday life and the public sphere, often with an eye to women's experience. Many works center on the geopolitics of entitlement and dispossession. The series of shows and forums she organized in 1989, "If You Lived Here," addressed urban planning and architecture, from housing to homelessness. Her writing and photography on roads, transport, and urban undergrounds (metros) further these concerns. Her photomontage series joining images of war and domesticity, first made in relation to Vietnam, has been reprised in relation to Iraq.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. Her books are Myself Must I Remake (1974), In Other Worlds (1987), The Post-Colonial Critic (1988), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), and Death of a Discipline (2003). Red Thread and Other Asias are in press. She has translated Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology (1976) and Mahasweta Devi's Imaginary Maps (1994), Breast Stories (1997), Old Women (1999), and Chotti Munda and His Arrow (2002).

subRosa (http://www.cyberfeminism.net/) is a reproducible cyberfeminist cell of cultural researchers committed to combining art, activism, and politics to explore and critique the effects of the intersections of the new information and biotechnologies on women's bodies, lives, and work. subRosa produces...