Foreword

Dear Readers,

When you saw the image on the cover, you may have experienced a jolt of discomfort and dismay. But with the feminist knowledge of our readers, you may have also said to yourself, Frontiers placed an image from the 1970s feminist art movement on its cover. And you are correct. Welcome to our special issue on feminist art. Michelle Moravec, the guest editor of this issue, identifies and describes our cover image in a paragraph below. As Moravec explains, Yoheved Weinfeld created this photograph, Stitched Breasts, a self-portrait, in 1974, as an investigation of key issues of feminist art: feminist identity, its relationship to the body, and the possibilities of using the body to challenge how male artists rendered women as objects. Stitched Breasts is meant to make us feel uncomfortable, to push us to rethink how we see our bodies and ourselves.

Yoheved Weinfeld engaged in feminist art in 1970s Israel, a place where feminist art was not valued, and few artists were involved in the movement. But Weinfeld knew other feminist artists in Israel, and she (and they) interacted with feminist artists in the United States. Weinfeld's story is the story of feminist art developing in unlikely places and of the importance of the women's movement to the movement of feminist art. These are also the concerns of this special issue, "Feminist Art and Social Movements: Beyond NY/LA." We cannot understand 1970s feminist art unless we study it as part of the women's movement, and we cannot understand the artists of that decade without locating them in place. The story of the women's movement is also the story of how it expanded across the landscape, how women in places far from the well-known centers of feminist art, New York and Los Angeles, nonetheless participated in the movement and built collaborative spaces for creating feminist art.

We wish to thank several people who helped bring this issue together, beginning with Michelle Moravec, the guest editor, who queried us some time ago about the possibility of this issue, maintained a steady faith in its importance, and brought together so many thoughtful pieces about feminist art. We also thank Hilary Harp, the Frontiers art editor, who first discussed the issue with Michelle and explained to us its importance for feminist art history. Finally we are indebted to our editorial assistant, Stephanie Schreiner, who skillfully and smoothly accomplished the many demanding tasks that a special issue in art history requires.

Gayle Gullett
Susan E. Gray
March 2012
Tempe, Arizona State University

Cover Note

The black-and-white photograph created by Yocheved Weinfeld (b. 1947, Poland) was chosen as the cover image of this special issue devoted to the feminist art movement beyond New York and Los Angeles for the many aspects of 1970s feminist art it represents so well. This work, and others like it, appeared in Weinfeld's first one-person show in Jerusalem in 1974. The image depicts the artist herself, in photographs that she cut and sutured together, and then rephotographed for exhibition. For feminist artists becoming both the creating subject and the object of artwork offered a means to transcend the objectification of women in art and to acknowledge the often intensely personal content of the work. Weinfeld's disfiguration of her image, which ironically comments on the gendered beauty ideal while simultaneously disrupting that voyeuristic process in art, calls to mind similar uses of the use of the body, particularly SOS—Starification Object Series (1974), by Hannah Wilke.