Publisher's Synopsis
The rhetoric and mythology of Western art has always been oriented toward male artists, a distortion art historians and artists have been struggling against in order to affirm and articulate the creative experiences of women. The editors of this energetically intelligent anthology have selected essays about and by women in the arts. The first section contains nine essays by psychologists, art historians and critics, literary critics, and sociologists, including bell hooks, Christine Battersby, and Linda Nochlin, who is represented by her seminal piece, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" In the second half of the book, the editors have collected eloquent and stirring autobiographical writings by such twentieth-century arts pioneers as Georgia O'Keeffe, Martha Graham, Louise Nevelson, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Audre Lorde. All have had to fight for the right to make art and then made art that has profoundly challenged not only gender roles, but art itself.
