Ten Artists Presenting Hertopia, Female Centered Visions
SULTANA’S DREAM, 2018. PORTFOLIO OF 27 LINOCUTS BFK RIVES TAN, 280GSM 20 1/8 X 16 1/8 INCHES (51.1 X 41 CM). EDITION OF 35.
“In order to rise from its own ashes, a phoenix first must burn.”— Octavia E. Butler
Artists have long turned to the spiritual and mystical in times of crisis or amid objectionable conditions, seeking alternative understandings of reality. The Romantics responded to the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution by finding manifestations of the sublime in nature. The Symbolists rejected the rationalist worldview of the fin de siècle by retreating into dreams and myths. And in the aftermath of World War II, Abstract Expressionists plumbed the collective unconscious, exploring notions of the artist as shaman which Joseph Beuys would later fully embody. By the 1960s, with the rise of Pop and Conceptual art, spiritual expressions came to be regarded as out of step with the art of the dawning postmodern age. Feminist artists like Mary Beth Edelson and Judy Chicago learned this in the 1970s when their goddess-centered works were dismissed as essentialist and retrograde. Donna Haraway summed up this skeptical view in her 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” declaring, “I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess.”