The Art of Feminism

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What the fight for equality looks like through the eyes of women artists. Feminist art did not appear all at once, though it is often discussed as a phenomenon of the 1960s. The Art of Feminism: Images that Shaped the Fight for Equality follows its birth and development across two centuries in which the lives of women around the world changed with extraordinary speed and depth.

The book contains more than 350 works: political posters and graphics, painting and sculpture, textiles and craft, performance, digital art and installation. It begins in the nineteenth century, moves through the era of both World Wars and arrives at the "birth" of feminist art in the 1960s. Later chapters follow its course from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the present day. Here you will find work by Barbara Kruger, Sophie Calle, Nancy Spero, Marina Abramović, Mary Kelly, Judy Chicago, Faith Ringgold and Sonia Boyce.

The 2022 edition is expanded and more varied still. It adds, for example, the figurative paintings of the Hungarian-Indian artist Amrita Sher-Gil and the meticulously researched, lavishly costumed self-portraits of the American photographer Ayana Jackson.

The editor is Helena Reckitt. Texts are by Lucinda Gosling, Hilary Robinson and Amy Tobin, with a preface by Maria Balshaw, Director of Tate, and a foreword by Xabier Arakistain, former director of the Centro Cultural Montehermoso Kulturunea in Spain. The book is both a dependable survey and an engaging guide for anyone curious about how social change is mirrored in art.

Helena Reckitt is a professor, curator and researcher, and one of the foremost international experts in the visual arts. She is Reader in Curating in the Art Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has curated exhibitions in the UK, US and Canada, including What Business Are You In? at The Contemporary, Not Quite How I Remember It at The Power Plant and Getting Rid of Ourselves at OCAD University. Besides The Art of Feminism, she is editor of Art and Feminism, Sanja Iveković: Unknown Heroine and, with Joshua Oppenheimer, Acting on AIDS.