‘Jewish Identities in American Feminist Art: Ghosts of Ethnicity’
by Lisa E. Bloom
Paperback, 208 pages, 67 illustrations
ISBN: 0-415-23221-X
Routledge, an imprint of Taylor and Francis
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Jewish Identities in American Feminist Art: Ghosts of Ethnicity explores the place of Jewishness in feminist art in the United States. It considers how the unspoken and unacknowledged issue of race, this ghost of the artists Jewish ethnicity, has affected, even haunted, their art work. Lisa Bloom situates the art practices of feminist artists from the 1970s to the present in relation to wider cultural and historical issues behind the reticence on the topic of Jewish identities in the visual arts.
Rooted in the postwar climate of assimilation, exemplified by the art criticism of Clement Greenberg, and exploded by three generations of feminist thinkers and practitioners, these themes are examined in depth through the work of important contemporary Jewish artists, including Danielle Abrams, Eleanor Antin, Doris Bittar, Joan Braderman, Judy Chicago, Deborah Kass, Rhonda Lieberman, Sherry Millner, Beverly Naidus, Elaine Reichek, Martha Rosler, Lidia Shaddow, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Ruth Wallen, amongst others.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
1. Clement Greenbergs modernist shadow
2. Negotiating Jewishness in the 1970s: The work of Judy Chicago and Mierle Laderman Ukeles
3. Rewriting the script: Eleanor Antins artwork
4. The California work of U.S. artist Martha Rosler
5. Contemporary feminist art practices in New York
6. California feminist art and postnationalist identities
Featuring 67 illustrations, this study provides an important recentering and visualization of the previously opaque role of Jewish identities in feminist art history.
Lisa Bloom teaches visual culture and feminist theory at the University of California, San Diego. Her previous publications include With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture (1999) and Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions (1993). She has both an M.F.A. from the Visual Studies Workshop and Rochester Institute of Technology (1985), and a Ph.D. from the History of Consciousness Board at the University of California, Santa Cruz (1990).
