Feminist Art: Gender, Power, and the Movement That Rewrote Art History (1970s-Present)

In 1985, a group of women gathered in New York City, put on gorilla masks, and printed posters with statistics. One poster showed a reclining nude wearing a gorilla mask and asked: "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?" The answer, printed below: "Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female." The poster was plastered on bus shelters and building walls across lower Manhattan. The group called themselves the Guerrilla Girls, and they took the names of dead women artists as pseudonyms: Kathe Kollwitz, Frida Kahlo, Alice Neel. No one knew who they were. That was the point. The masks protected their careers from retaliation by the galleries and museums they were criticizing. Forty years later, in 2025, the Guerrilla Girls celebrated their anniversary with exhibitions in Washington, London, Los Angeles, and Norway, and the statistics they were protesting in 1985 have improved but not by much.

Feminist art is art that addresses the experiences, bodies, histories, and political struggles of women. It emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s as part of the broader feminist movement and as a direct challenge to an art world that was overwhelmingly male. Feminist artists used every medium available: painting, sculpture, performance, photography, video, textile, craft, and activism. They invented new forms, including collaborative installations, body art, and consciousness-raising art. They also recovered the work of women artists who had been written out of art history, building an alternative canon that museums and universities have since been forced to acknowledge.

This entry covers what feminist art is, how it emerged from the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which artists defined it, and how a movement that began as a protest became one of the most influential forces in contemporary art.

What Is Feminist Art?

Feminist art is art made from a woman-centered perspective that challenges the male-dominated structures of the art world. It is not simply art made by women. Many women artists throughout history did not identify as feminist or make feminist work. Feminist art is art that consciously addresses gender as a subject: the body, domestic labor, sexual violence, reproductive rights, the exclusion of women from art history, the devaluation of craft, and the politics of representation.

Feminist art took several forms. The first is the recovery and celebration of women's experience, as in Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party (1974-1979), a large triangular installation with place settings for 39 historical women, each with a uniquely designed ceramic plate and embroidered runner. The second is the use of the female body as a site of political expression, as in Carolee Schneemann's Interior Scroll (1975) or Ana Mendieta's Silueta series (1973-1980), in which the artist pressed her body into earth, mud, grass, and fire to create female silhouettes in the landscape. The third is institutional critique, practiced by the Guerrilla Girls, who used statistics and posters to expose the gender and racial disparities in museums and galleries. The fourth is the elevation of craft, particularly textile and ceramic work, which had been dismissed as "women's work" and excluded from fine art contexts.

The Jewish Museum in Amsterdam is presenting Judy Chicago: Revelations from February 6 to August 23, 2026, the artist's first solo exhibition in the Netherlands. The exhibition is organized around the chapters of an unpublished illuminated manuscript Chicago created in the early 1970s while working on The Dinner Party, which was published for the first time in 2024 by Serpentine and Thames and Hudson. The show brings together early abstract and minimalist works, archival material, preparatory studies for major projects, and immersive video installations of site-specific performances. Read more at Jewish Cultural Quarter.

Historical Context and Origins

Feminist art emerged from the women's liberation movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and the founding of the National Organization for Women in 1966 created a political context in which women artists began to question their exclusion from galleries, museums, and art history textbooks.

In 1970, Judy Chicago founded the Feminist Art Program at California State University, Fresno, the first program of its kind. She and Miriam Schapiro moved the program to the California Institute of the Arts in 1971, where they organized Womanhouse (1972) with their students. Womanhouse was a collaborative installation in a vacant mansion in Hollywood, where each room was transformed into a statement about women's domestic experience. Chicago's Menstruation Bathroom featured a white bathroom with a trash can overflowing with used tampons and pads. Robin Weltsch and Faith Wilding's Nurturant Kitchen turned the kitchen walls into fried-egg shapes. Womanhouse drew thousands of visitors and demonstrated that feminist art could be collaborative, site-specific, and accessible to a general audience.

The movement was not limited to the United States. In Britain, the Women's Liberation Movement produced art collectives like the Hackney Flashers (1974-1980), who used photography to document women's working lives. In Latin America, artists like Marta Minujin and Lygia Clark used performance and participation to challenge patriarchal structures. In 2025, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art hosted an exhibition of Chicago's work titled What If Women Ruled the World?, featuring 11 art quilts posing questions about gender, power, and violence. The exhibition became a flashpoint for debate about whether international artists should show work in Israel during the Gaza war. Read more at JTA.

Key Artists and Pioneers

Judy Chicago (born 1939)

Chicago is the most prominent figure in feminist art. The Dinner Party (1974-1979, Brooklyn Museum) is a triangular installation with 39 place settings for historical and mythical women, from Primordial Goddess to Georgia O'Keeffe. Each plate features a unique ceramic design based on vulvar imagery, and each runner is embroidered with symbols relevant to the woman honored. The work took five years to complete and involved over 400 contributors. It was first exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1979 and was met with both massive public enthusiasm and harsh critical dismissal. It was rejected by several museums before being permanently installed at the Brooklyn Museum's Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art in 2007. Chicago's Birth Project (1980-1985) and PowerPlay (1982-1986) extended her exploration of gender, creation, and masculinity.

The Guerrilla Girls (founded 1985)

The Guerrilla Girls are an anonymous collective of feminist artist-activists who use posters, billboards, and public interventions to expose gender and racial inequality in the art world. The group formed in 1985 in response to a Museum of Modern Art exhibition that included only 13 women out of 169 artists. Their first poster, printed in 1985, compared the number of women artists shown in New York galleries to the number of naked women shown in museum art. Their 1989 billboard Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get into the Met. Museum? remains their most iconic work. The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles mounted How to Be a Guerrilla Girl from November 2025 to April 2026, drawing from the GRI's archival holdings of posters, planning documents, and ephemera. The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington presented Guerrilla Girls: Making Trouble from April to September 2025. Read more at NMWA.

Ana Mendieta (1948-1985)

Mendieta created the Silueta series (1973-1980), in which she pressed her body into earth, mud, grass, flowers, and fire to create female silhouettes in the landscape, then photographed them as they eroded, burned, or washed away. Born in Cuba and exiled to the United States at age 12, Mendieta described her work as a search for reconnection with the earth and with her displaced identity. Her Tree of Life (1976) shows her body covered in mud and pressed against a tree trunk, becoming indistinguishable from it. She died in 1984 after falling from the window of her 34th-floor apartment; her husband, the sculptor Carl Andre, was charged with her murder and acquitted. The controversy surrounding her death remains a subject of debate in the art world.

Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019)

Schneemann used her body to challenge the male gaze. Meat Joy (1964) involved performers writhing in paint, raw fish, and chicken parts. Interior Scroll (1975) involved Schneemann standing naked on a table and slowly pulling a scroll from her vagina, reading a text that criticized the structural exclusion of women from art history. Schneemann's work was controversial and frequently censored, but it opened the door for feminist performance art that used the body as a site of political expression.

Barbara Kruger (born 1945)

Kruger appropriates advertising imagery and overlays it with text that challenges the viewer's assumptions about gender, power, and consumption. Her Untitled (Your body is a battleground) (1989) shows a woman's face split into positive and negative, with the text printed across it in red and black. Kruger's work combines the visual language of advertising with feminist critique, and her influence on contemporary graphic design and political art is enormous.

Phases and Evolution

Feminist art's first phase runs from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, centered on the establishment of feminist art programs, collaborative projects like Womanhouse, and the creation of major works like The Dinner Party. This period is defined by the energy of the women's liberation movement and the founding of feminist art institutions, including the Women's Building in Los Angeles (1973) and A.I.R. Gallery in New York (1972), the first artist-run gallery for women in the United States.

The second phase, from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, is characterized by the rise of the Guerrilla Girls, the expansion of feminist art into institutional critique, and the increasing recognition of women artists by major museums. The 1985 founding of the Guerrilla Girls marked a shift from making feminist art to attacking the structures that excluded feminist art. The 1993 Whitney Biennial was famously described as the most political biennial ever, with strong feminist and multicultural representation.

The third phase, from the 2000s to the present, is marked by the institutionalization of feminist art. The Brooklyn Museum opened the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art in 2007, the first museum space dedicated to feminist art. The Guerrilla Girls celebrated their 40th anniversary in 2025 with multiple exhibitions. As one curator at the Getty Research Institute noted: "Maybe it hasn't changed all that much, the most market-driven part of the art world. But certainly institutions have changed and have better representation of women artists and artists of color." Read more at Observer.

Legacy and Influence

Feminist art transformed the art world. It forced museums to acquire work by women artists, forced art history programs to include women in their curricula, and established the principle that art can address gender, the body, and domestic life as legitimate subjects. The feminist art movement also pioneered collaborative and participatory art practices, the use of craft as fine art, and the idea that art can be a form of political activism. Contemporary artists like Mickalene Thomas, Wangechi Mutu, and Firelei Baez extend feminist art's legacy into new territory, addressing race, sexuality, and diaspora alongside gender.

Related Terms

Feminist art is closely connected to performance art, as many feminist artists used performance to address the body and gender directly. It overlaps with Dadaism in its use of provocation and institutional critique, though feminist art was more targeted and specific in its attacks. The Guerrilla Girls' use of statistics and posters connects to the broader tradition of assemblage and political graphic design. For more on feminist themes in art, read our post on women in art history.

See Feminist Art in Person

The best place to start is the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, where The Dinner Party is permanently installed. The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington is the only major museum in the world dedicated exclusively to art by women. The Tate in London holds significant feminist works, including pieces by Barbara Kruger and Susan Hiller. The Getty Research Institute's 2025-2026 Guerrilla Girls exhibition provides a comprehensive look at the collective's 40-year history.

If you want to trace feminist art from its origins to its current influence, start at the Brooklyn Museum for The Dinner Party, then visit the National Museum of Women in the Arts for the broader collection, and check the Getty Research Institute for the Guerrilla Girls archive. You will see how a movement that began with women questioning their absence from museums succeeded in changing what museums show. For more on the broader context, read our entries on performance art and Dadaism, or explore our post on women in art history.