Login
Not a CAA member?
Read about the benefits.
September 25, 2007
Lisa Gabrielle Mark, ed. WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution Exh. cat. Los Angeles and Cambridge, MA: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in association with MIT Press, 2007. 512 pp.; 475 color ills. Cloth $59.95 (9780914357995)

Exhibition schedule: Museum of Contemporary Art, Geffen Contemporary, Los Angeles, March 4–July 16, 2007; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, September 21–December 16, 2007; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York, February–June 2008; and Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia, October 4, 2008–January 18, 2009

 
CrossRef DOI: 10.3202/caa.reviews.2007.87

Large
Magdalena Abakanowicz. Abakan Red (1969). Sisal and mixed media. 157 1/2 x 157 1/2 x 137 13/16 in. Courtesy of the National Museum in Wroclaw. Photo courtesy of Magdalena Abakanowicz.

Sign In or become a member to see the full review

WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution is an international survey of artworks featuring radical subject matter, experimental processes, and aesthetic activism from the women’s movement. This exhibition is one of the first major retrospectives of women’s artwork from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. It also includes performance documents, interdisciplinary projects, and journals that reflect the many different political responses that gender discrimination provoked in the seventies. Since that decade, we have come to call this social revolution “feminism.” And like the social movement itself, this extensive collection of “early feminist art” reflects the complex set of issues and identities, alliances and factions, as well as the critique of inclusion and exclusion that continues to haunt this public inquiry and debate. What the women’s movement asked the public to question are collective ideas about the social conditions and conditionings of “women” that create and maintain their minority status in contemporary societies. “Feminism at-large” is thus a contested and complex grouping of ideologies and activism. With its signature proclamation, “the personal is political,” the women’s movement asked us to acknowledge the complexities of our lives with a critical rigor that blurred the boundaries between private and public life. Although this...