30 Iconic Feminist Works By Women Artists

Last March, we presented 15 iconic works of feminist art stretching from the first wave of feminism to the intersectional movement of today. But that roster could only scratch the surface of a potent artistic point of view. Here we add another 15 artworks that powerfully advance the feminist argument. - Edmonia Lewis, The Death of Cleopatra, 1876 African American and Native American sculptor Edmonia Lewis (1844–1907) was working at a time when the popular style of Neoclassicism favored classical, Biblical, and literary themes. Cleopatra, the legendary queen of Egypt from 51–30 BCE, was often depicted contemplating suicide. Lewis, however, took this subject and sculpted the moment after Cleopatra’s intentional death by snakebite in marble. She sits on a throne in majestic repose and regalia, her left hand drooping over the side of the chair, her head tilted to the side. Her right hand still holds the asp that killed her. The nearly three-ton sculpture was Lewis’s most ambitious work, and with it, she portrayed Cleopatra as a master of her own fate—something the artist aimed to become herself. Throughout her life, Lewis obscured facts related to her childhood and carefully crafted her biography in the way she wanted it to be known. But her work stood for itself and by the end of the 19th century, Lewis was the only Black woman who had participated in, and been recognized by, the American artistic mainstream. It should be noted that although Lewis’s work was not explicitly feminist, she and her contemporaries believed in women’s rights and benefited from the first wave of feminism that occurred in the 1840s. At this time, women gained access to higher education at newly founded women’s colleges like Vassar, and newly coed colleges and universities, such as the University of Michigan and Oberlin College, which Lewis attended. - Mary Cassatt, The Reader, 1877 American painter and printmaker Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) depicted the “New Woman”—the label associated with 19th-century feminism—from the woman’s perspective. Unlike other Impressionists of the time, who often focused on street scenes and landscapes, Cassatt painted images of women in social and private situations, with a particular emphasis on the intimate bonds between mothers and children. In The Reader, a woman lounges in a white armchair reading a large book, a leisure activity that may well not have been possible before the turn of the century. (Prior to the 1800s, only some girls were educated at home or in “dame schools,” informal schools run by women; only in the 1900s did public schools expand and were girls allowed, albeit often with restrictions, to attend elementary and high schools.) As a successful, highly trained artist who never married, Cassatt herself also personified the New Woman. She was an outspoken advocate for women’s equality, campaigning with her friends for equal travel scholarships for students in the 1860s and the right to vote in the 1910s. - Alice Pike Barney, Medusa, 1892, and Lucifer, 1902 Born into a family of patrons of the arts, Alice Pike Barney (1857–1931) spent a fateful day in 1882 at a beach in New York with her sister and Oscar Wilde; her conversations with Wilde shifted her perspective from collector to maker of art. Five years later, despite her husband’s disapproval, she went to Paris and studied painting with Carolus-Duran, benefiting from the additional educational opportunities that were becoming available to women throughout the late 19th century. Though art made by women was still considered inferior to works by men, Barney persisted, embracing her role as a “New Woman”—the label associated with 19th-century feminism—and often painting powerful portraits of her two daughters. Two such portraits, Medusa (Laura Dreyfus Barney) and Lucifer (Natalie Clifford Barney), depict the daughters as the titular figures; rather than showing the women as soft and serene, as was so often done at the time, here they are transformed into commanding, vindictive, exaggerated monsters.Works such as these reject the stereotypical gender norms ascribed to women for centuries, instead favoring eloquent representations of a woman’s breadth of emotion and true capabilities. - Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, In Memory of Mary Turner as a Silent Protest Against Mob Violence, 1919 A key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (1877–1968) was known for her explorations of the Black American experience, often with a focus on female figures. Her sculpture In Memory of Mary Turner as a Silent Protest Against Mob Violence stands as an enduring testament to the acts of brutality committed against Black people in America, particularly women, at the time. Rendered in painted plaster, the work shows a woman looking down at an infant cradled in her arms, her legs engulfed in flames. Fuller made the sculpture in response to the extremely brutal lynching of Mary Turner and her unborn baby. Turner’s husband had been lynched on May 18, 1918, and when she spoke out publicly against his murder, a mob captured her, strung her by her feet to a tree, doused her with gasoline and oil, and set her on fire. Fuller’s sculpture honors Turner’s courage for standing up to her husband’s killers. It is also one of the first works of art created by a Black American that specifically addresses the brutality of mob lynchings. - Georgia O’Keeffe, Jimson Weed, 1936 American painter Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) had a notoriously fraught relationship with feminism. While praised by her contemporaries for paintings commonly interpreted as alluding to female genitalia, O’Keeffe refuted these interpretations. She also refused to join the feminist art movement or any “all-women” projects. Yet she ardently stood up for female artists of the time and is cited by many as paving the way for the feminist art movement of the 1960s and ’70s. The oil-on-linen painting Jimson Weed shows four pinwheel-shaped blossoms of the poisonous plant commonly known as jimson weed, or devil’s trumpet, surrounded by green leaves and a swirling abstract blue background. Originally commissioned by cosmetics executive Elizabeth Arden, the painting is the largest floral composition the artist ever made. And when the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum—the first art museum in the US dedicated to a female artist—auctioned one of O’Keeffe’s older but similar works, Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 (1932), in 2014, it became the highest-priced artwork by a female artist in history, fetching $44.4 million, more than tripling the previous record. - Loïs Mailou Jones, Self Portrait, 1940 Having traveled extensively throughout Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean, Loïs Mailou Jones (1905–1998) created an expansive body of work in various styles, yet her output was always rooted in her African origins and American ancestry. Her casein-on-board Self Portrait of 1940 shows her worldly influences as deeply intertwined with how she perceived herself—and wished to be perceived by others. Gazing directly at the viewer and seated behind a canvas, a strong-looking woman wears a red button-up shirt beneath a blue blazer, her hair cropped short. Two African sculptures stand in the background, the artist’s way of connecting her identity to the continent of her ancestors. Some viewers have linked what looks like a bowl of apples behind her to Paul Cézanne’s Les pommes vertes (1872–73), calling its inclusion a reference to the formative year Jones spent in France in 1937. Though often associated with the Harlem Renaissance, Jones, with this self-portrait, positions herself simply as an independent artist of her time. - Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, 1965 One of the earliest works of the Feminist art movement, the participatory work Cut Piece was first performed by Fluxus artist Yoko Ono (b. 1933) at the Yamaichi Concert Hall in Kyoto in 1965. Following a set of instructions that she had written, which she called the piece’s “event score,” Ono sat down on stage, placed a pair of scissors in front of her, and invited the audience to approach her one-by-one and cut off pieces of her clothing, which they could then take away with them. The performance is open to wide interpretation, and has been understood to address themes ranging from materialism to gender to class, memory, and cultural identity. Ono herself has cited Buddhist stories, specifically the story of Jataka, or the Hungry Tigress, as an inspiration for Cut Piece and the ideas of ultimate giving and surrender. Many have also seen the performance as the representation of the body as a site of potential violence, where the audience is the male aggressor and Ono is the female victim. In this reading, Ono’s body represents all female bodies subjected to the scrutiny and violence of the male gaze. Although Cut Piece is now widely regarded as an iconic proto-feminist work of performance art, it should be noted that when asked about its feminist readings, Ono said she “didn’t have any notion of feminism” when creating it. - Elizabeth Catlett, Political Prisoner, 1971 Inspired by the wrongful arrest and subsequent acquittal of human rights activist Angela Davis, this wood sculpture Political Prisoner by Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012) shows a woman nearly six feet tall with her hands cuffed behind her back—one open, the other closed in a fist—gazing toward the sky. Rendered in cedar, her torso is painted in three blocks of color: red, black, and green, representing the Pan-African and Black liberation movement flags. Catlett, the first Black woman to receive an MFA at the University of Iowa, was known for focusing in her work on her own life as an African American woman. She emphasized that although Political Prisoner was inspired by a specific incident, the figure represents all political prisoners worldwide. According to the artist, the primary purpose of her work is to convey social messages rather than pure aesthetics—and Political Prisoner embodies this statement. - Faith Ringgold, For the Women’s House, 1971 In 1971, artist, educator, author, and activist Faith Ringgold (1930–2024) wanted to use the funds she had received from a Creative Artists Public Service Program grant to contribute to meaningful social change. Her idea: to paint a mural for the Women’s House of Detention, a women’s prison in Manhattan that was notorious for poor conditions but was also highly visible; women inside would talk to people through the barred windows, making it a symbol of women’s incarceration. To develop the mural, Ringgold interviewed incarcerated women, asking them what they dreamed their lives might be like upon their release. Before the work’s completion, however, the Women’s House of Detention was closed, and City officials redirected it to Rikers Island. Named by Ringold in homage to the Women’s House, the mural was unveiled at the Correctional Institution for Women on Rikers Island in January 1972 and became a monument to a resilient female future. Each quadrant of the mural depicts women of different ages in jobs rarely available to them at the time. One is a doctor, another a basketball player for the New York Knicks, a Black woman is president of the United States, and a white woman is a bus driver. Ringgold painted the mural to illustrate the end of what one inmate called “the long road” out of prison, but in an artist’s statement, she also made clear that the work’s purpose was to “broaden women’s image of themselves by showing women in roles that have not traditionally been theirs . . . and to show women’s universality.” - Mary Beth Edelson, Some Living American Women Artists/Last Supper, 1972 In this collage referencing Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, Mary Beth Edelson (1933–2021) covered the faces of Jesus and his disciples with those of female contemporaries, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Lynda Benglis, Yoko Ono, and Elaine de Kooning. Framing the primary image are additional photographs of women artists including Faith Ringgold, Agnes Martin, Yayoi Kusama, and Alice Neel. This border “included every photograph of a woman artist that I could find, with most of the 82 photographs coming directly from the artists themselves,” Edelson wrote in an artist statement. According to Edelson, the collage was intended to “identify and commemorate women artists, who were getting little recognition at the time, by presenting them as the grand subject—while spoofing the patriarchy for cutting women out of positions of power and authority.” Aside from O’Keeffe in the place of Jesus, all other women are randomly placed. In a gesture of solidarity, no one was put in the traitorous role of Judas. The collage was soon reproduced and distributed as a poster, and copies were sent to every woman pictured. The posters were also given to women’s centers and conferences, and reproduced in early feminist underground publications. O’Keeffe purportedly loved to give it to guests at her New Mexico studio: “She was amused and delighted with it,” Edelson wrote. - Betye Saar, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972 Set within a shadow-box frame, the assemblage The Liberation of Aunt Jemima by Betye Saar (b. 1926) is centered on a figurine that looks like Aunt Jemima, a racist archetype of an enslaved Black Mammy and the face of the eponymous American pancake mix and syrup brand until 2021. In Saar’s version, Aunt Jemima holds a broom in one hand and a rifle in the other. Across the background, her face is repeatedly plastered like a Warholian placard. A postcard in the foreground shows a mammy holding a white child, “another way Black women were exploited during slavery,” Saar once wrote. This was the first of many explicitly political works the artist made following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. “I used the derogatory image to empower the Black woman by making her a revolutionary, like she was rebelling against her past enslavement,” Saar wrote. Here, the representation of Aunt Jemima is not only calling out an offensive stereotype rooted in America’s deep-seated history of racism but also acting as a literal call to arms: During a lecture in 2007, Angela Davis credited the assemblage for starting the Black women’s movement. - Womanhouse, 1972 A groundbreaking installation and performance art project, Womanhouse opened in Los Angeles in 1972 as part of the first Feminist Art Program, originally established by Judy Chicago at California State University, Fresno, and later expanded in collaboration with Miriam Schapiro at CalArts. The Feminist Art Program was supposed to occupy a new building, but at the start of the school year in 1971, the building was not yet ready. Faced with a lack of studio space, Chicago, Schapiro, and their students embarked on renovating an abandoned Victorian mansion in Hollywood previously marked for demolition, with the ambition of highlighting the ideological and symbolic conflation of women and houses. After thoroughly cleaning, painting, sanding floors, replacing windows, and installing lights throughout the house’s 17 rooms, the artists transformed the domestic setting into an imaginative space that showed, exaggerated, and subverted women’s conventional social roles. Chicago painted a bathroom stark white, covered a shelf in gauze, and stuffed a trash bin until it overflowed with bloodied pads and tampons (Menstruation Bathroom). Sandra Orgel ironed identical sheets time and again (Ironing). Karen LeCocq and Nancy Youdelman created a performance entitled Lea’s Room in which the titular character sat in a pink bedroom applying makeup and removing it in an endless cycle, illustrating the pain of aging and the desperate process of trying to restore one’s beauty. When Womanhouse opened, only women were allowed to enter on the first day, but over its monthlong exhibition, it welcomed more than 10,000 visitors. Over the course of the project, “the age-old female activity of homemaking was taken to fantasy proportions. Womanhouse became the repository of the daydreams women have as they wash, bake, cook, sew, clean and iron their lives away,” Chicago and Schapiro wrote in the introductory essay to the Womanhouse catalog. The artists of Womanhouse were: Beth Bachenheimer, Sherry Brody, Judy Chicago, Susan Frazier, Camille Grey, Paula Harper, Vicky Hodgetts, Kathy Huberland, Judy Huddleston, Janice Johnson, Karen LeCocq, Janice Lester, Paula Longendyke, Ann Mills, Carol Edison Mitchell, Robin Mitchell, Sandra Orgel, Jan Oxenberg, Christine (Chris) Rush, Marsha Salisbury, Miriam Schapiro, Robin Schiff, Mira Schor, Robin Weltsch, Wanda Westcoast, Faith Wilding, Shawnee Wollenmann, and Nancy Youdelman. - Miriam Schapiro, Explode, 1972 Miram Schapiro (1923–2025) was a pioneer of the Feminist Art movement as well as the Pattern and Decoration movement. One of her best-known bodies of work combined various shapes, patterns, and textures into dynamic, intricate collages, which she called “femmages.” Femmage, Schapiro once said, is “a word invented . . . to include traditional women’s techniques to achieve their art: sewing, piecing, hooking, cutting, appliquéing, cooking, and the like—activities also engaged in by men but assigned in history to women.” In the femmage Explode, vividly colored and patterned fabric swatches, strips of lace, and embroidery detonate against a bright red background with a nucleus of white and yellow. Recalling traditionally feminine crafts like quilting and sewing, Schapiro’s work began the process of repositioning such acts of creation within the realm of fine art. “I wanted to validate the traditional activities of women, to connect myself to the unknown women artists who had made quilts, who had done the invisible ‘women’s work’ of civilization,” the artist wrote in 1977. “I wanted to acknowledge them, to honor them.” - Hannah Wilke, S.O.S. Starification Object Series (Curlers), 1974 One of the most progressive feminist artists of her generation, Hannah Wilke (1940–1993) was ahead of her time when she realized her trailblazing S.O.S Starification Object Series. Conceived in 1974, the installation S.O.S. Starification Object Series, An Adult Game of Mastication debuted on January 1, 1975 in the exhibition “Artists Make Toys” at the Clocktower, PS 1, New York. The work debuted as a public performance the same year at the Gerard Piltzer Gallery, Paris. Wilke gave attendees pieces of chewing gum, which they were asked to chew and then return to her. Topless, the artist then transformed the saliva-soaked wads into vulva-shaped sculptures and stuck them to her torso. Interested in how the ephemeral could be made permanent, she hired photographer Les Wollam to create a series of black-and-white photographs for which she covered her body once more with vulva-shaped wads of gum and assumed seductive pinup-style poses. At the time, other feminist artists and critics called the work exhibitionist. Yet with it, Wilke paved the way for women artists to challenge the male gaze by controlling the way their bodies were seen and portrayed. Today historians have read the shaped gum to speak to both sexual fetishes and ghastly scars representing the power—and stigma—of the female sex, while the artist herself has said the gum symbolized women’s second-class status and their disposability. “I chose gum because it’s the perfect metaphor for the American woman,” Wilke said. “Chew her up, get what you want out of her, throw her out, and pop in a new piece.” - Ana Mendieta, Body Tracks, 1974 In her art, Cuban-born American artist Ana Mendieta (1948–1985) explored themes of exile, the search for origin, and a return to the landscape. She incorporated blood or bloodlike red pigment into her performances and media works only between 1972 and 1975; the material had many layers of meaning for the artist, including references to Catholicism. In the film Body Tracks, Mendieta stands facing a white wall, with her hands extended upward in a V. She slowly drags her hands and blood-soaked sleeves toward each other down the wall, creating a uterus- or treelike shape in blood. As she reaches the base of the wall, she stands and walks off camera. Mendieta’s actions remain visible even when her body is no longer there, the smeared blood evoking notions of both presence and absence. - Lynda Benglis, Artforum Advertisement, 1974 On pages 4 and 5 of the November 1974 issue of Artforum, readers were shocked by a provocative two-page spread. The lefthand page was all black with only the artist’s name, gallery, and copyrights in small white letters. The black bled over onto the opposite page before giving way to a striking photograph of a naked woman, her hair cropped short, wearing white sunglasses, and holding a gigantic rubber dildo between her thighs. This spread—which caused controversy and even led to two staff members leaving the magazine—is now known as Lynda Benglis’s Artforum Advertisement (it was given this official name in 2019). “I was still thinking about gender stereotypes and I just wanted to make an image that can never be one thing: not one gender, not one form of sexuality or desire,” the artist (b. 1941) said when reflecting on the work in 2022. Although Benglis supports many feminist ideas, she has never identified herself as a feminist and refers to herself instead as a humanist. Yet with this advertisement, she jarringly upended readers’ expectations of what might be seen in an art magazine and also, and perhaps more important, challenged the notions of gender, power, and self-representation. - Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1974–79 Perhaps the best-known piece of feminist art, Judy Chicago’s installation The Dinner Party comprises a massive triangular banquet table with 39 place settings representing mythical and historically significant women from prehistory to early Greek societies to the Roman Empire to early Christianity to the American Revolution and suffragism. The settings all have unique embroidered runners, gold chalices, utensils, and painted porcelain plates with sculptural motifs based on vulvar and butterfly forms adapted to styles that reflect each woman’s legacy. A white tile floor under the table bears the names of an additional 999 significant female figures written in gold. The installation displays a series of heritage banners and panels that expand on the stories of the 1,038 women represented, ranging from the Primordial Goddess and Ishtar to Saint Bridget and Trotula to Sacajawea, Sojourner Truth, Emily Dickinson, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Today, the piece stands as a monument to women’s contributions to the world, and it is the centerpiece of the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. “By now it’s been seen by probably 2.5 or 3 million people,” Chicago (b. 1939) said in 2019. “It has [been] taught all over the world, [and] it taught me the power of art.” - Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975 In this video performance, conceptual artist Martha Rosler (b. 1943) acts out housewifely frustrations by parodying popular cooking demonstrations of the 1960s. Facing the camera from behind a kitchen counter, she goes through the alphabet, assigning each letter from A to T to various tools found in the domestic space. After identifying each object, she motions with it in an often unproductive, sometimes violent, way: A is for apron, which she puts on; B is for bowl, which she holds up and pretends to stir something in; C is for chopper, which she slams into the metal bowl. She continues on, hacking and stabbing with other objects—a knife, a nutcracker, a rolling pin—her deadpan gestures appearing to express the rage elicited by the oppressive roles ascribed to women by society at the time. For letters U to Z, Rosler uses her body to create the shape of each letter. “I was concerned with … the transformation of the woman herself into a sign in a system of signs that represent a system of food production, a system of harnessed subjectivity,” Rosler has said of the work. - Carolee Schneemann, Interior Scroll, 1975 In August 1975, Carolee Schneemann (1939–2019) entered an exhibition in East Hampton carrying a bucket of mud. After undressing and wrapping herself in a sheet, she read from her book Cezanne, She Was a Great Painter. She then dropped the sheet and ritualistically painted her body with the mud, before slowly extracting a scroll from her vagina. The scroll bore an adapted excerpt from the dialogue in Schneemann’s film Kitch’s Last Meal (1973–77), which she created in response to a male peer’s accusing her of making “messy, female work.” This performance, titled Interior Scroll, has since become an icon of the feminist art movement. By pulling the scroll out from within herself, she challenged the patriarchal gaze on the female body, reclaiming it as a site of knowledge and creativity. The text itself additionally challenged male-dominated artistic movements and institutions and their routine dismissal of female counterparts. - Dara Birnbaum, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1978–79 First displayed in the front window of a hair salon in downtown New York, the now-iconic video Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman by Dara Birnbaum (1946–2025) addresses the stereotypes ascribed to women characters in popular television shows of the late 1970s. The artist specifically focused on the series Wonder Woman, splicing together clips of the main character as she transforms from her role as a secretary to the titular superheroine, soundtracked by audio of a siren (also taken from the show) and ’70s funk music. The video illuminates the overly sexualized persona of the female figure as often portrayed in mass media, whether in a supporting or heroic role. “Where am I between the two?” Birnbaum once wondered. “I’m a secretary, I’m a Wonder Woman, and there’s nothing in between. And the in-between is the reality we need to live in.” Ending with a series of fiery explosions overlaid with lyrics to “Wonder Woman Disco” (1978) by the Wonderland Disco Band, the video also suggests that with the help of emerging technologies, a new kind of woman could emerge as well—one who can re-edit her perceived position in society and reframe, counter, and even eradicate gendered stereotypes. - Judith F. Baca, Hitting the Wall: Women in the Marathon, 1984 With Los Angeles gearing up to host the 2028 Summer Olympics, the sprawling mural Hitting the Wall: Women in the Marathon by Judy Baca (b. 1946) remains as relevant today as it was in 1984. The acrylic painting, measuring 20 by 100 feet, was created in situ on the retaining wall of the Harbor Freeway’s 4th Street off-ramp in Los Angeles, where it remains today. In it, a muscular woman, arms outstretched, runs through and breaks not only the finishing tape of a race but also a stone wall. The work was contracted by the Olympic Mural Commission and specifically commemorates the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles, when the first-ever women’s marathon in Olympic history was held. Running had been, and largely continues to be, a male-dominated sport, but here the inclusion of women is about more than just integrating sports: It is about breaking countless symbolic and societal barriers that have held women back since the beginning of time. “I use that metaphor for the marathon running of women’s rights,” Baca said when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art acquired the mural and her preparatory drawings in May 2024. “It’s not achieved; we are still struggling. There have been many rollbacks on equality.” - The Guerrilla Girls, The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist, 1988 The Guerrilla Girls collective was formed in 1984 in response to the exhibition “International Survey of Painting and Sculpture” at MoMA, which included the work of 169 artists, fewer than 10 percent of whom were women. Using the tagline “the conscious of the art world,” one of their first actions was a poster campaign targeting institutions and figures in the art world whom they felt were responsible for the exclusion of women and non-white artists from mainstream exhibitions and publications. The portfolio of 30 posters, titled Guerrilla Girls Talk Back, included The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist, a text that is exactly what the title suggests. Among the 13 “advantages” it outlined are: “Working without the pressure of success,” “Not having to be in shows with men,” “Having the opportunity to choose between career and motherhood,” and “Knowing your career might pick up after you’re eighty”—the latter two of which still strike a chord today. - Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your Body Is a Battleground), 1989 In light of the Roe v. Wade decision being overturned in 2022 and abortion bans being put in place across the United States ever since, Barbara Kruger’s pioneering and poignant photographic silkscreen Untitled (Your Body Is a Battleground) has gained renewed significance. In it, Kruger (b. 1945)—who is known for addressing sexism, misogyny, and the objectification of women through her distinct use of the visual languages of advertising—presents a black-and-white close-up of a woman’s face overlaid with the phrase “Your body / is a / battleground” in white lettering against striking blocks of red. Significantly, Kruger first made the work as a flyer to distribute during the 1989 Women’s March on Washington, which was organized after a series of anti-abortion laws began to undermine Roe v. Wade. Both art and protest, the work’s catchphrase became a rallying cry that was embraced nationwide—and urgently resurrected in 2022. Today the work and its slogan continue to serve a strong purpose as women in the United States fight for their reproductive rights once again. - Sarah Lucas, Eating a Banana, 1990 In Eating a Banana, a black-and-white photographic self-portrait, Sarah Lucas (b. 1962) takes a bite of a banana as she stares directly into the camera, wearing a black leather jacket and white T-shirt, her hair short and shaggy. This photograph marks an important turn in Lucas’s practice: Rather than perceiving her masculine appearance as a disadvantage, she had begun to see it as something she could use in her art. “I suddenly could see the strength of the masculinity about it—the usefulness of it to the subject struck me at that point, and since then I’ve used that,” she said. Throughout the 1990s, Lucas continued to make self-portraits as well as her only video to date (Sausage Film, 1990); in each work, she challenges stereotypical representations of gender and sexuality. In Sausage Film, she is served first a sausage, then a banana, by a shirtless male waiter. After a chuckle upon each plate’s arrival at her table, she eats the phallic foods with a deadpan seriousness, eradicating any potential sexual connotations. In Eating a Banana, her intense gaze has the same nullifying effect on the potential eroticization of the scene. Pieces such as these laid the foundations for what Lucas remains known for today: her uncanny ability to portray defiant femininity. - Shirin Neshat, Women of Allah series, 1993–97 Shirin Neshat was born in 1957 and raised in a progressive Iran, where women’s rights were expanded. She attended Catholic school and learned both Western and Iranian histories. In 1974 she moved to the US to attend the University of California, Berkeley. During her studies, her home country underwent a radical change: In 1979 revolutionaries overthrew and abolished the Persian monarchy in favor of a conservative government headed by Ayatollah Khomeini. Women’s rights were restricted, and, among other things, it was written into law that women must wear a veil in public. In 1990 Neshat returned to Iran for the first time in 17 years, and saw a society markedly different from the one in which she grew up. Visualizing her conflicting feelings, Neshat made her groundbreaking series Women of Allah. Each black-and-white photograph shows a veiled Iranian woman holding a weapon. “These photographs became iconic portraits of willfully armed Muslim women. Yet every image, every woman’s submissive gaze, suggests a far more complex and paradoxical reality behind the surface,” Neshat wrote in an artist statement about the series. The women are caught in the duality of their post-Revolutionary roles. They are subject to restrictions, such as the mandatory wearing of the chador, while also expected to be responsible warriors for their country. Meanwhile, the artist inscribed, in calligraphic Farsi, atop any area of exposed skin in the images, excerpts from poems and other texts by female authors exploring the notions of intimacy, feminism, and sexuality. - Emily Kam Kngwarray, Anwerlarr Anganenty (Big Yam Dreaming), 1995 Australian Aboriginal artist Emily Kam Kngwarray (ca. 1910–1996) worked with batik and painting to depict her connection to the places she lived—the land, water, sky, plants, and animals—and their cultural and spiritual heritage. Central to her life and artistic practice was the concept of “Dreaming” or “Dreamtime,” specifically that of the yam. The Yam Dreaming narrative focuses on ancestral women going on spiritual quests to find and harvest yams, which are revered in desert communities of central Australia not only as a valuable source of nourishment but also as a symbol of fertility and abundance. As an elder, Kngwarray was a custodian of women’s Yam Dreaming sites, and her Dreaming was the source of her creative power. Her ambitious painting Anwerlarr Anganenty (Big Yam Dreaming), more than 26 feet wide and 9 feet tall, features a complex network of white lines rendered against a black background. The abstract canvas depicts her birthplace, Alhalker, an important Yam Dreaming site, including its underground network of branching tubers, the cracks in the ground that appear when yams ripen, and arlkeny, or ceremonial patterns and designs that Anmatyerr and Alyawarr women paint on their bodies. Though Kngwarray’s work is not explicitly feminist, her worldwide recognition has paved the way for Aboriginal works to be viewed as fine art rather than craft or artifacts of cultural heritage, and for many other Indigenous artists, especially women, to receive long-overdue attention. - Kara Walker, A Subtlety, 2014 A Subtlety—also known as The Marvelous Sugar Baby and subtitled An Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant—was a monumental, and monumentally provocative, installation developed by Kara Walker (b. 1969) for the disused Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn. At its center stood a colossal, sphinxlike figure with stereotypical “African” features and other references to the archetype of the Black mammy. Approximately 35 feet tall and 75 feet long and crafted from white sugar layered over polystyrene, the sphinx was surrounded by 15 attendants modeled after racist blackamoor figurines. Speaking directly to racial and feminist histories, the installation evoked the brutal legacy of slavery and the sugar trade, spotlighting, as suggested by the subtitle, the unpaid and overworked people whose labor sustained colonial and New World economies. The figure’s mammy iconography also addressed hypersexualized tropes of the Black female body, inviting reflection on how Black femininity has been commodified and objectified. - Wendy Red Star, “Apsáalooke Feminist” series, 2016 A member of the Apsáalooke (Crow) Tribe, Wendy Red Star (b. 1981) works across mediums to push conversations surrounding both historical and contemporary Native American ideologies and colonialist structures in new directions. Each of the four photographs in her series “Apsáalooke Feminist” shows the artist and her daughter posed on or near a couch in front of a digitally rendered, colorfully patterned background based on the designs of Pendleton blankets. The mother and daughter are in traditional elk tooth dress, representing Red Star’s Apsáalooke heritage and the tribe’s matrilineal culture. The elk tooth dress, according to Red Star, is a woman’s way to “[show] off the hunting abilities of men in her family.” With this series and the pictured symbols, the artist aims “to highlight the irony of using the term ‘feminist’ to describe the matrilineal culture of the Crow Nation.” Moreover, she challenges the idea of mainstream feminism and considers it an offspring of colonialism; within the feminist context, she advocates for a specific Apsáalooke feminism that is both “historically and culturally specific to Crow women.” “One Blue Bead,” an exhibition of Wendy Red Star’s latest body of work will be on view at Sargent’s Daughters, New York, March 6–April 18, 2026 - Simone Leigh, Brick House, 2019 Known for an expansive practice that investigates Black female subjectivity across times and places, Simone Leigh (b. 1967) won the Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice Biennale for her monumental female bust, Brick House. The 16-foot-tall sculpture, first commissioned for and installed at New York’s High Line Plinth, is part of the artist’s “Anatomy of Architecture”series, which merges architectural forms from Africa and the African diaspora with the human body. In Brick House,a woman’s torso can be read as resembling a hoop skirt, a clay house—referencing Batammariba architecture from Benin and Togo and teleuk dwellings of the Mousgoum people of Chad and Cameroon—or even the restaurant Mammy’s Cupboard in Natchez, Mississippi. The figure’s head is crowned with an Afro and four cornrow braids ending in cowrie shells, perhaps a nod to their use as currency during the African slave trade and/or Batammariba cowrie shell divination. The face has lips and a nose but no eyes, preventing any specific identification. More than revering the collective strength and perseverance of Black women throughout different eras and geographies, the sculpture became only the second public monument depicting a Black woman in the entire city of New York when it was installed on the High Line. And when the University of Pennsylvania acquired a second edition, it became the first sculpture by a Black woman to be installed on the university’s campus. - Shahzia Sikander, Witness, 2023 Shahzia Sikander’s 18-foot-tall sculpture Witness depicts a woman with twisting roots for feet and arms, and braided hair coiled to look like a ram’s horns. A lace collar around her neck references similar ones worn by the late US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Surrounding the sculpture’s small waist, rounded bust, and full hips—reminiscent of ancient fertility goddesses—is a metal frame in the shape of a hoopskirt. But rather than conceal her body, it suggests a housing that she stewards. And attached to the armature are colorful mosaic tiles spelling out havah, meaning “air” or “atmosphere” in Urdu and “Eve” in Arabic and Hebrew. The powerful sculpture, rendered in high-density foam painted gold, was first exhibited to critical acclaim in New York at Madison Square Park in 2023. When placed on view on the grounds of the University of Houston, however, it was immediately criticized by the antiabortion group Texas Right to Life, which considered it “satanic.” On July 8, 2024, during a statewide power outage caused by Hurricane Beryl, vandals beheaded the sculpture. Sikander (b. 1969) ultimately decided to leave the sculpture as it is, writing that in addition to its original purpose of “demand[ing] a reimagining of the feminine not simply as Lady Justice with her scale, but of the female as an active agency, a thinker, a participant as well as a witness to the patriarchal history of art and law,” it now also stands as “a testament to the hatred and division that permeate our society.”