Feminist Friendships, Collaborations, and Networks in the Visual Arts

Since the late twentieth century, a mounting body of studies has demonstrated that women contributed notably to the visual arts of nearly every culture, despite the ubiquity of patriarchal structures. The present volume looks to friendship, collaboration, and networking as key factors in women's ability to overcome those systemic obstacles in order to play decisive roles in the visual arts, whether as artists, patrons, art critics, gallerists, or interpreters in the public sphere. Until only recently, collaborations and other collective endeavours have largely been ignored by both the panoptic histories of art and the art markets, both of which are predicated on notions of individual agency and their implied prototype of idealized masculine autonomy. By means of seventeen case studies spanning roughly 1500 to 1980 and covering several continents, the essays in this volume chronicle an enduring pattern of women artists, critics, and intellectuals pursuing their goals together. In elucidating the importance of the collaborative dynamic model, especially in its feminist iteration, these essays promote a fuller understanding of the visual arts across the globe and throughout the centuries. With contributions by Babette Bohn, Marilyn Dunn, Adelina Modesti, Lara C.W. Blanchard, Catherine Powell-Warren, Mary Sheriff, Melissa Hyde, Carina Reich, Ruth Iskin, Jacqueline Marie Musacchio, Elizabeth Otto, Julie Cole, Jennifer Griffiths, Giorgina Gluzman, ElizabethHamilton, Lisa Farrington, and Amy Tobin.