As Brooklyn Museum participates in the #5WomenArtists campaign started by The National Museum of Wom

As Brooklyn Museum participates in the #5WomenArtists campaign started by The National Museum of Women in the Arts for Women’s History Month, our #BKMTeens Digital Artizens are eager to jump into the conversation.On the Digital Artizens: Teen Feminist Art Takeover page, we often feature LGBTQ-identified artists. Celebrities like Willow Smith, Laverne Cox, and Miley Cyrus are changing the conversation around sexuality, gender identities and expressions by being open about their own identities and advocating for acceptance. Contemporary LGBTQ artists also participate in this conversation by creating works of art that challenge binary understandings of gender and sexuality and affirm the gender and sexual identities of all people. Today, we highlight #5WomenArtists who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, two-spirit, gender non conforming, intersex, and/or queer. Their gender and sexual identities are part of their larger intersectional identities, and the work they create is informed by their gender identity, their cultural identities, and how their cultures conceive of gender and sexuality. Zanele Muholi’s work explores the presentation of gender identities in her home country, South Africa, including the construction of masculine identities by lesbian women and trans men, as in Sunday Francis Mdlankomo, Vosloorus, Johannesburg. Muholi grew up and works in an area in which LGBTI rights are theoretically protected by the government, but where queer bodies are not actually safe from violence. Muholi documents the lives of members of the black LGBTI community there and encourages them to do the same, for visibility and posterity. Similarly, Mary Coble’s work addresses the ways in which trans men construct their masculine identities. As she explained at a talk at the “Global Feminisms” exhibition in 2007, her performance art piece Binding Ritual, Daily Routine exposes the experience of some trans men as they seek to align society’s perception of their gender with their own gender identities. Cass Bird’s photographs often illustrate subjects who manipulate their gender expressions. For example, the photographs I Look Just Like My Daddy and I Look Just Like My Mommy show the same subject, Macaulay, using clothing, their own skin, and the text on their hats to move between masculine and feminine images.Julie Mehretu is an Ethiopian-born artist born artist who lives and works internationally, and she identifies as a lesbian. Her large-scale, many-layered, paintings draw on maps and architectural drafting. Her paintings’ controlled chaos of lines and forms refers to complex social networks and the construction of society.Mickalene Thomas’ large-scale female nudes draw on canonical works of art from Europe, but instead of seeing white women painted and objectified by white men, the viewer sees African American women painted by an African American woman who may both identify with and desire their bodies. Her works celebrate the beauty of African American female bodies using the visual language of the 1970’s.Today, think about your own gender expression. What do you do daily to express your identity? How do you think an artist might capture it?Posted by Julia Fields -- source link

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