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 collaboration as a key factor 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 endeavors 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 from the Renaissance to the 1990s 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, Elizabeth Hamilton, Lisa Farrington, and Amy Tobin.

This book is dedicated to the prominent feminist art historians Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, in admiration for their inspiring and influential collaborative publications on feminism and women in the visual arts.

Foreword
Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard

Introduction
On Feminist Alliances in the Visual Arts
Jennifer S. Griffiths and Andrea Pearson

Chapter 1
Sisters in Art: Female Sodality in Early Modern Bologna
Babette Bohn

Chapter 2
Female Networks and Collaboration: Spiritual Philanthropy, Convents, and Art Patronage in Seventeenth-Century Rome
Marilyn Dunn

Chapter 3
A Female Maecenas: Vittoria della Rovere, Feminist Friendship, Collaboration, and the Arts in Baroque Florence
Adelina Modesti

Chapter 4
The Banana Garden Poetry Club and Women’s Artistic Exchanges: Writing about Paintings and Friendships in Seventeenth-Century China
Lara C. W. Blanchard

Chapter 5
Illustrating Nature in the Dutch Seventeenth Century: The Collective Power of a Female Community
Catherine Powell-Warren

Chapter 6
Representations of Female Friendship: Vigée Le Brun’s Portrait of Mrs. Chinnery (1803)
Mary D. Sheriff

Chapter 7
Brought into Friendship: Women, Social Networks, and Amitié in Some Portraits by Adélaïde Labille-Guiard and Gabrielle Capet
Melissa Hyde

Chapter 8
‘My Life Has Been Devoted to Friendship’: The Danish Painter Bertha Wegmann and the Feminist Reinvention of the Friendship Image
Carina Rech

Chapter 9
Mary Cassatt and Louisine Havemeymer’s Friendship: A Personal, Professional, and Political Alliance
Ruth Iskin

Chapter 10
An American Dantista and Her Friends
Jacqueline Marie Musacchio

Chapter 11
ringl + pit, from Their House to Bauhaus: Collaborative Partnership, Modernist Photography, and Queer Visual Forms
Elizabeth Otto

Chapter 12
Lesbian Collaboration as Subterfuge in the Works of Marcel Moore and Claude Cahun
Julie Cole

Chapter 13
The Force of Futurist Friendship: Růžena Zátková, Natalia Goncharova, and Benedetta
Jennifer S. Griffiths

Chapter 14
We Shall Overcome: Women, Art, and Anti-Fascist Networks in Buenos Aires
Georgina G. Gluzman

Chapter 15
A Friendship Written in the Stars: The Artistic Constellation of Alma Thomas and Delilah Pierce
Elizabeth Carmel Hamilton

Chapter 16
Black Feminist Art: Negotiating Networks and Identities
Lisa Farrington

Chapter 17
Heresies’ Heresies: Collaboration and Dispute in a Feminist Publication on Art and Politics
Amy Tobin

List of Illustrations