A Time of One's Own: Histories of Feminism in Contemporary Art

by Catherine Grant

Overview

In A Time of One’s Own Catherine Grant examines how contemporary feminist artists are turning to broad histories of feminism ranging from political organizing and artworks from the 1970s to queer art and activism in the 1990s. Exploring artworks from 2002 to 2017 by artists including Sharon Hayes, Mary Kelly, Allyson Mitchell, Deirdre Logue, Lubaina Himid, Pauline Boudry, and Renate Lorenz, Grant maps a revival of feminism that takes up the creative and political implications of forging feminist communities across time and space. Grant characterizes these artists’ engagement with feminism as a fannish, autodidactic, and collective form of learning from history. This fandom of feminism allows artists to build relationships with previous feminist ideas, artworks, and communities that reject a generational model and embrace aspects of feminism that might be seen as embarrassing, queer, or anachronistic. Accounting for the growing interest in feminist art, politics, and ideas across generations, Grant demonstrates that for many contemporary feminist artists, the present moment can only be understood through an embodied engagement with history in which feminist pasts are reinhabited and reimagined.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478023470
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	08/29/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	232
File size:	35 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Catherine Grant is a Reader at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and coeditor of Fandom as Methodology and Creative Writing and Art History.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. Anachronizing Feminism  1
1. Fans of Feminism  21
2. Killjoy’s Kastle in London  47
3. A Time of One’s Own  67
4. A Feminist Chorus  87
5. Conversations and Constellations  109
Conclusion. Rooms of Our Own  133
Notes  151
Bibliography  179
Index  205

What People are Saying About This

Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art - Maria Elena Buszek

“Catherine Grant’s writing about feminist artists’ need to acknowledge their own history in the midst of both connection and disconnection, kinship and gatekeeping is exciting. Grant’s focus on contemporary feminist art across disjointed, intimate, and generative ‘moments of finding’ across time and space represents a new and necessary contribution to feminist art history. There’s nothing like this book in contemporary art scholarship.”

Professor Dorothy Price

“This is such a necessary account of how disrupted temporal encounters with feminism in, of and through the archives of contemporary art, can trouble received institutional histories of feminism in the present. The range of material covered is various, surprising, messy, and compelling. Catherine Grant skillfully weaves the threads that lead us to a time of our own in a compelling account of feminism, desire, and freedom in contemporary art.”

Dorothy Price

“This is such a necessary account of how disrupted temporal encounters with feminism in, of, and through the archives of contemporary art can trouble received institutional histories of feminism in the present. The range of material covered is various, surprising, messy, and compelling. Catherine Grant skillfully weaves the threads that lead us to a time of our own in a compelling account of feminism, desire, and freedom in contemporary art.”

Editorial Reviews

"Grant’s evocative writing delineates the affective contours of collective art participation, and she vividly transports the reader with her on various expeditions – to an outdoor group performance in a wintry Trafalgar Square, to cacophonous choral readings of feminist texts or sitting alone on the last quiet days of a gallery exhibition. One of the true pleasures of the volume is its deep attentiveness to the textures, materials and experience of works of art, interwoven with the author’s compelling account of how cultural encounters strengthened her feminist consciousness."
 

-- Victoria Horne Burlington Contemporary

"Grant’s writing opens avenues for imagining possible feminist pasts, presents, and futures."

-- Julia Alting Trigger

“An original, associative and compelling account of archival fever and fandom in feminist practice … An exemplar for the ways we can, and should, learn together.”

-- Susannah Thompson Art History

"The undoubted importance of Grant’s book lies in the flexibility and breadth of the new set of terms and conceptual frameworks she applies to contemporary feminist art history. . . . The author’s transparent subjectivity and embrace of complexity offer up an authentically feminist work of scholarship predicated on her expansion of a familiar precept on her expansion of a familiar precept: 'The personal is the artistic is the professional is the political' (54)."
-- Jennifer S. Griffiths Woman's Art Journal

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