ABSTRACT
An important difference between art produced by earlier women artists and by those who have been active since the 1970s is that, in recent years, many women artists have been engaged in a deliberate dialogue with the Western art-historical tradition. Despite their widely differing goals and means of attaining them, most of these artists have sought to redress, through their art, fissures and lacunae in the Western canon – particularly with regard to women’s positioning within it. While many contemporary women artists have been influenced by the feminist movement and have identified themselves as “feminists”, their work has assumed diverse forms and has encompassed a variety of different strategies to achieve so-called feminist goals. In fact, in speaking of developments from this period, it is more accurate to refer to “feminisms” in the plural, rather than to a monolithic “feminist” agenda.
