Carolee Schneemann

Carolee Schneemann, a multidisciplinary artist, transformed the definition of art, especially discourse on the body, sexuality, and gender. The history of her work is characterized by research into archaic visual traditions, pleasure wrested from suppressive taboos, and the body of the artist in dynamic relationship with the social body.

Schneemann has had paintings, photographs, performance art and installation works shown at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Museum of Modern Art, NYC; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and a retrospective at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York entitled “Up To And Including Her Limits”. Film and video retrospectives were shown at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Film Theatre, London; Whitney Museum, NY; San Francisco Cinematheque; and the Anthology Film Archives, NYC.

She has taught at many institutions including New York University, California Institute of the Arts, Bard College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She was the recipient of a 1999 Art Pace International Artist Residency, San Antonio, Texas; the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (1997, 1998); 1993 Guggenheim Fellowship; Gottlieb Foundation Grant; the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts at the Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine, and the eLifetime Achievement Award, College Art Association in 2000.

Schneemann has published widely; books include Cezanne, She Was A Great Painter (1976), Early and Recent Work (1983); More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings (1979, 1997); Imaging Her Erotics, from MIT Press (2002). A selection of her letters edited by Kristine Stiles is also forthcoming.

Schneemann – Feminist Statement

Our feminism insists on remembering, on investigation, on insight and contextual analysis.

Our feminism refuses traditions of subjugation: subjugations of race, gender, sexual will, technologies, geographic exploitation, economic self-determination.

Our feminism celebrates research into the once lost and now retrieved contributions of women to every aspect of human creative history that had in past traditions been marginalized, denigrated or reattributed to male sources.

Our feminism has initiated intellectual determinations transforming ecology, ethnology, anthropology, archeology, physiology, political domination, militarism, medical history, aesthetic reductionism, neurological properties—a revivification of knowledge and imagination.

Our feminism has transformed cultural inheritance, so that the creative intentions of younger artists develop fluidly within our radical precedents.