February 15, 112th College Art Association (CAA) Annual Conference, Chicago. Panel chair.
Countering the tendency to present women artists as overlooked figures in (art) history, this CAA panel considered women’s lives and work as symptomatic for artistic subjectivities formed under Communism.
The panel offered a focused look at a number of women artist active in Eastern Europe since the immediate aftermath of WWII and through the period of the Communist rule in the region. Individual case studies thematized the artists’ intersectional identities: as women, as migrants, as Holocaust survivors, as Communist subjects, as artmakers and exhibition-makers, as cohabitants and lovers.
Positioning the women’s biographies and their formative life experiences as central to the understanding of the collective identity of a certain generation, the papers discussed the relationship between personal and collective memory; issues of self-historicization, self-expression, and self-effacement; effects of changing citizenship, migrations, and displacement; and the dynamics of desire among heteronormative standards.
Dr. Agata Justyna Pietrasik, Humboldt University, Berlin
Herstories of World War II: Artistic Practices of Three Female Artists in Poland
Joanna Szupinska, University of California, Los Angeles
Matriarchy in the Countryside: On Gender in Zofia Rydet’s “Sociological Record”
Dr. Marta Zboralska, University of Oxford
The Woman Artist as Polygamist: On Mewa Łunkiewicz-Rogoyska
Dr. Zanna Gilbert, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles
Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt’s Ambiguous Authorship
Magdalena Moskalewicz 