#femmage

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM 🎨 love, ur local art mom 🩵

disclaimers and more information under the cut ✂️

Femmage, also know as feminist collage is any artwork done by women by assembling objects, as by collage, photomontage, etc. It was defined by Miriam Schapiro and Melissa Meyer as an activity “practiced by women using traditional women's techniques to achieve their art—sewing, piecing, hooking, cutting, appliquéing. Meyer and Schapiro, claimed women/femmes to be the inventors of collage, after it was claimed to created by Picasso or Braque. In design studies it is also debate around why craft is not seen as design, some stating the reasons are sexist/misogynistic. “Femmage” work can be traced back to precolonial Africa and continued in maroon communities post colonization. Some same say maroon communities in Suriname have no weaving tradition, the women have since the nineteenth century, turned store-bought cloth into colorfully deco- rated capes, loincloths, scarves, waist-kerchiefs, neckerchiefs, wrap-skirts, baby bonnets, men’s caps, adolescent girls’ pubic aprons, and men’s dance aprons, as well as hammock sheets, hunting sack covers, and draw-string bags for small items such as shotgun cartridges. Cloth is raised in shrines to the ancestors, flown as banners on funeral canoes, offered as gifts, and used as decoration on coffin”

1:Saamaka Maroon shoulder cape, sewn early-20th century by Peepina (Suriname). Collection of Richard and Sally Price. Photo by Antonia Graeber.

2: Cape owned by future Saamaka Headcaptain Faansisonu (ca. 1905–1989)

Richard & Sally Price Collection,

Schomburg Center for Research in

Black Culture, New York

3: Reverse appliqué, early 1990s Musée des Cultures Guyanaises.

4: Chapter 5 New Lives for Ndyuka Women: “Everything’s Changed but the Men”, date and photographer unknown

5: St.-Laurent-du-Maroni 2013. From left to right: 1,2, and 7 are embroidered, 3 and 6 are painted, 4 and 5 are appliqué’d.

Photo byCécile Duro

6: Cross-stitch embroidery

Steven Alfaisi Facebook ca. 2015

7: source unknown

8: source unknown

Rhonda Urdang

Dreamscape with Leonora Carrington (Mexico City, 1954), Detail, Femmage | w/ hand-cut found paper, NY Times, 38x28x1, (C) 2020 | All rights reserved

RHONDA URDANG (b. NE) is an interdisciplinary artist who has largely been inspired by the intersectional feminist and peace movements. She has had a varied and interesting career; she has worked as a type setter, museum gallery attendant, apprentice dot etcher, and journeyman color separation artist on high-fashion catalogs in the graphic arts industry in Omaha and Phoenix. Since leaving academia, the patriarchy, and pseudoscience behind (some things are folktales or misbelief), her ingenuity has flourished. Her visionary artwork responds to historical and world events, when painting and the female artist are still being diminished, silenced, marginalized, and erased. Human, civil, and worker's rights have been important social issues for her early on. Since founding Flagstaff Feminist Art Studio in mid-summer 2014, she has worked primarily in multiple disciplines including femmage, assemblage, book art, mixed media collage, digital manipulation, painting, experimental film, and satire. She gains visual pleasure from unraveling the feminine mystique while peeling away layers of buried eidetic memory in her innovative art practice. Source & more: www.rhondaurdang.com/about

“A HEART I SEND THEE SQUIRE BALDWINE

REJECT IT NOT, I DO IMPLORE THEE

A WARM RECEPTION MAY IT MEET

MY NAME A SECRET I MUST KEEP

-OLD MAID”

“ The Original Femmagists:

saved, collected and recycled materials

made work with a woman-life context

often made subversive art

worked for an audience of intimates

celebrated private or public events in their work

combined image and text

used silhouetted forms

used narrative with recognizable images

created patterns with abstract geometric and floral forms

used photographs and printed matter

Miriam Schapiro. Again Sixteen Windows, 1973,

“We feel that several criteria determine whether a work can be called femmage. Not all of them appear in a single object. However, the presence of at least half of them should allow the work to be appreciated as femmage. 

1. It is a work by a woman. 2. The activities of saving and collecting are important ingredients. 3. Scraps are essential to the process and are recycled in the work. 4. The theme has a woman-life context. 5. The work has elements of covert imagery. 6. The theme of the work addresses itself to an audience of intimates. 7. It celebrates a private or public event. 8. A diarist's point of view is reflected in the work. 9. There is drawing and/or handwriting sewn in the work. 10. It contains silhouetted images which are fixed on other material. 11. Recognizable images appear in narrative sequence. 12. Abstract forms create a pattern. 13. The work contains photographs or other printed matter. 14. The work has a functional as well as an aesthetic life.”

Waste Not, Want Not: An Inquiry into What Women Saved and Assembled - Femmage, Miriam Schapiro and Melissa Meyer