Customer Reviews

Seeing Through the Seventies: Essays on Feminism and Art (Routledge Harwood)

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Laura Cottingham (b.1958), is an openly lesbian cultural critic who tackles vested interests including those of feminist art history. She represents a generation of younger commentators who grew up watching feminism change the world in which they lived. Seeing Through The Seventies: Essays on Feminism and Art contains nine essays on topics as varied as (heterosexual) critic Lucy Lippard, the construction of lesbian history, art exhibits like "Bad Girls" and "The Dinner Party," and the L.A. women's art movement of the 1970s. Cottingham uses her lesbian perspective as a tool with which to question assumptions. My only quarrel is that it does not have an index, a distressing omission in a book as useful as this one.

This is an outstanding book by an excellent author who knows her subject matter well. She is the pre-eminent feminist art critic in the United States and perhaps in the world. She is also an excellent writer and an ardent feminist who has utilized her profligate education at the University of Chicago to illuminate for us all the trends of contemporary art as well as historicize the femininization of modern art as yet uncatalogued. Not bad for a country girl from Kentucky.--AJ Kyriazis