Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance

Modern and contemporary women’s artistic production of autobiography frequently occurs at the interfaces of image and text. The many permutations of words and images in all their modes of production–photograph, pose, invocation, written narrative, sculpture, dance, diatribe–create countless possibilities of expression, and this volume charts some of the ways in which women artists are seizing these possibilities.

Editors Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have been at the vanguard of the study of women’s self-representation, and here have collected leading critics’ and scholars’ thoughts on artistic fusions of the visual and autobiographical. Marianne Hirsch, Linda Hutcheon, Linda Kauffman, Nellie McKay, Marjorie Perloff, Lee Quinby, and the other contributors offer new insights into the work of such artists as Laurie Anderson, Judy Chicago, Frida Kahlo, Orlan, and Cindy Sherman. From a painter’s diary to a performance artist’s ritualized enactments of kitchen domesticity, the many narratives of the self arising from these artists’ negotiations of the visual and textual prove to be goldmines for analysis.

Art historians, artists, critics, literary scholars in women’s studies, and anyone interested in the forms and implications of depicting the self will enjoy this richly illustrated collection.