Gender and art

Anita Steckel, Just Waiting for the Bus, Photo-montage, 1969–70

"In the 1960s and 1970s, Anita Steckel fought for the public acceptance of explicitly sexual art made by women, as part of the broader feminist art movement that was pushing for a revolution in the gender dynamics that continued to stifle women artists. Steckel’s photo-montages provocatively revamped existing imagery, often adding nudity and references to sexuality in order to vividly convey timely social or political messages.

Selections from Steckel’s archive are currently on view in NMWA’s Betty Boyd Dettre Library and Research Center. Papers, photographs, and art illustrate her boundary-pushing art and activism."

Equal Exposure: Anita Steckel’s Fight Against Censorship

National Museum of Women in the Arts, until May 09 2014

See more at: http://nmwa.org/learn/library-archives/library-exhibitions#sthash.zfJaG7ox.dpuf

The Suzanne Geiss Company presents a selection of Anita Steckel’s works from her Giant Woman  (1970-1973) and New York Landscape (1970-1980) series.

Steckel’s large-scale New York Landscape collaged paintings fuse imagery inspired by the human, art historical, and urban bodies. Supine female figures, erect phalluses, dollar bills, the Mona Lisa, and other massive cultural symbols are inserted into the skyline. They sit on skyscrapers, make love, even battle in a humorous take on the city’s fraught, psychosexual sense of identity.

Anita Steckel at the Suzanne Gleiss Company until December 13, 2013.