Greek American Feminist Artists

Greek American women have been celebrated in their communities as mothers, wives, teachers, and caretakers. This historiographic focus on home, church, and school endorses a patriarchal confinement in which female agency has been permitted to operate and ignores the extraordinary contribution that Greek American women have made in shaping the public sphere of art throughout the twentieth century. New research on a selection of pioneering artists who have not received proper attention places their work and lives in the context of their respective diaspora communities and their complex interactions with multiple colliding worlds. Cleo Damianakes flourished in the 1920s, and her classical figurative designs were popularized through her book covers. Ethel and Jenne Magafan came of age as social realists in the murals of the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. During the emergence of the feminist movement in the 1960s, sculptor Lynda Benglis and painter Mary Grigoriadis pioneered two radically different strategies of critique. Finally, performance artist Diamanda Galás brought her voice to the conceptual breakdown of genres in the 1980s and 1990s. Situating these Greek American women artists in the context of their Anglo Greek sisters who preceded them and of expatriate Greek artists who joined them during the Cold War prompts a reexamination of the Greek American experience. Rather than submitting to roles defined by tradition and patriarchy, the six women considered here used their Greek American voices to critique, revolutionize, and ultimately reshape the visual arts in the twentieth century

Agency (philosophy · Context (archaeology · Diaspora · Expatriate · Greek Literature · Painting · Public sphere · The arts · Electrical and Electromagnetic Research · Geochemistry and Geologic Mapping · Geological Modeling and Analysis