The body as manifesto: When 1970s feminist art made taboos bleed

The 1970s didn’t just see the birth of artworks; they witnessed bodies in rebellion, hands that refused to embroider meekly, voices that screamed where they had been taught to whisper. The feminist art of that decade wasn’t a school, nor even a unified movement. It was an aesthetic insurrection, a way of taking up brushes—or scissors, or cameras—to write a history from which women had been systematically erased. And if today, standing before The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago, we remain struck by the power of those vulva-shaped plates, it’s because these artists dared to do what no one had dared before: turn their own bodies, their own blood, their own humiliations into weapons of massive subversion.

01When museums became battlegrounds

Imagine a world where women artists were so rare in permanent collections that New York’s MoMA could organize an exhibition in 1971 titled Twenty-Two Realists without including a single woman. Where gallery owners laughed, saying women couldn’t paint large formats because "their arms weren’t strong enough." Where an artist like Lee Krasner had to sign her canvases with just "L.K." to avoid buyers rejecting them on principle. That world was the 1960s—and it was against this world that the feminists of the 1970s declared war.

Their first target? The institutions themselves. In 1970, a group of women artists in New York founded the Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), a name that sounded like a call to arms. Their first action was as simple as it was radical: they stormed the Whitney Museum with signs proclaiming, "5% of exhibited artists are women, but 85% of nudes are female." The message was clear: if museums wanted women’s bodies, they would get them—but not the ones they expected. That same year, in Los Angeles, Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro created the Feminist Art Program at CalArts, a program where female students learned to make art from their personal experiences, a heresy in an academic world that still worshipped masculine objectivity.

But perhaps it all truly began in Atlantic City in 1968. That day, a group of feminists disrupted the Miss America pageant by crowning a sheep and tossing bras, high heels, and beauty products into a "freedom trash can." The widely publicized action marked a turning point: for the first time, the general public discovered that women could laugh at their own chains. In artists’ studios, that laughter became a weapon. They began to subvert symbols of femininity—sewing, housework, makeup—turning them into instruments of revolt. As artist Faith Wilding put it: "We no longer wanted to be men’s muses. We wanted to be our own goddesses."

02Blood on the canvas: when the intimate became political

There is something deeply unsettling about the photographs of Menstruation Bathroom, an installation created in 1972 by Judy Chicago and her students. In a pristine bathroom, blood-stained sanitary pads were arranged like offerings—some hung on the wall like paintings, others placed on the bathtub’s edge. Beside them, a trash can overflowed with used tampons. The work, presented as part of the Womanhouse exhibition—a whole house transformed into a feminist art piece—shocked visitors. Yet it wasn’t the blood that disturbed the most. It was the absence of shame.

For centuries, art had depicted the female body as an object of desire or motherhood, but never in its rawest biological reality. The feminist artists of the 1970s shattered this taboo with a violence that today seems almost naive in its radicalism. In 1971, Japanese artist Shigeko Kubota staged a performance titled Vagina Painting: naked, she used a brush attached to her crotch to draw red lines on a canvas laid on the floor. The gesture, both grotesque and poetic, encapsulated the movement’s entire anger and irony: if men could paint with their penises (as Salvador Dalí had claimed), why couldn’t women do the same with their vaginas?

But perhaps it was Hannah Wilke who pushed audacity furthest with her series S.O.S. Starification Object Series (1974–1982). In these photographic self-portraits, Wilke posed like a 1950s pin-up, but with one key difference: her body was dotted with small sculptures made of chewed gum, shaped like vulvas. These artificial "scars" turned her body into a map of female pain—the wounds of abortion, domestic violence, harassment. When a critic accused her of "indulging in narcissism," Wilke simply replied: "If I did the same with a male body, people would call it heroic performance. With a female body, they call it narcissism."

What made these works so powerful was their categorical refusal of metaphor. Where traditional art used symbols (an apple for sin, a mirror for vanity), the feminists of the 1970s showed things as they were. Blood wasn’t an allegory; it was blood. Scars weren’t metaphors; they were real marks. And that’s perhaps why their art continues to haunt us today: because it leaves us no escape, no way to look away.

03The vulva as masterpiece: The Dinner Party and the scandal of beauty

You have to imagine Judy Chicago in 1974, bent over a triangular table nearly fifteen meters long, surrounded by an army of women painting porcelain plates, embroidering tablecloths, and engraving names into ceramic tiles. For five years, what would become The Dinner Party mobilized over four hundred volunteers across the United States. The project was both a banquet and a tomb, a celebration and an act of vengeance. Each plate represented a famous woman—from the primordial goddess to Virginia Woolf, Sappho to Emily Dickinson—and was designed as a stylized vulva. The message was clear: if history had forgotten these women, their bodies could not be erased.

When the work was finally exhibited in 1979, it caused an earthquake. Conservative critics howled "pornography," radical feminists accused Chicago of "biologism," and museums refused to host it. The Smithsonian called it "too controversial," and it wasn’t until 2007 that it found a permanent home at the Brooklyn Museum. Yet despite the controversies, The Dinner Party became one of the most viewed works in the history of feminist art. Why? Because it dared to do what no one had dared before: transform a symbol of female domesticity—the dinner table—into a monument to the glory of forgotten women.

What fascinated (and horrified) in this work was its very beauty. The porcelain plates, with their floral motifs and gilding, were breathtakingly elegant. The embroidered tablecloths resembled medieval tapestries. And that’s where Chicago’s genius lay: she had taken materials traditionally associated with "decorative femininity"—ceramics, sewing, embroidery—and turned them into instruments of power. As she wrote in her notebooks: "I wanted to create a work so beautiful that people couldn’t deny it, even if they hated its message."

Today, standing before The Dinner Party, we’re struck by the tension between the delicacy of the materials and the violence of the statement. Each plate is both an homage and an accusation. Frida Kahlo’s, for example, is an explosion of vivid colors that seems to scream the artist’s pain. Sojourner Truth’s, an anti-slavery Black activist, is the only one without a vulva—a deliberate choice to highlight the racism of white feminists at the time. And then there’s the "heritage floor," those 999 names of women engraved in white tiles, like so many ghosts history had tried to erase.

04The forgotten women of history: when feminism forgot Black women and lesbians

There’s a poignant scene in the archives of the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles, the beating heart of the feminist art movement in the 1970s. In 1979, a group of women gathered to organize The Great American Lesbian Show, one of the first exhibitions entirely dedicated to lesbian art. Among them was Harmony Hammond, an artist who worked with fabrics and recycled materials to create abstract works evoking lesbian domestic spaces. Yet despite the exhibition’s boldness, no major institution took an interest. Worse: in the decades that followed, The Great American Lesbian Show was almost entirely erased from art history.

This is just one example of a painful paradox: the feminist art movement of the 1970s, which claimed to be revolutionary, often reproduced the same exclusions it fought against. Black women, lesbians, sex workers, and working-class women were frequently sidelined, if not outright ignored. As artist Faith Ringgold pointed out in a 1972 interview: "White feminists talk about liberation, but they don’t see that for a Black woman, liberation means first not being raped by her boss or beaten by her husband. Art comes after."

Yet despite these blind spots, some artists managed to make their voices heard. Adrian Piper, with her conceptual performances, explored the intersections of race, gender, and identity. In Catalysis III (1970), she walked the streets of New York with a sign on her back reading "Wet Paint," forcing passersby to confront their own reactions to a Black woman in public space. Howardena Pindell, meanwhile, used unconventional materials like beads and paper fragments to create abstract works that spoke of memory and trauma. Her installation Free, White and 21 (1980), in which she filmed herself recounting experiences of racism while disguised as a white woman, remains one of the most striking works on the invisibility of Black women in the feminist movement.

But perhaps it was artist Betye Saar who best captured this tension between inclusion and exclusion. In 1972, she created The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, a work that subverted the racist "mammy" stereotype by putting a rifle in her hands. Saar, who described herself as a "Black feminist before the term existed," used art as a weapon against stereotypes. Yet when she presented her work in feminist exhibitions, she often faced incomprehension. As she later recounted: "Some white feminists told me, ‘Why are you talking about race? We’re all women, aren’t we?’ But for me, being a Black woman was a double oppression. You couldn’t ignore that."

05The body as archive: when art becomes a weapon against forgetting

There’s something deeply unsettling about Hannah Wilke’s late-life photographs. In 1992, as she battled cancer, she began a series titled Intra-Venus, documenting her body’s transformation under chemotherapy. The images are both heartbreakingly beautiful and unbearably violent: Wilke, naked, her head shaved, her breasts marked by scars, her belly swollen from treatment. Yet despite the illness, she maintained the same defiant posture as in her 1970s self-portraits. As if, even facing death, she refused to be reduced to the status of victim.

This idea of the body as archive—a place where both personal and collective history are inscribed—was central to 1970s feminist art. For these artists, the body wasn’t just a subject; it was material, a medium, a weapon. Carolee Schneemann understood this as early as 1964 with Meat Joy, a performance in which naked bodies covered in paint rolled in raw meat, fish, and dead chickens. The spectacle, both sensual and repulsive, was a way of saying: "This is what it’s like to be a woman’s body in a world that either idealizes or devours you."

But perhaps it was Ana Mendieta who pushed this idea to its extreme with her Siluetas series (1973–1980). In these performances, Mendieta used her own body to create silhouettes in earth, sand, or mud, photographing them before they disappeared, carried away by wind or tide. These images, both poetic and political, spoke of the fragility of the female body, but also its resilience. As she wrote: "I am an extension of nature, and nature is an extension of me."

Yet despite the power of these works, many were forgotten after their creators’ deaths. It wasn’t until the 2000s that art historians like Amelia Jones and Griselda Pollock began to rehabilitate them. And that’s perhaps the greatest paradox of 1970s feminist art: the artists who had spent their lives fighting erasure were, in turn, erased by history. As if the art world, after trembling under their blows, had finally closed its doors.

06The legacy that still bleeds: why their art continues to haunt us

Today, when you enter the Brooklyn Museum’s room dedicated to The Dinner Party, you’re struck by the silence. Visitors approach the plates in whispers, as if afraid to wake something. Some smile, others have tears in their eyes. Many seem uncomfortable, as if they’ve entered a sacred space whose codes they don’t understand. And that’s perhaps the true power of 1970s feminist art: it doesn’t just make us think. It unsettles us. It forces us to look at what we’d rather ignore.

Yet despite its impact, this art remains largely unknown to the general public. How many people know that The Dinner Party was rejected by over twenty museums before finding refuge at the Brooklyn Museum? How many know Harmony Hammond’s name, whose Floorpieces—abstract fabric works—anticipated contemporary textile art by decades? How many have heard of The Great American Lesbian Show, that pioneering exhibition almost entirely erased from history?

The problem is that 1970s feminist art was never truly "digested" by the art world. It was tolerated, sometimes celebrated, but rarely integrated into the canon. As art historian Linda Nochlin pointed out in a famous essay: "The women artists of the 1970s were treated as guests in art history, never as full inhabitants." And that’s perhaps why their legacy continues to haunt us. Because it reminds us that the fight for equality is never over.

Today, as the #MeToo movement has brought issues of harassment and consent back to the forefront, 1970s feminist art appears prophetic. Carolee Schneemann’s performances, Hannah Wilke’s photographs, Judy Chicago’s installations—all these works seem to say: "See? We warned you." And yet, despite this foresight, despite this radicalism, the struggle continues.

Perhaps that’s the greatest lesson from these artists: art doesn’t change the world overnight. It bleeds, it screams, it resists—and sometimes, decades later, its scars become visible. Like Hannah Wilke’s little vulva-shaped gum sculptures, stuck to her body like so many open wounds, 1970s feminist art reminds us that some pains never fully disappear. They inscribe themselves in collective memory, waiting for their moment to resurface.

And that moment, perhaps, has come.