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Why do art galleries represent fewer female than male artists? In the words of the feminist activists the Gorilla Girls, why are female artists five percent of the art in museums but nude females represent eighty-five percent of the nudes? Do black artists have additional barriers to success when compared to artists of other ethnicities? Why is there such little representation for disabled people in art, and who are the ones representing disabled people? How are queer people represented in art and why is it often non-queer people representing them (and often in very negative ways as late as the 70's)?  Identity Politics is the umbrella term for the art movement that sought to answer these questions, and tended to feature artists that come from these minorities taking pride in their identities and protesting the discrimination they faced through their art. A critique, or perhaps an addition, to this field is the idea of Intersectionality, or the idea that multiple minority identities can overlap and create additional systems of disadvantage. Many artists that contributed to this field did have several identities- the term itself was invented by a black feminist socialist group. 'Identity Politics' is a loaded term in American politics, with both right wing and left wing critics decrying it for being divisive. However, it is difficult to argue with the results of the ideas of identity politics in society; the 60's and 70's saw black people gain more equal rights through the Civil Rights acts, and LGBT activists were able to decriminalize homosexuality and gain more societal acceptance through the Gay Liberation movement. Both of these were possible through coming together as groups and protesting, sometimes violently, for these rights. It is hard to untangle art from politics with identity politics because like this video below, it asks if our politics are really as logical and objective as we like to think. In essence, Identity Politics asks what effect our identities have on our outlook and life experience, and how discrimination and oppression experienced because of minority identities can be overcome.

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Identity Politics: How All Your Identities Sway Your Vote

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Identity Politics has come about as an umbrella term to cover several new art movements that came about after the 60's, one of these being the Feminist Art Movement. The 60's saw feminists begin to analyze how art had been dominated by men and what effect that had on the art that was produced and popularized. Feminist Artists began to create art that expressed questions from a female outlook and celebrated female contributions. Many galleries refused female artists on the basis of their sex alone- new galleries and methods of distribution were produced to share their message. Women were given greater autonomy during this era- there was a strong push for the Equal Rights Amendment and many nondiscrimination protections were codified in the law. (see https://www.theartstory.org/movement/feminist-art/)

see Dinner Party by Judy Chicago for an example of feminist art and the themes it explores. This specific work features real and fictional females throughout society and represents their influence.

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The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At 560,000 square feet, the museum is New York City’s second largest in physical size and holds an art collection with roughly 1.5 million works.

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'Queer' itself was a re-appropriation of the word, which was often used as a slur before being reclaimed by activists and artists in the 70's. The late 20th Century was a tumultuous time for queer artists (and people), and much of that art either expressed frustration or dreamed of a better, more accepting world. Politically, homosexuality was decriminalized in 1963 in the United States, and would shortly thereafter be declassified as a mental disorder. The Stonewall Riot would lead to greater visibility of the queer community. However, even with these wins, there were still a multitude of problems. Many states would choose to classify 🤬 as a misdemeanor and it would take a Supreme Court case to repeal these laws in 2003. The Reagan administration was widely decried for their mishandling of the AIDS  epidemic. Queer Art would represent the continual fight for acceptance and equal protection under the law. (see https://www.theartstory.org/movement/queer-art/)

Here the Dyke Action Machine parodied posters from The Gap. It showed a world where lesbians were perceived no differently than their heterosexual counterparts.

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Set of six Xerox posters 11 x 17 inches

500-piece campaign wheatpasted in Lower Manhattan, New York City
June 1991

DAM!'s first poster project was a straight-forward effort to expose the lack of lesbian representation in American popular culture. The project highlighted the fact that for one to "exist" or be visible in mainstream media, one must belong to a recognizable consumer group. The campaign replaced the "underground" celebrities featured in the GAP ads with pictures of lesbian activists.

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Set of six Xerox posters 11 x 17 inches 500-piece campaign wheatpasted in Lower Manhattan, New York City June 1991 DAM!'s first poster project was a straight-forward effort to expose the lack of lesbian representation in American popular culture.

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Born in 1911, Romare Bearden is one of the earliest practitioners of what we consider Identity Politics in art. He was a Jack of all trades before becoming an artist. He created political cartoons in college. He participated on his university's baseball team, and would go on to play baseball semi-professionally. Eventually, he would be injured in a way that would make him rethink his athletic career and focus more on his art. As an artist, he wasn't afraid to experiment in different techniques. Expressionism, cubism, he even experimented with collages and would also gain popularity from his jazz. Bearden would receive awards for his contributions to society from the NAACP and President Jimmy Carter. He passed away in 1988 from complication of bone cancer. (see https://www.theartstory.org/artist/bearden-romare/life-and-legacy/)

Here, Bearden shows the solace and community black communities and women can draw from each other while also showing the spiritual solace Mary, the mother of Jesus, surely gained from visiting her sister Elizabeth after the crucifixion of her son.

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Romare Bearden. The Visitation. 1941 | MoMA

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Romare Bearden. The Visitation. 1941. Gouache, ink, and pencil on colored paper. 30 1/2 x 46 1/2" (77.5 x 118.1 cm). Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (by exchange). Acquired with the cooperation of the Estate of Nanette Bearden and the Romare Bearden Foundation whose mission is to preserve the legacy of the artist.

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Faith Ringgold’s Over 100 Pound Weight Loss Performance Story Quilt, 1991

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Faith Ringgold’s Over 100 Pound Weight Loss Performance Story Quilt, 1991

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Though she has worked in a variety of mediums, including painting, Faith Ringgold became especially famous for her artistic quilts. This quilt represents the plight of women, especially black women, to feel like they have to look a certain way or have a certain body type to be beautiful. She describes how she created this quilt at a time when her weight was killing her physically and spiritually and she spent her time thinking about and preparing food. Other quilts tell stories, including one that re-interprets Aunt Jemima's backstory into one of empowerment for people of color. (see https://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/27/nyregion/an-artist-traces-her-life-in-quilts.html)

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Change 3: Faith Ringgold's Over 100 Pound Weight Loss Performance Story Quilt, 1991

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Rashid Johnson is one of the more abstract artists here, dabbling in installation art and more subjective abstract art. These abstract pieces were meant to be viewed while listening to certain music and are actually large wallpapers. While looking at them, the audience is to reflect on their identity in terms of race and politics.

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The Drawing Center: Rashid Johnson: Anxious Men

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Since distinguishing himself as the youngest artist in Freestyle, the landmark 2001 exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Johnson has established himself as one of the preeminent artists of his generation. Invoking such varied themes as the black experience in America, the dialogue between abstraction and figuration, and the relationship between art and personal identity, Johnson has been discussed within the context of contemporary painting, photography, sculpture, video, installation art, and even performance. Now, with the Anxious Men, drawing enters that list.

Universally accessible and employing common visual tropes such as the monochrome and the grid, Johnson's work is also self-referential making specific allusion to his upbringing in Chicago and the Afro-centric values of his parents. In Rashid Johnson: Anxious Men, the artist creates a site-specific installation in the Drawing Room gallery. The core of the exhibition is a new series of black-soap-and-wax-on-tile portraits that Johnson calls his "anxious men." Executed by digging into a waxy surface, they enact a kind of drawing through erasure and represent the first time Johnson has worked figuratively outside of photography or film, and on such a small scale. Whereas Johnson's previous work has taken a more cerebral approach to questions of race and political identity, the drawn portraits confront the viewer with a visceral immediacy. The portraits are set within a multi-sensory environment that includes wallpaper featuring a photograph of the artist's father from the year Johnson was born, and an audio soundtrack comprised of Melvin Van Peebles's "Love, That's America," a song that originally appeared in Peebles's 1970 film Watermelon Man and that was recently pressed into service by the Occupy Wall Street movement. In this way, the exhibition creates an immersive space that implicates not only the artist but also the viewer in its interrogation of selfhood and identity.

Curated by Claire Gilman, Senior Curator.

Exhibition Materials

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The Drawing Center: Rashid Johnson: Anxious Men

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Since distinguishing himself as the youngest artist in Freestyle, the landmark 2001 exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Johnson has established himself as one of the preeminent artists of his generation.

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An interesting phenomena in Intersectionality is the idea that identities can pull one in contradictory directions. For example, I have one gay friend (and know of others) who have expressed that they feel that some in the LGBT community don't like them identifying as Mormon due to the negative and homophobic ideas they believe the church possesses . When interacting with church members, they feel that members ignore and feel uncomfortable with the queer part of their identity (and there is probably also occasional queerphobia). This is not unique to the Latter-Day Saint faith, conservative Christianity has been wrestling with these questions since the beginning of the Gay Liberation Movement, but I think this intersect of identities is particularly relevant to us right now, and we should be particularly thoughtful of the stretch between these identities.

This exhibition in Provo featured queer Latter-Day Saints who chose to embrace both their queer and their Mormon identities.

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Melinda Hannah, local artist, will be showing her portraits of LGBT Mormons at the Schack starting on December 18, 2016. (Kevin Clark / The Herald)

Earlier this year, Everett artist Melinda Hannah garnered national attention with her project "The Hero's Journey of the LGBT Mormon," a touring show of 20 large, high-quality portraits of lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender Mormons and their families from around the country.

The exhibit will be displayed Dec. 17 through Jan. 30 at the Schack Art Center, just downstairs from where Hannah lives in the Artspace Everett Lofts. It was shown in Provo, Utah, in September, and will be going to San Francisco in mid-February.

The brightly colored and light-filled paintings express love, and that's what it's all about for Hannah, who recently returned to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

"I wanted to remind people that they need to love their friends and family no matter what," Hannah said. "The portrait project is about opening people's hearts and minds."

The project began after Nov. 5, 2015, when the LDS church announced a new policy requiring church discipline, leading to ex-communication, for those in same-sex marriages. The policy also prevents children of same-sex parents from being baptized in the church until they are 18, and it requires that they renounce same-sex marriage.

For Hannah and many others, this meant that these young people had to openly disavow their gay parents to stay in the church.

After protests and promises from some church members to resign, church leaders revised the rules slightly to apply it only to children whose primary residence was with same-sex parents; so visits to same-sex parents did not prevent children from receiving blessings from the church. And the policy is not retroactive, so it doesn't apply to children already baptized.

Hannah believes the stance from church leaders resulted in a spike in deaths by suicide among Mormons, and that it was time to speak up.

"My personal relationship with Christ means that I have love, and I have felt the presence of God's love for my gay friends," she said. "LGBT Mormons are greeting the world with courage, strength and compassion, and they are building an inspirational legacy. The project gives names and faces to the stories of some of our LGBT fellows."

This isn't the first time Hannah has painted to bring attention to a cause.

In 2014, she painted portraits of women with terminal illnesses.

"I am not the best portrait artist, but I am good at revealing the tangible, spiritual, internal essence - the inner beauty and dignity found in all people," Hannah said. "I wanted to show a depth of beauty I do not think these women saw in themselves. When the body is at its weakest, people need to know their beauty is still there."

That project - "Illuminating Essence" - was the first Hannah funded with gofundme.com.

She employed a similar crowd funding campaign for "Hero's Journey."

The show has a fundraising goal of $20,000, which will pay for materials, 17 months of Hannah's work, travel to Provo and San Francisco, and the opening reception at the Schack.

"At first I only asked for $5,000 because many Mormons believe that one's gifts, even artistic, should be given for free," Hannah said. "But art should never be undervalued." The fundraiser is now at about $17,500.

Hannah believes in the healing power of art, something she has relied on since she was a kid.

Now in her 50s, the artist said that despite her LDS upbringing, she had a troubled childhood and survived by relying on her imagination and encouragement from a teacher who noted Hannah's talents working with color.

Hannah also has dealt with mental illness since her college years at Brigham Young University, where she fought an eating disorder, trying to be slim at a school where women outnumbered the men 3 to 1.

She left Utah, moved to Seattle and found a job with The Seattle Times, first as a delivery truck driver and then as an illustrator for the real estate sales department. Still she fought depression, chronic fatigue syndrome and other illnesses.

Hannah was 26 years old when she was accepted to Cornish College of the Arts. But after three years, she had an emotional breakdown. After a lengthy time away, she returned to Cornish to finish.

"When I graduated, there was a line around the block to see my final art show," she said.

Mitch Mayne, a gay Mormon from San Francisco, praised Hannah for her activism and work on "Hero's Journey" in a piece he wrote earlier this fall for the Huffington Post.

"It's her passion for healing through art that has inspired this show," he said.

If you go

"The Hero's Journey of the LGBT Mormon" by Melinda Hannah

Dec. 17 through Jan. 30, the Schack Art Center, 2921 Hoyt Ave., Everett. Open daily, except Dec. 25, 26 and Jan. 1.

More about the fundraiser is at www.gofundme.com/melindahannah.

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New Schack exhibit features portraits of LGBT Mormons | HeraldNet.com

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Melinda Hannah, local artist, will be showing her portraits of LGBT Mormons at the Schack starting on December 18, 2016. (Kevin Clark / The Herald) Earlier this year, Everett artist Melinda Hannah garnered national attention with her project "The Hero's Journey of the LGBT Mormon," a touring show of 20 large, high-quality portraits of lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender Mormons and their families from around the country.

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Bearden's best work, in my opinion, is his abstract rendering of Christ on the cross. Ponder the meaning of all the colors and what they mean. This work is noted as having humanist themes, what do you think they are? (see https://www.theartstory.org/artist/bearden-romare/artworks/)

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"Many Art Shows to Open This Week." New York Times (October 8, 1945), p. 10.

Edward Alden Jewell. "Negro Art Shown in Two Exhibits." New York Times (November 6, 1945), p. 26.

Associated Press. "He's Series Artist." Washington Post (October 28, 1945), p. B6, notes that Sam A. Lewisohn was one of the purchasers of works from Exh. New York 1945.

Jane Watson. "9000 Enter GI Arts Contest." Washington Post (June 17, 1945), p. B6.

Romare Bearden. "Rectangular Structure in My Montage Paintings." Leonardo 2 (January 1969), pp. 11-12.

Lowery S. Sims. Selected Works by Black Artists from the Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Exh. cat., Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation. [New York], 1976, unpaginated.

Calvin Tomkins. "Profiles: Romare Bearden. Putting Something Over Something Else." New Yorker 53 (November 28, 1977), p. 61, discusses "The Passion of Christ" series.

Michael Brenson. "A Collagist's Mosaic of God, Literature and His People." New York Times (January 11, 1987), p. H33.

Matthew S. Witkovsky. "Experience vs. Theory: Romare Bearden and Abstract Expressionism." Black American Literature Forum 23 (Summer 1989), pp. 259-60, discusses "The Passion of Christ" series.

Myron Schwartzman. Romare Bearden: His Life and Art. New York, 1990, pp. 136-37, ill.

Lowery S. Sims. "African American Artists and Postmodernism: Reconsidering the Careers of Wifredo Lam, Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, and Robert Colescott." African American Visual Aesthetics: A Postmodernist View. Ed. David C. Driskell. Washington, 1995, p. 104, fig. 4.2.

Lisa Mintz Messinger. "American Art: The Edith and Milton Lowenthal Collection." Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 54 (Summer 1996), p. 18.

Lisa Gail Collins in African-American Artists, 1929-1945: Prints, Drawings, and Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 2003, pp. 52-53, no. 24, ill. (color).

Lisa Mintz Messinger in African-American Artists, 1929-1945: Prints, Drawings, and Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 2003, p. 51.

Ruth Fine in The Art of Romare Bearden. Exh. cat., National Gallery of Art. Washington, D. C., 2003, pp. 14, 17-18, 255 nn. 48, 50, p. 261 n. 177, discusses "The Passion of Christ" series.

Abdul Goler in The Art of Romare Bearden. Exh. cat., National Gallery of Art. Washington, D.C., 2003, pp. 192, 194-95, 217, 268 n. 20, discusses "The Passion of Christ" series; notes that the series was exhibited in 1945 at the Galerie John Devoluy, Paris [the dates listed for the Paris exhibition in the chronology overlap with the dates of Exh. New York 1945].

Sarah Kennel in The Art of Romare Bearden. Exh. cat., National Gallery of Art. Washington, D.C., 2003, p. 142, discusses "The Passion of Christ" series.

Kymberly N. Pinder. "Deep Waters: Rebirth, Transcendence, and Abstraction in Romare Bearden's Passion of Christ." Romare Bearden, American Modernist. Ed. Ruth Fine and Jacqueline Francis. Washington, D.C., 2011, pp. 145-46, 148, 150-51, 155-58, 160-61, discusses "The Passion of Christ" series.

Pepe Karmel. "The Negro Artist's Dilemma: Bearden, Picasso, and Pop Art." Romare Bearden, American Modernist. Ed. Ruth Fine and Jacqueline Francis. Washington, D.C., 2011, p. 254, discusses "The Passion of Christ" series.

Bridget R. Cooks. "Romare Bearden: On View." Romare Bearden, American Modernist. Ed. Ruth Fine and Jacqueline Francis. Washington, D.C., 2011, pp. 215, 219 n. 22, discusses "The Passion of Christ" series.

Jacqueline Francis. "Bearden's Hands." Romare Bearden, American Modernist. Ed. Ruth Fine and Jacqueline Francis. Washington, D.C., 2011, p. 130, discusses "The Passion of Christ" series.

Henri Ghent. "Interview with Romare Bearden." The Romare Bearden Reader. Ed. Robert G. O'Meally. Durham, N.C., 2019, p. 57 [transcript of an interview conducted on June 29, 1968].

Kobena Mercer. "Romare Bearden: African American Modernism at Mid-Century." The Romare Bearden Reader. Ed. Robert G. O'Meally. Durham, N.C., 2019, p. 223, notes that "The Passion of Christ" series was shown in Exh. Washington 1945.

Calvin Tomkins. "Putting Something Over Something Else." The Romare Bearden Reader. Ed. Robert G. O'Meally. Durham, N.C., 2019, p. 40 [reprints Ref. Tomkins 1977].

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Romare Bearden | Golgotha | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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"Many Art Shows to Open This Week." New York Times (October 8, 1945), p. 10. Edward Alden Jewell. "Negro Art Shown in Two Exhibits." New York Times (November 6, 1945), p. 26. Associated Press. "He's Series Artist." Washington Post (October 28, 1945), p. B6, notes that Sam A.