TFAP@CAA

Since 2007, the TFAP@CAA Day of Panels have brought together exceptional groups of artists, art historians, curators, and critics for a free and open to the public day of dialogue during the annual College Art Association (CAA) Conferences. CAA has been a founding program partner of The Feminist Art Project since its inception in 2005. TFAP became an Affiliated Society of CAA in 2016. We are grateful for CAA’s generosity in providing meeting rooms, publicity, technical support, and assistance that gives greater visibility throughout the conference week to women artists, feminist concerns, and supports the mission of TFAP. Additionally, TFAP collaborates with CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts.

College Art Association 113th Annual Conference

Hilton Midtown, NYC | February 12–15, 2025

Join WCA at the CAA Conference!

TFAP@CAA 2025 Day of Panels

MAKING TROUBLE:
WOMEN, SCIENCE & ART

Saturday, February 15 | 9:00am – 4:30pm |  Concourse G

Chair: Anonda Bell, Rutgers University

Free and open to the public. RSVP requested, not required.

Art Historian Linda Nochlin stated that, “feminist art history is there to make trouble, to call into question, to ruffle feathers in the patriarchal dovecotes.” This event is dedicated to women who are troublemakers, and whose creative practice references science as a source of inspiration for writing, research, curating and art making. Through their work they question underlying assumptions about the world, how standard scientific processes and methodology which aspire to objectivity may instead be steeped in bias and discrimination, leading to flawed and inaccurate, entirely subjective data outcomes. Some have adopted science-based art making techniques, materials and concepts, to explore ideas about humanity. Women, for many years, were not able to aspire to formal careers as scientists as they were excluded from places of higher education. The same could be said of the visual arts – women were not seen in museums but they were still making art. In both cases, it was incorrectly assumed that women lacked certain physical and mental capacities, thus justifying their exclusion. This event will focus on both the physical sciences (including artificial intelligence, trans-species organ transplants, DNA, ecology and natural history) and the social sciences (including psychiatry, hysteria, and mysticism).

SCHEDULE

9:00am – 10:30am
Introductions and Keynote
Connie Tell, The Feminist Art Project, Welcome
Anonda Bell, Rutgers University, Science & Art Introduction
Anne Swartz, Savannah College of Art & Design, Unnatural Sciences
KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Suzanne Anker, School of Visual Arts

11:00am – 12:40pm
Panel #1: PEOPLE
Stephanie Dinkins, Stony Brook University
Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Independent Artist
Magdalena Dukiewicz, Independent Artist

1:30pm – 2:30pm
Panel #2: EXPERIENCE
Laura Splan, Independent Artist
Eva Lee, Independent Artist

2:45pm – 3:25pm
Panel #3: PLACE
Michele Oka Doner, Independent Artist
Natalie Waldburger, OCAD University

3:25pm – 4:30pm
CLOSING SPEAKER
Margaret Wertheim, The Institute for Figuring
Crochet Coral Reef: Crafting Against Patriarchy in Science and Art

TFAP@CAA 2025 SOCIAL MIXER

Friday, February 14 | 1:00pm – 2:00pm | Morgan Suite, 2nd floor

CAA Conference Registration Required

Join the WCA TFAP caucus during our Affiliated Society business meeting slot for a social mixer.
Connect with friends and colleagues, meet new people, and learn about TFAP!

TFAP@CAA 2025 Affiliated Society Session

GODDESS REDUX:
FEMINISM AND SPIRITUALITY IN CONTEMPORARY ART

Friday, February 14 | 4:30pm – 6:00pm | Regent, 2nd floor

Chairs: Connie Tell, The Feminist Art Project

Kathleen Wentrack, The City University of New York, Queensborough CC

CAA Conference Registration Required

In a 1988 lecture, Mary Beth Edelson stated, “Goddess was always a metaphor for me for radical change and change of consciousness and for challenging the daily experience of what is thought of as acceptable social codes while opening other realms of experience.” Edelson was indicative of 1960s and 1970s feminist artists who looked to ancient matriarchal cultures and goddess imagery as alternative symbols and mythological frameworks to challenge and undermine patriarchal systems of oppression. By the 1980s this work was denounced and labeled essentialist. The aughts began a series of survey exhibitions on feminist art which included a renewed appreciation and deeper analysis of the complexity of this work and exposed these artists to a younger generation who took the concept of the goddess and spirituality in new directions. This is evidenced in several recent exhibitions such as The Female Side of God (Frankfurt, 2020), Feminine Power: The Divine to the Demonic (London, 2022), and The Goddess, the Deity, the Cyborg (Cambridge, 2024). What is striking about this newer work is the breadth of examination of ideas of spirituality in artistic expression that includes a diversity of goddess references, transcultural goddesses, figures of power both benevolent and destructive, gender fluid deities, and transformational rituals of pleasure and healing. This panel will investigate new manifestations of goddesses and spirituality in contemporary art with a special consideration given to strategies that subvert constructs of power.

Panelists:
Roots of Resistance: The Woman-Tree, Political Artivism, and Feminist Spirituality in Ibero-American Art
Diana Angoso De Guzmán, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
This study explores the resurgence of the Woman-Tree archetype in contemporary Ibero-American art through the lens of ecofeminism, tracing its evolution from ancient symbols to modern artistic expressions. E.O. James identifies the Tree of Life as an embodiment of the Great Goddess, symbolizing fertility, regeneration, and the feminine principle across various religious traditions. This archetype reappears in the work of Ibero-American artists such as Fina Miralles, Ana Mendieta, Cecilia Vicuña, and more recently, Lucía Loren.
Focusing on performances from the 1970s, Miralles’s “Dona Arbre,” Mendieta’s “Tree of Life,” and Vicuña’s works, which integrate indigenous knowledge and ecological wisdom, illustrate how these artists use the Woman-Tree theme to challenge patriarchal structures and advocate for ecological and feminist ideals. Vicuña’s art, deeply informed by indigenous cosmologies, addresses themes of nature and spiritual interconnectedness, reinforcing the archetype’s role in contemporary feminist and environmental discourse. Their works are contextualized within the political landscapes of Franco’s Spain and Pinochet’s Chile.
Additionally, the research highlights the growing body of Spanish-language ecofeminist scholarship, featuring contributions from Alicia Puleo, Angélica Velasco Sesma, and Marisol de la Cadena. Their work advocates for a more nuanced understanding of ecofeminism in the Global South, offering perspectives beyond those prevalent in Anglo-American contexts. This study aims to provide a comprehensive and inclusive view of how feminist spirituality and goddess imagery are reinterpreted in contemporary art.

Gaia’s Return: Earth-Goddesses in Contemporary Indigenous Eco-Activism
Jordan Troeller, Leuphana University Lüneburg
This paper considers the invocation of the Earth-Goddess Gaia in recent artworks addressing indigenous appeals to ecological justice. The most ancient of Goddess figures, Gaia has taken multiple guises in contemporary art, from the costumes of rainforest animals worn by anti-Bolsonaro protesters in Rivane Neuenschwander and Mariana Lacerda’s Eu sou uma arara [I am a Macaw] (2022) to the alliance between land rights and gender in the figure of Lakota activist Tokato Iron Eyes, who features in Andrea Bowers’s video installation My Name Means Future (2020) addressing indigenous resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline. In such works, figures of the Earth Goddess are marshalled as part of a highly politicized appeal that yokes futurity and ancient wisdom—as spelled out in one of the protest banners created by Neuenschwander and Lacerda which reads “The Future is Ancestral.” I examine the horizon of meaning invoked by Gaia in such interventions by tracing a feminist reception of the figure Gaia, which emerged in the 1980s, but which has been marginalized in mainstream feminist movements. Particularly appealing for climate activists today, I propose, is how the Gaia figure supersedes the anthropomorphic in her multiple alliances with animal and plant life (Buffy Johnson’s Lady of the Beasts: The Goddess and Her Sacred Animals, published in 1988, is here emblematic). In doing so, such a hybrid figure allows for emergent cosmologies that combine both secular critique and ancient knowledge with the potential to dismantle capitalist and patriarchal exploitation.

Contemporary Goddesses in Irish art: the work of Jesse Jones and Breda Lynch
Fionna Barber, Manchester Metropolitan University
This paper looks at the work of two artists, Jesse Jones and Breda Lynch, that in very different ways evidences the significance of Goddess-related themes and imagery in contemporary Irish feminist practice. Goddesses have survived in Irish culture through their incorporation into Christianity as saints, and a continued recognition of the locations associated with earlier female deities such as holy wells. Drawing on 1980s precedents of the use of Goddess imagery as an imaginative feminist resistance to political crisis (unlike elsewhere), Jones’ multimedia installation Mirror Martyr Mirror Moon (Ikon Gallery Birmingham 2024) invokes both the triple Goddess and water rituals in an engagement with feminist art history. This work’s encounter with Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self Portrait as St. Catherine of Alexandria (c.1615-1617) powerfully undoes the silencing of women through the institutional power of church and state. Similar to Jones, Lynch’s recent work is also contextualised within the political struggles around female embodiment culminating in the repeal of the Eighth Amendment outlawing abortion in 2018. Yet the difference in their practice also works against reductive readings of Goddess imagery. In Lynch’s archival work goddess figures (eg Goat Woman 2016) interweave with other invocations of the pagan frequently as indicative of a queer eroticism. Her playful appropriation of ephemeral sources also distances the production of lesbian identities from the archetypal womyn-centred imagery in the remaking of fluid bodies and desires in a significantly changed Ireland and beyond.

African Matrilineal Models of Empowerment in the Art of Tabita Rezaire and Josèfa Ntjam
Monique Kerman, Western Washington University
French artists Tabita Rezaire and Josèfa Ntjam create futuristic visions from ancient African history and mythology, drawing upon African matrilineal ontologies to resist patriarchal paradigms. Combining these with cutting-edge science and technology, their works challenge male supremacist ideology both culturally and biologically. Rezaire was born in 1989 to a French-Guianese father and Danish mother. Working in digital media online as well as in installation, her early works expressed rage and suffering due to colonial trauma and patriarchy. Eventually, she began envisioning herself as a spiritual healer, addressing the harms of colonialism, racism, and sexism within both body and spirit through her artistic practice. She takes inspiration from African matrilineal beliefs as well as gynecological metaphors of the womb and pregnancy. Ntjam was born in Metz in 1992 to a French-German mother and Cameroonian father. Created from found imagery combined with sound and storytelling, Ntjam’s works debunk European narratives of race and history using ancient African cultural models and her own family archives as well as science fiction. Her creative strategies range from the reclamation of figures like Nefertiti or Mami Wata to the introduction of the avatar “Persona,” who endeavors to reclaim her lost African origins by searching for them in cyberspace. Both Rezaire and Ntjam visually plumb ocean depths for the primordial source of life, literally conceptualizing its divine power as “gender-fluid,” in opposition to toxic masculinity. They honor the potentiality of such power to restore our relationship with the natural world, facing climate crisis and ongoing environmental degradation.