Black Sheep Feminism: The Art of Sexual Politics

Dallas Contemporary presents Black Sheep Feminism: The Art of Sexual Politics, a groundbreaking exhibition that probes the work of four radical feminist artists active since the 1970s. Joan Semmel, Anita Steckel, Betty Tompkins and Cosey Fanni Tutti each fearlessly confronted sexual mores, gender norms, and the tyranny of political correctness; all faced censorship for the explicit sexual content of their work. This timely study explores key themes that are part of a broader conversation about the legacy of various feminisms in present day politics and culture. Black Sheep Feminism is the first exhibition organized at Dallas Contemporary by Alison M. Gingeras, the museum’s new adjunct curator.

Feminist art, like feminism itself, is hardly monolithic. If feminism has often been controversial, the “black sheep” feminists featured in Dallas Contemporary’s exhibit were doubly so. Steckel, Tompkins, Semmel and Tutti explored the extreme edges of feminist politics and sexualized iconography. In the process, these four ran afoul not just of mainstream culture, but also of more orthodox strains of feminism--and sometimes, even, of each other.

For instance, mainstream feminism art often avoided sexually explicit imagery, so reminiscent of the patriarchal pornography industry. Bucking this feminist trend, the black sheep feminists embraced such imagery. In 1973, Semmel joined Steckel’s “Fight Censorship” group, which declared its intention to create sexually explicit art. As Steckel said at the time, “If the erect penis is not ‘wholesome’ enough to go into museums—it should not be considered ‘wholesome’ enough to go into women.”

Meanwhile, Fanni Tuttti immersed herself directly in the UK porn business, posing for 40 magazine spreads. In her 1976 London exhibition Prostitution, she claimed the images she created as a sex worker as her own art—provoking a public outrage that reached into the chambers of the British Parliament.

Even within this sex-positive subset of feminist art, there were conceptual riffs. Semmel, for instance, disapproved of Tompkins’s monumental “Fuck Paintings”—tightly cropped scenes of heterosexual penetration culled from porn magazines—arguing that images originating in a misogynous industry could not be redeemed, even when co-opted by a feminist artist.

The contentious nature of these four artists’ work has unfairly led to their marginalization within established feminist art history. Black Sheep Feminism seeks to redress this historical slight, arguing that these four extraordinarily relevant artists are unsung matriarchal forebears who sought to push the limits of body art, political correctness, and female sexual agency. While they strayed from the established feminist flock, today they provide essential performative, discursive, and iconographic precedents for a host of contemporary art practices that explore audacious, sex-positive terrain—from Jeff Koons’ Made in Heaven to more recent pornographic paintings by John Currin.

Alison M. Gingeras is Adjunct Curator at Dallas Contemporary in Dallas, Texas. Gingeras is a curator and writer who has held curatorial positions at the Guggenheim Museum, Centre Pompidou Paris, and Palazzo Grassi.