Not For Sale: Feminism and Art in the USA (USA, 1998) 90 min.
Written and directed by Laura Cottingham; music by Yoko Ono; edited by Sally Sasso and Leslie Singer. Produced by Hawkeye Productions.
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Miriam Schapiro Berthe Morisot and Me 1975
Not For Sale:
Feminism and Art in the USA (USA,
1998) 90 min.
Written and directed by Laura Cottingham; music by
Yoko Ono; edited by Sally Sasso and Leslie Singer.
Produced by Hawkeye Productions.
After a one-month preview run at Apex Art in New York and a rough-cut screening in Boston at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University, Not For Sale: Feminism and Art in the USA premiered this May at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It is on view this September in Paris at Air de Paris and will be on tour in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and the UK later this fall.
This piece represents the most recent work by New York's preeminent feminist art critic and international curator Laura Cottingham.
Featuring over 100 artists, in all media, but especially video and performance art, collaboration pieces and feminist installations, this video also includes live footage of activist protests, artists' consciousness-raising groups, panel discussions, and other documents from the Women's Liberation Movement in the United States. Each artist and piece is identified for the viewer who may wish to pursue further research on the period or artwork. Cottingham's extensive archival research has unearthed many images and video footage unavailable in any other form, much of it drawn from the personal archives of artists active in the American Feminist Art Movement during the 70s. Over 40 artists have contributed images and footage that will be completely new to even the most sophisticated viewer.
Not For Sale allows the viewer adequate time to experience time-based media, to hear the tone of discussions and differences of opinion, to investigate the diversity of backgrounds, aesthetics and goals of the participants. The viewer is invited to work out the meaning of 70s artistic feminism along with the participants in the movement.
Edited by Sally Sasso and by award-winning San Francisco filmmaker Leslie Singer, Not For Sale is a serious and enduring contribution to the feminist movement and to the history of twentieth-century artmaking. This video-essay constitutes a tribute to the tremendous energy and output of the women artists and feminist members of the art world during the 70s, to their failed experiments and frustrations, as well as to their successes during a time of tremendous political and cultural upheaval whose implications are far from resolved.
An important archival record of the intersection of cultural/political/art activity, Not For Sale is appropriate for use in college-level courses on contemporary art, the history of women artists or women's studies, performance art, documentary film, American cultural studies, gender studies, political art, and many other topics. It is eminently appropriate for collection by any museum archive concerned with visual and performance work during this period. For public audiences, this work also addresses many broader contemporary cultural issues, giving voice both to the feminist experiences of the 70s and to the concerns of women everywhere at the end of the twentieth century.
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