Moving the Medium Forward

One of the many ephemeral materials created by the Guerrilla Girls was a photocopy of a dollar bill divided by a dotted line into one-third and two-thirds, with the caption, "Women in America earn only 2/3 of what men do. Women artists earn only 1/3 of what men do." While sexism continues to pervade the art world, female artists in two exhibitions currently on view at the MCA are challenging this boys-only sensibility with the mastery, experimentation, and innovation of their chosen medium.

Diana Thater, whose exhibition closes Sunday, is a Los Angeles–based video and installation artist, who revolutionized film and video in the 1960s and 1970s. Rather than working with the technological constraints of the media like many of her contemporaries, she pushed the mediums beyond their limits, pulling projectors out from their hiding places, playing with a limited spectrum of seven colors, and rejecting the rectilinear framework imposed by standard monitors. Thater’s works blur the lines between architecture, sculpture, and video, and her installations challenge how video can and should be experienced. Listen to her discuss the role art history played in her artistic choices in the audio excerpt on this page.

Similarly, the 10 artists featured in Riot Grrrls have rejected the masculine associations of abstract art, creating big and unapologetically bold nonrepresentational paintings of their own. Named after the feminist punk movement of the 1990s, the exhibition pairs pioneering artists who worked in the 1970s and 1980s with a younger generation of artists they influenced, continuing a conversation whose spirit is captured in this statement from the Riot Grrrls’ manifesto: "BECAUSE viewing our work as being connected to our girlfriends-politics-real lives is essential if we are gonna figure out how [what] we are doing impacts, reflects, perpetuates, or DISRUPTS the status quo."