Meet 12 Women Breaking New Ground in the Arts
From protest graffiti in Cairo to a floating peep show on the San Francisco Bay, these 12 women are throwing out the status quo with their boundary-pushing work.
Once upon a time, to be a woman AND an artist constituted an extraordinary, even subversive act. Think Lady Murasaki, Frida Kahlo, Cindy Sherman, Yoko Ono. While such pioneers paved the way for today’s women artists, public visibility and monetary reward in the arts still tend to lean heavily in favor of men. An ARTNews infographic looking at gender disparity in late 2015 New York postwar/contemporary auctions found that 92 percent of the lots were by men, and only 8 percent by women. “If you look at percentages by value, the situation is equally grim,” says ARTNews. “Take Christie’s, where the combined value of work by women … has hovered around 3 percent of the total sale result over the past five years.”
In another ARTNews piece about the status of women in art in 2015, Connie Butler, chief curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, said, “… [Y]ou look at all of the artists who are in that top echelon of the highest-earning artists, whether it’s in the auction world or the commercial world, and there aren’t any women… A cultural shift still has to take place.”
Swimming against these currents, women artists carry on innovating and creating. Take, for example, these 12 artists, all members of the TED Fellows community. With work as wide-ranging as protest street graffiti in Cairo, a peep show floating on San Francisco Bay, lavish portraits of Russian fairy tale archetypes, photographs documenting survivors of the Ukraine conflict and more, each reveals hidden corners of the world that would otherwise remain unseen. This innovative and courageous work asks us to engage compassionately with what would otherwise be neglected and forgotten — possibly still a subversive act.
1. Uldus Bakhtiozina, Russia — photo-based artist
Russian photo-based artist Uldus considers herself a daydreamer in love with reality. Her work, which examines stereotypes about Russian culture and takes gleeful delight in smashing them (watch her TED Talk: “Wry photos that turn stereotypes upside-down”) is full of fantasy and escapism. Yet each moment in the image happens in reality, a process Uldus calls “documenting dreams.” For her recent series Russ Land, for example, Uldus explores the magical, archetypal world of pre-Christian Russian fairy tales and folklore. Each image is intricately detailed with Uldus’s handiwork — from the set design to hand-stitched costumes to modeling to capturing the images on film. “I never use digital manipulation,” she says.
Uldus was named best fashion photographer by Italian Vogue in 2016, but Uldus says it’s still unusual to be a female fashion photographer. “The industry doesn’t trust women like it trusts men. I’m lucky because my name sounds masculine, so many magazines that approach me think I’m man — until they see me.”
2. Aparna Rao, India — artist
Aparna Rao creates charming, interactive sculptural artworks that whimsically awaken us to our own subtle unconscious and involuntary behavioral patterns and emotional responses. (Watch her TED Talk, “Art that craves your attention.”) Part of Bangalore-based art duo Pors & Rao, Rao’s work uses movement to make her art seem aware of — and respond to — human perception. “Many of the works are conceived as a kind of ‘being’ with basic behavior patterns such as shyness, fatigue and dependency, highlighting absurd and involuntary aspects of human behavior and relationships,” says Rao. “Some imply a kind of pre-conceptual way of perceiving the world, where emotions and thoughts are projected onto the things around us — as if everything were conscious.”
For example, in Pygmies, tiny figures hidden around the edge of a frame play peek-a-boo with viewers, in reaction to the ambient sounds they make. Decoy consists of a humanlike creature frantically waving for attention. And Clappers comprises 996 small figures, each one deciding to clap at will when triggered by motion. The piece plays with the ego of the viewer — who might get anything from an ovation to a half-hearted smattering of acknowledgement.
3. Kiana Hayeri, Iran — photographer
Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Kiana Hayeri examines the lives of young people who grew up with conflict. After spending several years documenting Iranian youth in Iran and abroad, she moved to Kabul in 2014 to continue her project by documenting a group she calls Afghan Millennials — born between 1980, the first year of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and 2001, which marked the beginning of the US-led military intervention. There, she found a shadowy culture of breakdancing, boxing, live music, fashion and photography. “They are a generation that has only known war, a generation that no one really knows about,” says Hayeri, “yet they show great resiliency and hope.”
Hayeri is now at work on various projects, including documenting young Syrian refugees making new lives in European cities, the recruitment of children in Afghanistan by all sides of the armed forces, and single mothers in Afghanistan, a small and culturally unrecognized sector of society.
“Life in a war-torn country as portrayed on our TV screens and newspapers is missing humanity, which enforces the idea of ‘the Other’, says Hayeri. “I hope that by showing small, humane stories, the next time someone decides to drop a bomb on a nation, they pause, remember my photographs, and step back.”
4. Jennifer Brea, USA — filmmaker
In 2010, Jennifer Brea, then a PhD student in political science, was struck down by what appeared to be a severe flu. It turned out to be the beginning of a long illness — including neurological dysfunction and extreme exhaustion — from which she has yet to recover. The medical community not only didn’t recognize her illness, it dismissed it as hysteria. Brea did her own research and discovered that there is a name for what she was experiencing: myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), a devastating, misunderstood and ignored disease affecting millions.
To call attention to the plight of those suffering from ME, Brea has made a film, Canary in a Coal Mine, to offer firsthand insight from multiple perspectives into what ME is and what it feels like to live with it. “There’s a particular kind of pain that comes with having no narrative, with not being able to see your experience reflected in the culture,” says Brea. “I’ve always been curious and I’ve always been a storyteller, but film is a new medium for me. It became my way to communicate when written language wasn’t available to me anymore because of the cognitive disabilities arising from my disease. I think it one of the most powerful tools for empathy and connection we have.
“Living with this illness has helped me to understand just why it is so important that our stories and storytellers are diverse in every way — gender, ethnicity, ability. It’s made me wonder how many other incredible and important stories are hiding in plain sight?”
5. Sarah Sandman, USA — designer
An artist who designs ways to bring people together, Sarah Sandman cares less about personal expression than about creating human connection, and “extracting a collective voice.” Her projects have included designing black hand-shaped protest signs with her South Bronx students to join the Black Lives Matter movement, Human Scrabble games where total strangers race to form words together, and Gift Cycle — in which she and her collaborator, Melissa Small, rode 75 miles a day from community to community all the way across the United States, carrying local art from one location to exchange with artists in the next community. A narrative of togetherness and unexpected acts of kindness, fun, and generosity emerged — building social capital through the sweat of altruism.
Sandman’s design studio, Public Displays of Affection, recently completed an adult coloring book for Planned Parenthood’s national conference, and with her new project Brick x Brick, she’s designing brick-patterned jumpsuits to be worn by women who will build human walls and register people to vote in swing states. “Women continue to be underrepresented in the institutional art world,” she says, “but the holistic perspective of the female narrative equips us for leading artistic movements that highlight and challenge social and environmental injustices.”
6. Anastasia Taylor-Lind, United Kingdom — photographer
When photographer Anastasia Taylor-Lind found herself in Kiev at the height of violence during Ukraine’s Independence Square protests, the documentary photographer decided to record not the fighting itself, but the human beings involved. (Watch her TED Talk: “Fighters and mourners of the Ukrainian revolution.”)She set up a makeshift photo studio with a medium format camera in an alleyway inside the barricaded square and began making portraits of the rebels — and later the women who came to mourn their deaths. Later, she returned to Ukraine to complete Welcome to Donetsk: a project in which she sent postcards of the capital of the Donbass region to strangers around the world, each card inscribed with the name of one of the thousands killed so far in the conflict. She intends to bear witness to the dead in this way until the conflict ends.
On being a female photojournalist, Taylor-Lind says: “Women make up just 15% of photojournalists, and more than half (nearly 65%) of photojournalists come from Europe and North America. The value of a photograph is part of the editorial content we collectively generate, not only as a piece of journalism but also as a historical record. As contributors to this visual diary, we must consider what stories we are telling, and who is telling them. Dare we leave the bulk of the narrative to the predominately white middle-class heterosexual man from the world’s richest countries?”
7. Constance Hockaday, USA — nautical artist
For Chilean-American queer nautical artist Constance Hockaday, open water is an undefinable space of unfettered liberty. Hockaday makes large-scale installations on urban waterfronts — which she fiercely believes should be kept public, but are often restricted by government regulation and commercial interests. On a liquid platform, she creates large floating installations, performances and social sculptures that call attention to cultural phenomena happening on land — from a floating peep show bobbing in the San Francisco Bay, highlighting the loss of spaces for the Bay Area’s queer community, to a boat hotel in Far Rockaway that the Guardian called “a New York City success story.” These projects offered temporary access points to the water that Hockaday calls “tears in the social order.”
“Shorelines are a place where many different kinds of laws and human interests collide with the uncontrollable realities of the natural world. But water upholds the idea that living beings have the right to own the space that their physical bodies occupy, and the right to a freedom of movement,” says Hockaday. “The social order of land has forgotten these basic rights.”
More recently, while working to prevent the commercialization of the publicly run, post-industrial Oakland waterfront, Hockaday has also developed a piece of work about disaster response and survival at the Headlands Center for the Arts, an abandoned military bunker overlooking the Pacific Ocean, north of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.
8. Bahia Shehab, Egypt — art historian and artist
When the Egyptian revolution began in January 2011, art historian and scholar of Arabic script Bahia Shehab found herself spray-painting the word “no” in Arabic on the streets of Cairo in protest. Having researched the word “no” throughout Islamic culture, she’d discovered that there are thousands of ways to write the word. (Watch her TED Talk, “A thousand times no.”) Shehab found characters for “no” all the way from Spain to the borders of China, adorning script on architecture, plates, textiles, pottery, books and beyond. With some of these characters, she created stencils that reflected the conflict of the time — “No to a new pharaoh,” “No to stripping the people” and so on — and sprayed them in the streets.
“I started using the ‘nos’ like ammunition,” she says. “ I took these characters out of their historic context to put them in a new context — a modern context — and gave them new life.”
Today, says Shehab, the streets of Cairo are no longer a safe place to protest, but she continues work on the “Thousand Times No” project in other cities of the world, while in parallel spraying poetry by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Shehab has sprayed in Freiburg, New Orleans, Vancouver, New York, Madison, Tokyo and Istanbul so far.
9. Iyeoka, Nigeria/USA — musician
In the Yoruba tradition, Nigerian-American poet, musician, songwriter and artist Iyeoka’s name means “mother who speaks the word” — reflecting her dedication to exploring and playing with the musicality and meaning of languages. “I am fascinated by the subtle nuances of the spoken language and our current access to translation and meaning,” she says. “My name encourages me to share the story of Esan people in the great diaspora.“
Iyeoka began her musical career by founding the group The Rock by Funk Tribe—interweaving her poetry with jazz, blues, funk and gospel—and releasing three albums in three years. Now on world tour to promote her fourth album, GOLD, she sets out to create awareness and encourage the preservation of the Esan language — an endangered native dialect of Edo State, Nigeria — through storytelling, proverbs and music.
10. Laura Boushnak, Kuwait — photographer
Kuwaiti-born Palestinian photographer Laura Boushnak turns her lens on women in the Arab world — in Yemen, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Palestine — who are motivated to improve their lives through education, confronting formidable cultural and social barriers to do so. (Watch her TED Talks: “For these women, reading is a daring act” and “The deadly legacy of cluster bombs.”) In her project “I Read, I Write,” Boushnak addresses such topics as female illiteracy as well as educational reforms and political activism among university students.
Sometimes, Boushnak asks women to write their thoughts on prints of their portraits, sharing their voices as well as images with the world: “I sought education in order to be independent and not count on men for everything,” writes Aisha, a teacher from Yemen. And, from a Tunisian activist: “Question your convictions, be who you want to be, not who they want you to be; don’t accept their enslavement, for your mother birthed you free.”
11. Daniela Candillari, Slovenia /USA — composer
Slovenian conductor, pianist and composer Daniela Candillari believes in telling stories through music. “I believe that there is music in every motion, gesture, and sound of the spoken word,” she says. “I also believe that everyone carries music with them — they may just not be aware of it. Our imagination can show itself in so many different forms, and music offers the strongest and the widest palette of expression we can experience.”
Candillari has worked extensively with preeminent artists, ensembles and opera houses throughout Europe and the United States, and also writes her own music, quite often drawing inspiration from books. Her composition Extremely Close, which she premiered earlier this year, was inspired by the Jonathan Safran Foer novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. At the moment, she’s working on a cycle of twelve preludes for piano, inspired by Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll. She’s also at work on a piece featuring percussion, bass trombone and piano, which she hopes to turn into music for a ballet.
“In classical music, there is a strong sense that we are losing our audiences. One of my wishes is to show that is actually not the case,” says Candillari. “We need to encourage audiences to become part of our performance—one of my visions for Gravity Shift, the New York–based chamber orchestra I founded, and for which I serve as artistic director. Finding a new way to present old works is a crucial way to ignite my own imagination and that of the audience, and to keep searching for the next possibility, in music and in life.”
12. Yana Buhrer Tavanier, Bulgaria—human rights activist
Yana Buhrer Tavanier is integrating her dedication to social justice with her passion for the arts. Working in collaboration with artist, computer scientist and TED Fellow Julie Freeman, Buhrer Tavanier co-founded Fine Acts, an organization that matches activists and artists from around the world, commissioning them to collaborate on projects that amplify human rights advocacy. In designer Safwat Saleem and sculptor Alica Eggert’s installation “The Future,” for instance, 206 light bulbs spelling out the word FUTURE represent the world’s sovereign states. Bulbs representing states at peace are lit, while bulbs representing states in conflict are unlit — illuminating the overall state of peace or conflict around the world.
The Fine Acts Collective currently features more than 30 TED Fellows, and is growing to include other prominent artists and advocates. “I believe it is time for an empathy revolution. A global movement calling for respect, equality, dignity, and justice, with art as a catalyst,” says Buhrer Tavanier. “Many human rights workers today struggle to translate formidable issues into a language that makes people care, and compels them to act. Mere facts and statistics don’t do the trick, neither do reports or statements on their own. Art, however, can create a visceral response. Art can make the distant feel personal.”
The TED Fellows program hand-picks young innovators from around the world to raise international awareness of their work and maximize their impact.
