Installation view of After Carolee at Artpace San Antonio. Photo courtesy of Artpace San Antonio.
“By the year 2000, no young woman artist will meet the determined resistance and constant undermining that I endured as a student… . She will never feel like a provisional guest at the banquet of life.” So predicted the groundbreaking feminist artist and writer Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019) in an essay from the 1970s. Schneemann began her career in New York City in the early 1960s. In those days, male painters stole her brushes and books, claiming that, as men and
real artists, they needed her materials much more than she did. The realities and challenges of women’s lives became the driving force behind Schneemann’s pioneering artwork.