Congratulations to Dr. Christine Fillipone (Ph.D. 2009) on her forthcoming book, Science, Technology, and Utopias: Women Artists and Cold War America (Routledge Press).
About the book:
"This innovative book offers the first focused examination of women artists’ response to the preeminent status of science and technology during the Cold War, a period that saw the rise of “big science”, the space race and cybernetics as well as the birth of a feminist awareness of women’s historical exclusion from these domains of knowledge and power. Women artists responded critically, while simultaneously redeploying the products of "Technological Society" into works that promoted ideals of progress and alternative concepts of human community."
Upcoming Speaking Events:
October 20, 3:15pm
"The Whole Earth: Open Systems and Eco-Art", International Cybernetics, Southeastern College Art Association Conference (SECAC), Roanoke, VA
November 2, 5:00pm
"Science, Technology, Utopias: Women Artists and Cold War America", Millersville University of Pennsylvania, Millersville, PA
February 17, 10:30am
Organicism, Technology, and Open Systems in Feminist Art (panel co-chair), College Art Association (CAA), New York, NY
Book Signing Party, February 2017 at CAA, New York (details TBA)
Reviews
"This important book provides a fresh and alternative narrative to the increasingly well documented use of systems by artists and art historians from the 1960s onwards. With impressive research and perspicacious analysis Filippone gives an account of how women artists used the aesthetic and political potential of open systems to challenge social hierarchies. It makes a valuable and necessary contribution not only to art historical debates but also those in histories of technology and gender studies." --Francis Halsall, Director, MA Programs, Art in the Contemporary World, National College of Art and Design, Dublin and author of Systems of Art
"Building on feminist philosophies and herstories, Filippone explores the vexed relationship that radical women in the art world of the ‘60s (Schneemann, Rosler) bore to the powerful phalanx of art and technology dominating the epoch. She marks the later 1970s turn from New Left criticality to an embrace of cybernetics and systems (Denes, Aycock) to show the complexity of a gendered Cold War that could not eradicate the potential for feminist techno-utopia. Filippone’s book offers an important corrective to existing histories of the period."--Caroline A. Jones, Professor of Art History in the History, Theory, and Criticism Section of the Department of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
"Women artists' historic role in sorting out and contributing to the field of science is one of art history's most under-recognized fields of research. Filippone's book not only opens a door onto this neglected topic, but goes the extra mile by demonstrating how women artists working across media (from drawing to performance art) adapted and transformed the scientific notion of open systems to produce dynamic art experiences. Heretofore, systems theory has largely been linked to conceptual art practices of the late sixties. Filippone carefully traces how four key feminist artists merged New Left tendencies with that era’s scientific theories to engender artworks that radically reconfigured societal norms." --Sue Spaid, author of Ecovention: Current Art to Transform Ecologies
