Ferren Gipson’s beautiful book, “Women’s Work,” needs to be on the shelf of anyone interested in exploring the work that female artists are doing to re-examine the traditional role of women’s craft and its relationship to contemporary art. Gipson concentrates on artists working in three media: textiles, fibre art and ceramics. Each of 14 artists are presented in short bios of 6 pages each, including gorgeous photographs of their work. Some of the names (Judy Chicago, Yayoi Kusama) are familiar, but most will be new to the non-academic reader.

Gipson discusses in her introduction that female artists have often disrupted male power structures - by working in media not taken seriously as art, and by exploiting the natural link between women’s art and political and social causes. And so she also disrupts by giving us impeccably researched material in a style that tells us stories about the artists and art and avoiding a dry text of dates, places and influences. The artists chosen are a diverse group; from the Americas, UK, Europe, the Middle East and Asia, the paths to their careers as diverse as the work they do.

As a textile artist myself, and a person who has become fascinated with the lineage of artwork by women, I applaud this book. Thank you to NetGalley and Quarto for an advance reader copy in exchange for my honest review.

This book was a pleasant and fresh surprise. I have been reading a lot of women's art books recently, many of them with the same format: one introductory essay, followed by short 2-4 page biographies of a particular woman artists. I thought I was bored of this formulation for a book, but then Women's Work came along.
Women's Work has opted for a tighter focus on mediums that have been historically associated with women, particularly ceramics and fiber arts (everything from weaving and embroidery to fashion, soft sculpture, and assemblage.) While this may seem like a tight focus, it paradoxically allows the book to expand across time and space while sharing new artists all the while. The women in the book hail from Mumbai, Buenos Aires, Harlem, Paris, Hamburg, and more, the earliest born in 1887 (Marina Martinez) and the latest in 1994 (Hannah Hill).
Importantly, at least for me: There are a few artists that I expected to be in here (Judy Chicago, Yayoi Kusama, etc.) but most were new to me. I'm not exactly a fiber arts or ceramic specialist, but it has still been a while since I've read a book with so many new players. With these sorts of books (the endless strings of mini biographies), you're never going to get a great meaty critical perspective or lots of context, of course. But it gave me exactly what I wanted out of this kind of book: I left the book excited to find more about these women, and that's always a good feeling.
My only criticism is that my reading of the title implies some sort of progression, "From Feminine Arts to Feminist Art." This doesn't really play out in the book. We don't start off feminine and get feminist, and even the feminist identity of some of these artists is a little vague. Part of me wants to argue that a woman just existing as a woman in the arts does not make her specifically feminist, even if she does use traditionally feminine materials, and only a handful of the biographies in the book discuss the artists' specific stances on feminism, but this is really a small issue with the branding of the book more than anything.
Overall: Good, great, even. Read it.

I recently came across this book on Instagram and was so excited to receive a digital copy for review prior to publication. This is a stunningly gorgeous and much needed book! It adds to a growing list of titles profiling women artists, but with a focus primarily on three-dimensional work. (A welcome addition to a number of painting-focused titles.)

Through this book I was exposed to a number of artists I was unfamiliar with, as well as getting the chance to revisit some old favorites. The layout gives each artist space for both her and her work, and serves as an excellent introduction for anyone unfamiliar.

I have no doubt that the physical book will be even more beautiful and pleasurable to read than then digital edition. I look forward to adding a copy to my collection when it is released and I think anyone who is passionate about women in the arts should do the same.

Ferren Gipson introduces this sensual dip into modern art history with a question. What is ‘women’s work (…) supposed to mean?’ My first question was not about meaning but about who determines this label and what is its effect? Must artists, even as they search for forms, materials, and practices that reject patriarchal and misogynistic culture, be doomed to comparison with men’s work? Indeed, typically, will it always be men, Picasso, Dali, Rauschenberg, Oldenburg and others, as in this anthology, who exemplify modes of expression, the surreal, the assemblage, or the soft sculpture? What is it that consigns the creative invention of one-half of the population to marginal status? Where all manner of female assigned at birth artists are present as random adjuncts to male assigned patterns of intention; men with a proper career; men promoted to eclipse the pious, prim conformity identified by Rozsika Parker back in 1984 in the opening of, The Subversive Stitch: embroidery and the making of the feminine. Parker noted that bent-over was the posture of women engaged in craft work. However, where Parker’s critique was tightly focused on stitching, Gipson’s celebration embraces a broad perspective.

The book is an enthusiast’s selection of favourites, masquerading as an account with a critical theme. There is studio pottery and ceramic sculpture, applique, quilting, weaving, textile sculpture, installation, and fashion, even, for good measure, a bit of painting by Miriam Schapiro, who is quoted in the introduction, ‘For thousands of years, weaving, ceramics, sewing were believed to be what untutored women made with their hands. But that was our art.” Gipson presents these diverse practices as down-to-earth, shared between people outside the academy.

The larger part of the book takes the form of a catalogue with each artist allotted six pages, one a black and white portrait photograph, and (almost always) three representative works. The biographies that accompany each entry are practical accounts of individual careers. They are primarily straightforward, without the suggestion of glass ceilings, barriers to acceptance and equality with male peers, solidarity with other women artists, or with the significant movements of emancipatory feminism. Few artists consolidate the introductory narrative of creativity rooted in domestic networks. Most artists prove to be urbane and cosmopolitan. They travel widely, are active, and society networked with the very artworlds and fellow professionals that women’s work, with its emphasis on amateurism, insists separation from. Artists need a career. A chosen medium contributes to the formation of an artistic persona. However, materials can never be purely symbolic; they also have economic aspects.

Gipson privileges materials and informal networks, but their significance remains unspecific, and there is more to say. Substances, such as clay and different soft fibres, may have multiple nuanced functions in feminist artistic practices, simultaneously signalling agency and connoting regimes of oppression. The book shares its title with ‘Women’s Work,’ by Elizabeth Wayland Barbert, a sociological investigation, particularly into the relationship between textile production and civilisation’s emergence in Eurasia. Barbert points to the intersection of two factors in the early-modern and premodern eras: everyone had to work consistently to support subsistence needs, and it was conventional for infants to continue weening through the first three years of life. Women’s historical engagement with ceramic and textile production was a necessary division of labour. Women required adaptable, interruptible, and proximate activities. Only with wealth came the privilege to cease working and reflect, debate, invent, or devote time exclusively to childcare. Then, in affluent leisure, painstaking craft activities functioned to occupy some women, diverting time and attention. However, such crafts were not entirely wholesome sisterly occupations but mechanisms of exclusion. Crafts side-tracked attention and kept women out of the developmental conversations that formulated the brutal technologies of the industrial revolution. One, the mechanised loom had a devastating impact on women. Oppression was ramped up when factory work replaced domestic weaving activities that could coexist with childcare. The artistic association of textile art belongs not to the graft of ordinary women making ends meet with hand spinning and home looms but to homely needlework undertaken by women with at least a certain amount of free time. Thus, class divisions and sexual inequalities are tangled.

Any book that introduces a range of woman artists to new audiences is totally needed, and here there is a valuable ‘More artists to explore’ section too. However, without a slightly more rigorous approach to what is being anthologised and why it is important, there is a danger that the book contributes to the stereotypes proffered to justify ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ The answer could be understood not as exclusion, belittling, and erasure but as innate fussiness or, as Gipson puts it, practices with ‘historical associations with the Feminine.’ These are the very associations Mary Wollstonecraft critiqued in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman over 200 years ago. ‘It is plain from the history of all nations, that women cannot be confined to merely domestic pursuits, for they will not fulfil family duties, unless their minds take a wider range, and whilst they are kept in ignorance, they become in the same proportion, the slaves of pleasure as they are the slaves of man.’

As someone studying textiles I was delighted to be offered Ferren Gipson's 'Women's Work' as an ARC via NetGalley. Whilst there are well written profiles of famous artists such as Annie Albers, Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse, what made this book particularly interesting for me was the number of amazing practitioners that I had yet to come across. The works selected as examples are inspirational and there is the added bonus of a list of 'more artists to explore' which will no doubt keep me inspired for years to come.

Thank you, Quarto Publishing Group - White Lion, for the advance review copy.

This book is such an eye opener for me. I wouldn't have known anything about all this important information on women pioneers about their creativity, hard work and the unique distinct art they produced.

The pictures are so rare I feel. It's a privilege to read this book. Feeling empowered.

What wonderful creations by amazing women! I found this really interesting and inspiring! I visited the Tate modern a couple of years back and some of the work in this book reminded me of my visit, absolutely fascinating!