5 Female Artists That Have Changed the World

Your mind will be BLOWN!

Shirin Neshat

Shirin Neshat is a Iranian-American visual artist, known for conveying the female experience in the male-dominated Iran. She was born in Qazvin, Iran on March 26th, 1957, and left to study at the University of California at Berkeley right before the Iranian Revolution. She returned back to Iran for Woman of Allah, a collection of self portraits where she wears the traditional chador (a veil that women wear in Iran). Throughout most of career, she was an outsider, exiled from Iran, looking in seeing how the strict scriptures of Islam were affecting women.

Monica J. Beasley

Monica J. Beasley is an African- American painter from the South. Monica J. Beasley received her M.F.A. in painting from Northwestern University in 2002. She is best known for painting about her Southern roots and the African American experience. Although most of her work includes light colors and dainty drawings, it has a deeper meaning. Historically, black women never had the luxury of being dainty and delicate like their white counterparts.

Hein Koh

Hein Koh is a Brooklyn-based visual artist born in Jersey City, NJ in 1976. She graduated from Dartmouth College with a dual B.A. in Studio Art and Psychology and later, got her M.F.A at Yale. She is best known for her project called Braving the Cold (picture above) where she used the style of adding eyes onto inanimate objects. “I end up twinning a lot of my work,” she said in an interview. “I think a lot about relationships in my work....These roses—there are three and I think of them as me and my daughters...I want it to be a lot of different layers.”

Harriet Powers

Harriet Powers was a quilt maker born in 1837. Powers was born into slavery near Athens, Georgia and historians say she might have learned to sew from other slaves living on her plantation. Powers’s first quilt was called the Bible Quilt and is currently on display in the Smithsonian Museum. The quilt is divided into 11 panels, and has been said to have been significant to her life. The only other quilt that records have survived is the Pictorial Quilt. This quilt is divided into 15 rectangles, each one telling it’s own story, such as panel 4 representing Adam and Eve in the garden. Harriet Powers’ specialized in a form of art that was originally dominated by men. Her quilts inspired women in the United States and the form of art eventually became female dominated.

Tina Blau

Tina Blau was a landscape painter from Austria. Her debut was in 1867, but her breakthrough was in 1882 with the painting “Spring in the Prater”. Her work contained light colors and loose brushwork. Blau is said to have felt very close to nature, and used as inspiration for her artwork. In addition, Blau taught landscape painting at an academy of arts for women specifically. Unfortunately her work was not as appreciated the time she lived compared to now due to sexism and the fact that Blau was a Jew. She was not given as many opportunities as men, but managed to get her art out to the world to be admired now.