Eat the cake. Buy the shoes. Make the art.
- Gili Fruchter
- May 31
- 2 min read
Judy Chicago, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Barbara Kruger The unforgivable freedom of women who simply want to create
From Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, to Georgia O’Keeffe’s flowers, and Barbara Kruger’s bold “I shop therefore I am,” women in art have faced exclusion even within the supposedly free, open realm of artistic expression.
Regardless of era, geography, or social class, women’s art is almost always perceived as feminist. In other words: if you’re a woman and you create, you’re already subversive. Already a threat. A rebel, even if you never meant to be. Just as women are judged along the old axis of Madonna or whore, so too in the art world the one that claims to be liberal and free women artists are rarely allowed just to be. They must mean something. Represent something. Carry the weight of something.
The three artists mentioned each disrupted the cultural order in their own way. Judy Chicago declared herself a feminist, unapologetically. Barbara Kruger attacked consumer culture through sharp, graphic text. Georgia O’Keeffe? She just wanted to paint flowers, and yet, her work was constantly stripped of its original intent, reduced by male critics to symbols of the female body, even when she refused that interpretation.
This post was originally meant to be about pleasure and desire. However, as often happens in conversations about women and art, the discussion naturally drifted toward critique. Because even when women didn’t set out to represent anything, they were represented. Even when they didn’t mean to start a storm, the storm came anyway.
Just like we’re told to choose between the cake and the salad, between the shoes we want and the credit limit we “should respect,” women in art are caught in the same game: navigating between inner desire and external rules, between free expression and a supposedly objective, masculine standard.
And maybe the tighter the shackle, the bigger the threat?
Maybe O’Keeffe’s flowers are threatening not because they’re soft, but because they’re too powerful. Maybe they stir something bodily, ancient, and unspoken, a collective memory that some would rather suppress. Maybe femininity that refuses to shrink is simply too much.
Because if we weren’t so threatening, maybe there wouldn’t be so many rules.
And just maybe, the fact that these women stirred so much backlash, even when they “just” painted, photographed, or set a dinner table, isn’t a failure. It’s the victory. They took up space.
Eat the cake. Buy the shoes. Make the art.
I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way. Georgia O’Keeffe
What a ridiculous clusterfuck of totally uncool jokers. I make my work about this kind of sadly foolish farce. I’m waiting for all of them to sue me for copyright infringement. Barbara Kruger
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