Over thirty contemporary artists are presented to suggest some aspects of the dialogue between French and American feminism with an emphasis on the 1970s. "Vraiment Féminisme et art" is curated by New York critic Laura Cottingham and features historical documents from the French and American women's liberation movements in addition to art works in video, film, photography, performance, sculpture, painting, and installation.

With the theoretical writings and political activism of the Women's Liberation Movement that emerged in the late 60s and early 70s, women began to recognize themselves in historical, self-conscious, political terms. Although women's liberation movements came forth in the urban centers of most industrialized nations during the 1970s - including England, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Italy, Spain - the relationship between France and the United States is singular because of the critical importance Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 book, "Le Deuxième Sexe" played in both the emergence and direction of the American Movement. Additionally, many of the artists featured in "Vraiment" formed professionnal, artistic, and personal connections - both within and accross the national borders of France and the United States - during the 1970s.

The art movement that emerged in the United States in response to and in collaboration with the Women's Liberation Movement was enormous. The American Feminist Art Movement founded new schools, established alternative and cooperative galleries, published new magazines, led successful protests against the discrimination of women by museums and galleries, and forged new aesthetic strategies to introduce the insights of feminist consciousness into fine art. In France and other European countries the number of women working as artists during the 1970s was much smaller than the sizable movement that galvanized in the US, but the artistic transformation of feminism into art practice was nonetheless still evident. Some of the themes that emerged within first generation feminist work included a centralization of female subjectivity and experience, reclamation of "women's work" (including housework and craft), explorations of female sexuality, interrogations of gender stereotypes, and celebrations of women's history.

In addition, the exhibition presents a selection of political tracts, books, film footage of feminist demonstrations, photographs, manifestos, posters, political buttons and other pieces of memorabilia and historical materials drawn from the French and American women's liberation movements of the 1970s including film footage of the first nationally televisized feminist protest in the United States "No-More-MissAmerica", September 1968, Atlantic City, New Jersey and the 1972 March down 5th Avenue, New York City ; from France, film footage of the Feminist protest (1972) in Bobigny and Abortion Rights Protest (1979) in Paris.

An introduction to some of the artists and artworks featured in exhibition

Dyke Action Machine!
The synthesis of aesthetics and politics that engaged artists associated with the Feminist Art Movement during the 1970s produced diverse artistic strategies in all visual mediums. Because of the activist-politic that informed the basis of the Women's Liberation Movements, the poster was an inevitably popular medium (as seen in works by Mary Beth Edelson, Hannah Wilke and others), and has as its legacy the street posters of Dyke Action Machine!, a collective that formed in 1991 in New York City.
By manipulating mass media slogans and consumer advertising, Dyke Action Machine! re-presents mainstream American culture within modes of direct address that both celebrate lesbian culture and challenge the heterosexism of US society. The posters featured in "Vraiment" were initially shown on the streets - that is, on public facades of buildings - in New York City.

Nicole Gravier
The European visual tradition of relegating images of women into limited categories - muse, mother, whore, metaphor - was perceived by '70s feminists to be coterminous with the political subordination of women to men. Consequently, many '70s artists thought to resituate and reconstruct images of women through altering, critiquing, refusing and consciously manipulating the representations of women found in fine art as well as in mass media.
The photographic installations of Nicole Gravier featured in "Vraiment", which are taken from different series from the late '70s that incorporate a feminist search for female identity and - in the "Publicité" series - a feminist critique of mainstream advertising.

Natacha Lesueur
Because of the emerging conscious of Feminism, women during the '70s began to question the construction of "the female" - in particular, cosmetics, female-coded clothing, hair rituals and other signs of "Feminity" were taken as appropriate sources of aesthetic investigation (cf. "Womanhouse", Eleanor Antin's "Representational Painting", Orlan's "Le baiser de l'artiste", etc.).
On the 1990s, in the works of young artists such as Natacha Lesueur, the cultural codes of Feminity continue to be explored. Just as '70s artists preferred to locate their investigations on, within and around their own bodies, Natacha Lesueur accepts herself as both the subject and object of her art.

Tania Mouraud
Perhaps the assertion of female subjectivity and female experience as a centralized concern is the most significant aesthetic, and sociopolitical, legacy of the Feminist Art Movements. In the early '70s works of Tania Mouraud, female identity is explored according to its coterminous relationships accross time, space and location, as in "People call me Tania Mouraud", 1971-1973 and "People call me Claudia Calleux", 1971-1973. In Mouraud's 1971 "Can I be anything which I say I possess", the cultural limits on female authority - or possession - are addressed; while in "Rose...", 1974, the female genitals are centralized in a metaphoric representation that consciously coaxes the camera into "seeing" the rose as vulvic.

Dorothée Selz
In the five diptychs by Dorothée Selz featured in "Vraiment" - which were first produced in 1973; although three of the featured five have been recreated for this exhibition - the artist is exploring the visual and sociological roles patriarchy has established for women. Each diptych features, on the left, an image of woman taken from a '70s male porno magazine while, on the right, the artist has recreated the pornographic image through props, drawing, and her own bodily image. To emphasize the ironic and critical stand of her presentation, all of the images in "Mimétisme relatif" have been framed in colored sugar.
Other early '70s investigations of mainstream pornographic representations of women include those bu Hannah Wilke, Orlan, and others. During the 1990s, the strategy continues in the works of artists such as Ghada Amer.