60s began to develop feminist networks and organizations to further the political cause of womenÆs liberation in all of its many manifestations. WomenÆs art was inextricably linked to protesting the status quo, and was ôinseparably fused with their identities as artists, critics, and historians" (Lopez and Roth, in Broude and Garrard, p. 141). Women like Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Nancy Spero, and May Stevens were leaders in the use of art to criticize social realities. Further, feminist art whether visual or performance, came to embody a set of political ideas in which women began to reclaim their own ôvoices.ö
Gloria Fenan Orenstein, a professor at the University of Southern California, contends that one of the major themes running throughout feminist art of the 1970s was the reclamation of a matristic visual model (in Broude and Garrard, p. 176). Many women artists drew upon the archeological and Jungian roots of the goddess, emphasizing the fertility goddess or source of all life and the goddess of regeneration, rebirth, and return.
...