Gender Violence, Art, and the Viewer: An Intervention

The works covered in college art history classes frequently depict violence against women. Traditional survey textbooks highlight the impressive formal qualities of artworks depicting rape, murder, and other violence but often fail to address the violent content and context. Gender Violence, Art, and the Viewer investigates the role that the art history field has played in the past and can play in the future in education around gender violence in the arts. It asks art historians, museum educators, curators, and students to consider how, in the time of #MeToo, a public reckoning with gender violence in art can revitalize the field of art history.

Contributors to this timely volume amplify the voices and experiences of victims and survivors depicted throughout history, critically engage with sexually violent images, open meaningful and empowering discussions about visual assaults against women, reevaluate how we have viewed and narrated such works, and assess how we approach and teach famed works created by artists implicated in gender-based violence.

Gender Violence, Art, and the Viewer includes contributions by the editors as well as Veronica Alvarez, Indira Bailey, Melia Belli Bose, Charlene Villaseñor Black, Ria Brodell, Megan Cifarelli, Monika Fabijanska, Vivien Green Fryd, Carmen Hermo, Bryan C. Keene, Natalie Madrigal, Lisa Rafanelli, Nicole Scalissi, Hallie Rose Scott, Theresa Sotto, and Angela Two Stars. It is sure to be of keen interest to art history scholars and students and anyone working at the intersections of art and social justice.

Ellen C. Caldwell is Professor of Art History at Mt. San Antonio College. She is the author of Paula Rego: Art Souvenir.

Cynthia S. Colburn is Blanche E. Seaver Professor of Fine Arts at Pepperdine University. She is the coauthor of The History of Art: A Global View and coeditor of Reading a Dynamic Canvas: Adornment in the Ancient Mediterranean World.

Ella J. Gonzalez is a PhD candidate in History of Art at Johns Hopkins University. She is the coauthor, with Cynthia S. Colburn, of "How to Teach Ancient Art in the Age of #MeToo," which was published in Hyperallergic.