BRUSHES, BODIES, AND BATTLES: WOMEN REDEFINING ART AND PROTEST

Excerpt from a digital artist's journal, 2023: "I code, I create, I disrupt. My work is not 'pretty'—it is messy, glitchy, fragmented, just like the reality of women navigating a digital world that still seeks to erase us. If the system wasn't made for us, then we will make our own."

- By Moitrayee Devi Baruah

For centuries, the world of art has been a grand arena where men painted their versions of reality on the canvas of history, while women remained on the fringe—muses, not masters; subjects, not creators. Their fingers chiselled, drew, and danced in the face of invisibility, but their creations were dismissed as dainty, personal, or ornamental. What does it mean when a woman picks up the brush, the pen, the stage not as ornament, but as a weapon of protest? Her solitude is not mythicised; it is unmediated. Her rage is not hysteria; it is revolution. And yet, even now, the world is reluctant to accept women's art as universal.

The recovery of women's artistic space has been at the heart of feminist critique, resisting systemic erasure and challenging women artists to be part of mainstream artistic histories. Linda Nochlin's seminal essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? (1971) critically analysed the structural impediments such as restricted education and institutional sexism—that historically excluded women from the art world. She contended that the absence of great women artists was not due to a lack of talent but the deeply entrenched patriarchal systems that constructed artistic legitimacy. Griselda Pollock expanded on this by employing a Marxist-feminist The deeply rooted double standard of art and cinema is articulated in the androcentric assumption that male narratives are ipso facto universal, and female narratives remain on the periphery as “niche” or “women’s.”

and psychoanalytic critique to dismantle the myth of the “universal artist,” exposing how cultural production has been constructed through gendered divisions of labour (Pollock, 1988).