Elizabeth Ohlson

Elizabeth (born in 1961) is a Swedish photographer and artist that loves to expresses the sexualities of minorities through her artwork. One of her most well known pieces is 'Ecce homo,' that depicts Jesus with homosexuals and transsexuals. She wanted to remind people that Jesus was friends with the outcasts of society and this idea came to her when one of her Homosexual friends died from AIDS and someone mentioned that it was God's Punishment to them for being homosexual. 'Ecce Homo' was first showed in Stockholm in 1998 and after, in the Uppsala Cathedral (archbishop K. G. Hammar approved!!) as well as other places across the world.
She also has a piece called 'Taear' which is a photograph of two germen men farming with their genitals.
her site is in swedish I'm assuming but maybe you can navigate your way around to see some more of her work.... http://www.ohlson.se/

Tee Corinne

Tee was born on November 3,1943 as Linda Tee Citchin and passed away at the age of 62. She is an amazing lesbian activist, fiction writer as well as photographic artist and has also created the well known and glorious 'Cunt Coloring Book. She graduated with a B.A. from the University of South Florida in 1965, and received her M.F.A. from Pratt Institute in 1968. Tee was also the co-founder of what is now called 'Queer Caucus for Art,' a co-facilitator of the Feminist Photography Ovulars, and a co-founder of The Blatant Image (feminist photography magazine.)








this site had a great interview with Tee... and there are also some other interesting artists on this site:
http://www.queer-arts.org/archive/9809/corinne/corinne.html

Jess dobkin

Jess dobkin is a performance artist that was born in Canada in 1970 and is still working and living in Toronto. She has created many controversial works such as
Lactation Station Breast Milk Bar,
For this she invited people to taste test Women's breast milk.





For other performances she uses her body such as in her performance,
The Two Boobs,
where she ties stings to her nipples and paints faces on her boobs and has a puppet show.
other works of hers include:
1. sound check
2. clown car
3. restored
4. an ontario bride
5. composite body
6. talk to me

Just to warn you there is humour nudity on her website (below) http://www.jessdobkin.com/


and this is her artist's statement that I thought would be interesting to read:

'I approach performance art as an inherently subversive practice. My performances challenge the status quo, transgress boundaries and envision alternate realities. The intimacy and immediacy of live performance lets me guide the audience on a journey through real space and time to examine things differently than they ever have.

My body is my primary tool in my practice, and my work explores its physical and psychic abilities, limitations, and attributes. Using personal narrative as my starting point, I pull from my own experiences of love, work, parenthood, politics and sex for material.
I focus attention on the life spans of my performances, understanding that they exist before and beyond the physical presentation of the work. Audiences’ anticipation, expectation, and memory become elements that I influence. In my “Lactation Station Breast Milk Bar” project, the performance began when I disseminated the press release a month prior to the live performance. This was when the public discussion began, as the work sparked a thoughtful and intense national dialogue.

I create photographic images to accompany my performances that are designed to intrigue, stir curiosity and initiate discussion. These photographs are disseminated through print and web media before the performances and then inform the live event. Most of these images have also been published and exhibited as stand-alone works.

My art is an instrument of freedom and transformation. I use my creative practice to process my own experience and understand the world around me. I use playful humour as a strategy to establish a sense of comfort and safety for an audience so that we can broach challenging subject matter, such as queer sexuality, sexual violence and mortality. I have always carried a sense of heightened urgency in the creation and production process, and in my most recent projects, this urgency has become a central theme in my work.' -Jess Dobkin

Catherine Opie

Catherine was born 1961 in Sandusky Ohio and is a documentary photographer. She attended California Institute of the Arts School of Art in 1988 and now is a professor of photography at the University of California. She focuses on different communities such as the GLBT community as she is a lesbian herself. She also likes to play with gender role, and has a series of lesbians with false mustaches.

you can look at some of her work here http://www.regenprojects.com/artists/catherine-opie/images/

explinations. interests. wants

I am receiving my associates in Fine Arts by the end of this year (spring 2010) so I decided to focus on lesbian art and artists. Lesbian history has not really been documented and established considering that history was mainly documented by white men because they were in power as women as well as non-Caucasians were being oppressed. As women fight their way into the art world, and even better having them be lesbian or represent lesbians is something well worth noting and being a part of our history. Woman's sexuality is just as important and we should be able to express that ( and not just women sexuality but heterosexuality.) As an art student myself I often turn to my creative side to express my feelings as well as many of the artists that I have and will be blogging about. Women dealing with lesbian issues and within that issues dealing with substance abuse, oppression, gender identification and so on. Art not only helps one express their feelings, but it brings people together as it did for many lesbians. And although most of my research is done on art such as painting, illustrations, performance and other fine arts, art also has to do with self expression and how you identify yourself and the art of writting and talking and coming together.

As far as suprising, I really just have come across a lot of amazing artists. It's great to capture a persons feelings through their artwork. You can sort of tell and understand where they are coming from through pictures, and just reading about the artist always helps. Some of the art is somewhat shocking, but not too much. Such as Jess Dobkin, She is a performance artist if you haven't read about her yet. She takes the woman's body and uses it in a very humerus and shocking manner. I'm sure you will be able to run across some of her videos, but she has performances such as having a car drive in front of her vagina and pulling little tampon like people from strings out of it.

I would really just like to learn more and see more work of each artist. I have really been enjoying "Dykes to Watch Out for" and I have really been getting interested in graphic novels so it would be nice to do some research on that on my own and get to reading some of them such as 'Hothead Paisan.' Also local events that have to do with the art world and the GLBT community.

Annie Leibovitz

Annie was born on October 2 in 1949, in Westbury, Connecticut and studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she eventually developed a passion for photography. After, she lived shortly on a collective farm in Isreal and then returned to the U.S. where she started working for Rolling Stones magazine and by the age of 23 she was promoted to chief photographer. In 1983 she left Rolling Stones and started working with Vanity Fair. In 1996 She was chosen to be the photographer for the Olympics. She is a Very successful lesbian photographer that embraces the art of photography through bold colors , subjects and body positioning.

Diane Dimassa

Born in 1959 in Connecticut, Diane started drawing "Hothead Paisan: homicidal Lesbian Terrorist" in 1991 in her way of therapy as a recovering substance user. Her character uses all sorts of weapons in retaliation against women oppression and is well known to lesbians and feminists in the underground comic world.

http://www.albany.edu/ws/journal/2006/hothead%20paisan.html

She also illustrated and contributed to:

'My Gender Workbook'

'Sexing the Body'

'Pussycat Fever'

'Jokes and the Unconscious'

'Live Through This'

http://www.hotheadpaisan.com/index.html

Claude Cahun

Claude was a French artist, photographer and writer born on October 25 in 1894 and raised by her grandmother because her mother had mental issues. Her Work involved both political as well as personal statements that challenged the roles of gender and sexuality in a surrealist style. Claude who was born Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob, started to experiment with androgynous self portrait by the early age of 18 and continued through the 1930s. In early 1920s she moved to Paris with her partner and stepsister Suzanne Malherbe who goes by Marcel Moore and they continued to collaborate in works of writing, sculpture, photo montages and collages.

http://www.vinland.org/scamp/Cahun/

Linda Montano

Linda is a feminist and contemporary performance artist. She is mostly known for her year piece done with Tejching Hsieh, where she was tied to him with a rope for one whole year. She investigated the relationship between life and art. She grew up Catholic but is interested in spiritual energies and practices Zen Buddhism.
http://www.lindamontano.com/

Julie Mehretu

Julie is an amazing Lesbian abstract Artist that is known for her layering of paint and prints. She was born in 1970 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, but grw up in Michigan were she received a degree in art from Kalamazoo College. She also attended University Cheik Anta Diop in Dekar, Senegal when she studied abroad and later in 1977 she earned her Masters in fine arts at Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. She now lives and works with her partner Jessica Rankin in New York who is also an artist.







You can find Julie's art displayed at the White Cube art gallery in London
http://www.whitecube.com/artists/mehretu/

Megan Rose Gedris

Megan who also goes by "Anonymous Manga" and "Rosalarian" is an amazing freelance Illustrator and writer for three comics she pubishes on the internet:

1. YU+ME:dream
2. I Was Kidnapped By Lesbian Pirates From Outer Space!!!
3. Le Jardin (the Garden)

she was born on June 12, 1986 and is openly Lesbian, and all three of her comics involve Lesbian Relationships.

you can look at her work on her site here
----> http://rosalarian.com/