The career of the New York-based artist Mary Beth Edelson (1933–2021) was shaped by feminism and the Women51²è¹Ý¶ù Liberation Movement. Edelson is most well known for her audacious photocollage poster Some Living American Artists (1971), for which she de-faced a reproduction of Leonardo Da Vinci51²è¹Ý¶ù mural The Last Supper (1495–8) with images of women artists. She is also associated with Goddess feminism, and so with the neo-paganism of the Women51²è¹Ý¶ù Spirituality Movement, a praxis and a discourse beset in histories of feminism as at best naïve and universalising, and at worst exclusionary. Returning to Donna Haraway51²è¹Ý¶ù well-known feminist essay ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985) and her imbrication of the cyborg and the goddess in a ‘spiral dance’, I look again at how the goddess, the cyborg and other critters manifested in the technologies of Edelson51²è¹Ý¶ù feminist art.
Amy Tobin is Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge, Curator, Contemporary Programmes, Kettle51²è¹Ý¶ù Yard and Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge. Her book Women Artists Together is forthcoming with Yale University Press this year
Organised by Dr Rachel Warriner (The Courtauld).Ìý