Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / The erotically charged art of Chicago Imagist painter Christina Ramberg (1946–1995), whose retrospective is currently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, aligns chronologically with the second-wave feminism of the 1970s and 80s. Today’s third-wave feminists (some say it’s now fourth-wave) frequently disparage that incarnation of the movement for privileging white women’s worries, and worse, for its obliviousness to institutional misogyny. Fortunately, Art Institute curators Mark Pascale and Thea Liberty Nichols don’t try to pigeonhole Ramberg’s work into that framework. Although she considered herself a feminist, an aggrieved one she was not. Her art was personal, not political, and it doesn’t fit neatly into standardized versions of feminism. Remarkably, the artist found a way to mix together sharp and provocative subject matter about women’s desires with a classical, pristine aesthetic.
