Date of Award

6-2025

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts in Art History

First Advisor

Stefanie Snider

Second Advisor

Sarah Cantor

Third Advisor

Jonathan Walz

Abstract

Goddess imagery, the representation of a female deity or a concept of divine feminine power through various forms, symbols, and narratives, has been used by artists to communicate a multitude of sentiments, from spiritual reverence to political ideology. This study probes the evolution of representations of the deified female body from the 1970s to the current era to reveal contrasts in how these icons of female power have transformed over time. The artwork of second-wave feminist and self-identified “Goddess artist” Mary Beth Edelson is examined as a foundation for second-wave Goddess sentiment. Edelson’s collage work, which incorporates figures from a variety of Western and non-Western traditions, was inspired by the research of archeologist Marija Gimbutas, whose pioneering studies on Neolithic fertility figurines and pre-literate spiritual symbology provided a basis for the Goddess spirituality aspect of the Women’s Liberation Movement. To examine what Goddess iconography looks like in its current manifestation, Edelson’s work is compared with the contemporary Goddess imagery used by Chitra Ganesh in her visual interpretation of Sultana’s Dream, a futuristic feminist utopian short story written in 1905 by prominent Bengali educator, writer, and activist Rokeya Sakhhawat Hossain. Textual references, concepts of violence and abjection, and eco-feminist sensibilities are thematically intertwined in order to gain a better understanding of the impact that these elements have had on the shifts that have taken place over the course of the past sixty years, from body-centered representations of the deified female form to person-centered representations of the deified female form.

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