Laura Cottingham is an American art critic, curator and visual artist living and working in New York. Normally working with video her best known pieces are Not For Sale, 1998 and The Anita Pallenberg Story, 2000. Her work speaks to us about reconsidering the meaning of art in light of the counterculture of 1960s America. Her influences include Fluxus, Rock and Roll, punk, ballet, feminism, gay rights and the Civil Rights Movement. She is best known for her writings on 1970s Feminist Art and has many published works on the artists of that period.

The Butchies “(Our music is) feminist music: strong women-identified women playing music. That doesn’t necessarily fall into a genre but describes the people playing. To me, we are women’s music”, Kaia Wilson (a member of the band). The Butchies are often referred to as the “Queercore Crusaders”.

Mab Segrest Best known for her autobiographical work; Memoir of a Race Traitor, Mab Segrest is a feminist writer and activist who is recognised for speaking and writing about sexism, racism, homophobia and other forms of oppression and prejudice. Until 1983, Segrest was involved in the production of journal Feminary. Seeing writing as a force for political change, the journal’s focus was anti-sexist, anti-racist and anti-homophobic; a unique contribution to women’s history. After Feminary, between the years of 1983 and 1990, she worked with North Carolinians Against Racism and Religious Violence (NCARRV) and it credited with being the main force in driving the Ku Klux Klan from North Carolina in the late 1980s.

Tammy Rae Carland Co-owner of Mr Lady Records, Tammy Rae Carland is also a photographer, ‘zine editor, and video artist. Carland was the founder of an independent art gallery in the 1980s which is where she met Kathleen Hanna (of Le Tigre). Together, they made the band Amy Carter. After the band broke up, they collaborated on a fanzine I heart Amy Carter which became well renowned in the 1990s.

Sleater Kinney was a politically charged indie rock band, that formed in 1994. The group’s name is taken from Sleater Kinney Road, in Lacey, Washington, which was the location of one of their early practice spaces. Formed in the Pacific Northwest, they were a vital part of the riot grrrl and punk scenes that were arising in the 1990s and were best known for their feminist politics. The bands lyrics are generally to do with social situations and political problems; rebelling against war, traditionalism, gender roles and consumerism. In 2006, Sleater Kinney announced an indefinite hiatus, stating that there were “no plans for future tours and recordings”.

Vivienne Dick is a film-maker who utilises both a documentary and an experimental style. She was active in the No Wave film culture (a super-8 film movement associated with down-town New York’s avant-garde punk bands of the late 1970’s, it’s name a satirical play on words from the popular New Wave art scene that dominated galleries at the time). At the Artists space retrospective 2010, when asked “Do you even think about stuff like this anymore, or are they all arguments of the past?”, Dick answered, “Things have shifted, but the world we live in has many of the same imbalances of the past. I think feminism has been repressed and there will be a resurgence.”

Lorraine O’Grady is an artist and critic whose work addresses issues of stereotypes, diaspora, and black female subjectivity. In 2007 her landmark performance, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, was made one of the entry points to WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, the first-ever museum exhibit of this major art movement. In this piece she adopted the persona of ‘Mlle. Bourgeoise Noire” and invaded art openings, shouting out poems that railed against the art world that she perceived as not looking beyond a small circle of friends.

Gayatri Spivak is a literary critic and theorist from India. Best known for her contemporary critiques of culture challenging the “legacy of colonialism” and the way that her readers engage with literature and culture, she wrote the monograph; Can the Subaltern Speak?. This monograph was considered to be a founding text of post-colonialism. She describes herselg as a practical Marxist-feminist-deconstructionist and often focuses on the cultural texts of those who are marginalised by Western culture: immigrants, working class and women.

Angela Davis A civil rights activist, who is most famous for her involvement with the Black Panthers and the Communist Party, Angela Davis is also the 3rd woman to make the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List. Davis was most politically active during the 1960s and 70s. She has taken an active interest in prisoner rights and is the founder of Critical Resistance, an organisation working to abolish the prison-industrial complex. She states her own interests to be feminism, African-American studies, critical theory, Marxism, social consciousness and the philosophy and history of punishment and prisons and has described herself as a democratic socialist.