54 Facts About Carolee Schneemann

Carolee Schneemann taught at several universities, including the California Institute of the Arts, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Hunter College, Rutgers University, and SUNY New Paltz.

Carolee Schneemann's works have been associated with a variety of art classifications including Fluxus, Neo-Dada, performance art, the Beat Generation, and happenings.

Carolee Schneemann was born Carol Lee Schneiman and raised in Fox Chase, Pennsylvania.

Carolee Schneemann's family was generally supportive of her naturalness and freeness with her body.

Carolee Schneemann attributed her father's support to the fact that he was a rural physician who had to often deal with the body in various states of health.

Carolee Schneemann was awarded a full scholarship to New York's Bard College.

Carolee Schneemann was the first woman from her family to attend college, but her father discouraged her from an art education.

Carolee Schneemann's image is included in the iconic 1972 poster Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson.

Carolee Schneemann began her art career as a painter in the late 1950s.

Carolee Schneemann's painting work began to adopt some of the characteristics of Neo-Dada art, as she used box structures coupled with expressionist brushwork.

Carolee Schneemann described the atmosphere in the art community at this time as misogynistic and that female artists of the time were not aware of their bodies.

Carolee Schneemann chose to focus on expressiveness in her art rather than accessibility or stylishness.

Carolee Schneemann still described herself as a formalist however, unlike other feminist artists who wanted to distance themselves from male-oriented art history.

Carolee Schneemann is considered a "first-generation feminist artist", a group that includes Mary Beth Edelson, Rachel Rosenthal, and Judy Chicago.

Carolee Schneemann became involved with the art movement of happenings when she organized A Journey through a Disrupted Landscape, inviting people to "crawl, climb, negotiate rocks, climb, walk, go through mud".

In 1962, Carolee Schneemann moved with James Tenney from their residence in Illinois to New York City when Tenney obtained a job with Bell Laboratories as an experimental composer.

Carolee Schneemann contributed to Oldenburg's happening, filmed by Stan VanDerBeek in upstate New York, Birth of the American Flag.

Carolee Schneemann got to personally know many New York musicians and composers in the 1960s as well, including George Brecht, Malcolm Goldstein, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and Steve Reich.

Carolee Schneemann was highly interested in the abstract expressionists of the time, such as Willem de Kooning.

The first support for Carolee Schneemann's work came from poets such as Robert Kelly, David Antin, and Paul Blackburn who published some of her writings.

Carolee Schneemann created a "loft environment" filled with broken mirrors, motorized umbrellas, and rhythmic color units.

Carolee Schneemann created 36 "transformative-actions" - photographs by Icelandic artist Erro of herself in her constructed environment.

Carolee Schneemann claimed that she did not know at the time of the symbolism of the serpent in ancient cultures in figures such as the Minoan Snake Goddess and, in fact, learned of it years later.

In 1964, Carolee Schneemann began production of her 18-minute film Fuses, eventually finishing it in 1967.

Carolee Schneemann then altered the film by staining, burning, and directly drawing on the celluloid itself, mixing the concepts of painting and collage.

Carolee Schneemann herself appeared in some Brakhage films, including Cat's Cradle, in which she wore an apron at Brakhage's insistence.

Carolee Schneemann received an especially strong reaction regarding the cunnilingus scene of the film.

Pop artist Andy Warhol, with whom Carolee Schneemann was acquainted, having spent time at The Factory, drolly remarked that Carolee Schneemann should have taken the film to Hollywood.

Carolee Schneemann began work on the next film, Plumb Line, in her Autobiographical Trilogy in 1968.

The sound and visuals grow more intense as the film progresses, with Carolee Schneemann narrating about a period of physical and emotional illness.

The film ends with Carolee Schneemann attacking a series of projected images and a repetition of the opening segment of the film.

From 1973 to 1976, in her ongoing piece Up to and Including Her Limits, a naked Carolee Schneemann is suspended from a tree surgeon's harness, which is attached from the ceiling above a canvas.

Carolee Schneemann manually lowers and raises the rope in which she suspends, to reach all corners of the canvas.

Carolee Schneemann arrived at the museum when it opened with the cleaners, guards, secretaries, maintenance crew and remained until it closed.

Carolee Schneemann intended to do away with performance, a fixed audience, rehearsals, improvisation, sequences, conscious intention, technical cues, and a central metaphor or theme in order to explore what is left.

In 1984, Carolee Schneemann completed the final video, a compilation of video footage from six performances: the Berkeley Museum, 1974; London Filmmaker's Cooperative, 1974; Artists Space, NY, 1974; Anthology Film Archives, NY, 1974; The Kitchen, NY, 1976; and the Studio Galerie, Berlin, 1976.

In 1975, Carolee Schneemann performed Interior Scroll in East Hampton, New York and later that year, at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado.

Carolee Schneemann disrobed and then got on a table where she outlined her body with mud.

Carolee Schneemann argues that by placing the source of artistic creativity at the female genitals, Schneemann is changing the masculine overtones of minimalist art and conceptual art into a feminist exploration of her body.

In 1978, Carolee Schneemann finished the last film, Kitch's Last Meal, in what was later called her "Autobiographical Trilogy".

Carolee Schneemann said that in the 1980s her work was sometimes considered by various feminist groups to be an insufficient response to many feminist issues of the time.

The wall installation consisting of 140 self-shot images, depicted Carolee Schneemann kissing her cat at various angles.

Carolee Schneemann continued to produce art later in life, including the 2007 installation Devour, which featured videos of recent wars contrasted with everyday images of United States daily life on dual screens.

One of Carolee Schneemann's primary focuses in her work was the separation between eroticism and the politics of gender.

Carolee Schneemann's cat Kitch, which was featured in works such as Fuses and Kitch's Last Meal, was a major figure in Schneemann's work for almost twenty years.

Carolee Schneemann considered her photographic and body pieces to still be based in painting despite appearing otherwise on the surface.

For example, Carolee Schneemann relates the colors and movement featured in Fuses to brush strokes in painting.

Carolee Schneemann acknowledged that she was often labeled as a feminist icon and that she is an influential figure to female artists, but she noted that she reached out to male artists as well.

Carolee Schneemann asserts that Schneemann's work is difficult to classify and analyze as it combines constructivist and painterly concepts with her physical body and energy.

Carolee Schneemann preferred her term "art istorical", so as to reject the "his" in history.

Much of Carolee Schneemann's work was performance-based: therefore photographs, video documentation, sketches, and artist's notes are often used to examine her work.

In 2013, Dale Eisinger of Complex ranked Interior Scroll the 15th best work of performance art in history, writing that "Carolee Schneemann is argued to have realigned the gender balance of conceptual and minimal art with her 1975 piece".

Carolee Schneemann died at age 79 on March 6,2019 after suffering from breast cancer for two decades.

Carolee Schneemann's name appears in the lyrics of the Le Tigre song "Hot Topic".