Carolee Schneemann
1939–2019
A seminal figure in the development of non-object-based art in the postwar era, Carolee Schneemann scrutinizes the dominant structures of society through her provocative, celebratory, and sensorial art. Her multidisciplinary practice—which includes performance, installation, film, video, painting, drawing, and writing— has dealt frankly with sexuality, taboos, gender, and the body alongside deeply researched topics such as anthropology, myth, symbolism, and art history. Schneemann was originally trained as a painter, and her early Abstract Expressionist paintings were an important influence on her first performance works, scatological and gestural events she termed “Kinetic Theater,” which combined performance and installation and developed alongside Fluxus and Happenings.
Her most famous of these works was Meat Joy, which was choreographed for nine performers—four men wearing only briefs coupled with four bikini-clad women (including the artist) and a “serving maid” who introduced raw meat and other items into their orgiastic action. It was first performed in 1964 at the Festival of Free Expression in Paris and then at Dennison Hall in London and the Judson Memorial Church in New York. In Schneemann’s own words, “Meat Joy has the character of an erotic rite: excessive, indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chickens, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, rope brushes, paper scrap. Its propulsion is toward the ecstatic—shifting and turning between tenderness, wildness, precision, abandon: qualities which could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent.” Schneemann edited the 16mm documentation of these three performances into a distinct experimental film by incorporating pop music, slow motion, montage editing, and poetic voice-over to create a dizzying and exuberant vision of the experience. It remains an essential, groundbreaking example of early feminist art.
Introduction
Known for a multidisciplinary practice that spanned 60 years, particularly performances that dealt with issues of gender and sexuality. She considered herself a painter but worked in multiple media, including photography and motion pictures. Her works are held in the collections of the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, New York’s MoMA, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, London’s Tate Modern, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
Roles
Artist, author, installation artist, media artist, painter, performance artist, photographer, video artist
ULAN identifier
500092112
Names
Carolee Schneemann
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed December 19, 2025.
