Girls! Girls! Girls! in Contemporary Art

"Girls! Girls! Girls!" explores the representation of girls in contemporary women's art. Since the 1990s, women artists have for the first time dominated the creation and evolution of work depicting female bodies, producing what are arguably the most challenging, critically debated, well publicized, and highly collected representations of females. The contemporary women artists discussed in this anthology are virtually rewriting the representation of women in art now, and they are doing so in ways that differ importantly from those of their predecessors. The overarching question remains why adult women artists are turning in such numbers to the subject of girls now, and how their respective artistic explorations signify. In answer, "Girls! Girls! Girls!" offers seven extended essays, which together address such themes as adolescent space, narcissism and nostalgia, intergenerational relationships, post-feminism, the girl as site of rupture and haunting, aggression and exploitation, authorial gender, female masculinity, and fantasy.