Exhibition catalogue published in conjunction with show held at the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, Purchase, January 15–April 3, 2011. Traveled to the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, August 25–December 5, 2011. Curated by Helaine Posner and Nancy Princenthal. Texts by Helaine Posner, Nancy Princenthal, Tom McDonough, Griselda Pollock, and Kristine Stiles. Artists include Judith Barry, Dara Birnbaum, Barbara Bloom, Sarah Charlesworth, The Guerrilla Girls, Lynn Hershman, Susan Hiller, Jenny Holzer, Deborah Kass, Mary Kelly, Silvia Kolbowski, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Adrian Piper, Martha Rosler, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Lorna Simpson, Sturtevant, Carrie Mae Weems, and Hannah Wilke. "The practice of deconstructivism, a term describing artwork that examines the imagery of the popular media, was significantly shaped by dozens of important female artists during a critical era in late twentieth-century visual culture. These artists subverted their source material, often by appropriating it, to expose the ways that commercial images express imbalances of power. The mechanisms of power in mainstream art institutions were also subject to these artists' critique. This exhibition catalogue features a diverse group of North American women whose transformative and often provocative work deals with gender, sexual, racial, ethnic, and class-based inequities. Essays by leading critics discuss such topics as the importance of critical theory and sexual politics in the art world of the 1980s; how domesticity is represented in commercial media and the art that addresses it; the importance of psychoanalytic theory as a critical framework; and the sexualization of inanimate objects." -- publisher's statement.