Epistemology of Ignorance

Explain in your own words what the phrase “the epistemology of ignorance” means and, as best you can, draw from your own experience or other anecdotes to provide an example that can help explain the idea.

Hande Lara Sever

“Epistemology of ignorance” is the study of knowledge production. This study is concerned with dismantling the hierarchies of knowledge in our society, since in modern day societies positions of power heavily monitor what we learn and why we learn it.

In American and European Art History women’s art works were labeled as craft and were dismissed until the feminist art movement of the 1970s. Judy Chicago, an American feminist artist, elaborates on women’s exclusion from the art scene with an anecdote from the days that she was an art student at UC Berkley, she states that her art history professor said that last week’s class would be dedicated to women artists and when the last week arrived he dismissed the class stating that there is nothing as women artists. Judy Chicago created her major work The

Dinner Party as a response to this class. The Dinner Table functions as a symbolic history of women in Western civilization and it includes women intellects as  Virginia Woolf and Simon De Beauvoir. Chicago further elaborates on women’s exclusion from the art scene in her book Through the Flower: My Experiences as a Women Artist  “Because we(women) are denied knowledge of our history, we are deprived of standing upon each other's shoulders and building upon each other's hard earned accomplishments. Instead we are condemned to repeat what others have done before us and thus we continually reinvent the wheel.” (Chicago)

            As part of the Feminist Art movement women also reclaimed their own history in order to push back on this ignorance and reject the systematic exclusion of women from the art world. Joyce Kozloff elaborates on her experience as “For us, there weren’t women in the galleries and museums, so we formed our own galleries, we curated our own exhibitions, we formed our own publications, we mentored one another, we even formed schools for feminisit art. We examined the content of the history of art, and we began to make different kinds of art forms based on our experiences as women. So it was both social and something even beyond; in our case, it came back into our own studios.”  As Kozloff states women artists produced their own knowledge of art to combat the hierarchies of knowledge. Thus feminist art movement functioned as an epistemology of knowledge.

                                Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1979.