Excerpt: Franca Trubiano on Women who Make in ‘Bio/Matter/Techno/Synthetics’

A new book from Actar, Bio/Matter/Techno/Synthetics: Design Futures for the More than Human, brings together the work of 28 women who discuss and describe the origins, methods, and tactics of design, both historically and as envisioned futures. In an excerpt from her essay, “From Muse to Maker: The Matter of Creativity at the Intra-section of Nature and Artifice,” Franca Trubiano, associate professor of architecture and chair of the Graduate Group in Architecture, sets the stage for the wide-ranging collection by describing how the accomplishments of female creators are typically contextualized in terms of their male colleagues. Along with Trubiano (PhD’05), the editors of the publication are Amber Farrow (MArch'21), María José Fuentes (MArch'21), Susan Kolber (MArch'20, MLA’20), and Marta Llor (MArch'20). There is a public book talk with the editors on Wednesday, April, 16, 2025, 6:00pm.

In the Shadow of Muses

Women who create are always fully vigilant to the fact that they have not always been advantaged with access to the means of making. The now near-commonplace reference to them as designers, artists, architects, landscape architects, material scientists, builders, coders, historians, and theorists belies the fact that this is an extraordinarily recent phenomenon. Measured relative to the history of Western thought for example, with Hellenistic Greece as a point of origin, women have sat at the intellectual ‘table’ of makers as it were for two percent (2%) of this history.(1) A hundred years ago, women were still considered but muses, sources of inspiration, and objects of interest for those more gifted with the talent to write, draw, paint, compose, build, and lead. At the end of the 1960s, in Europe and the Americas, their work was hardly visible in publications, academia, the press, works of art, and public office. Indeed, during the second wave of feminism, women still struggled to achieve an independent voice and the freedom to create.

According to British art historian, author, and broadcaster Katy Hessel, even in the twenty-first century the impulse to associate women artists with their male counterparts remains commonplace in historiography. In her essay for The Guardian, “Why do we still define female artists as wives, friends and muses?,” Hessel noted how even contemporary exhibits entirely dedicated to the work of women artists insist on identifying their personal relationships with the men in their lives.(2) Reporting on the spring 2023 Whitechapel Gallery show in London, Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970, Hessel observed that five of the eighty-six artist labels describing artwork dedicated portions of fairly limited fifty-word statements to husbands and other male artists who presumably influenced the work of these women. Hessel asked if this was characteristic of labels used to describe the work of men. Her careful review of labels in collections at The National Gallery, London and Tate Britain suggested not. As Hessel observed, labels for Frans Hals (1582-1666) at The National Gallery speak not of Judith Leyster (1609-1660), and those for Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) at Tate Britain make no mention of Marlow Moss (1889-1958). Just as she suspected, however, Moss’s label named Mondrian. When validating a woman’s intellectual and creative abilities, referencing the professional influence of her male peers and partners is presumably a requirement.

A similar observation was made by then writer for The Paris Review, Cody Delistrary, during his 2018 review of the posthumous solo exhibit of expressionist painter Gabriele Münter (1877-1962) at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, outside of Copenhagen, Denmark. He too remarked how in reviewing Münter’s prolific career—exhibited in one hundred and thirty works of art—“social conditioning dictates that you look first at the shadow of her long-term lover, the better-known Wassily Kandinsky,” rather than the strength or shortcoming of the work itself.(3) It would appear that even art critics and scholars remain habituated by a form of unconscious bias in their reflex to assume that the work of women artists is derivative of that of their male colleagues. The reverse is hardly ever the case, however.

What is more common when it comes to male artists is the citing of women who have served as their companions, wives, and sources of inspiration. Indeed, as Delistrary reminds us in his essay, “When Female Artists Stop Being Seen as Muses,” women have, historically, acquired a place in the annals of artistic artifice primarily in their role as creative motivators. In this, they participate in corroborating the often repeated and rarely challenged dialectic of ‘genius’ and ‘muse’. In this pas de deux, the former is characteristically associated with the gifted, enflamed spirit of creativity that emanates from the minds of men—originator of all ideas, culture, laws, and designs, while the latter allied with that which inspires them—their women. Visionary and near-divine prodigies seek guidance in the musings of companions, be they real or allegorical, corporeal or spiritual.

Architecture—as the stuff of buildings and the art of design—has participated in propagating this gender-based narrative as the origins of creativity. We need only recall the frontispiece of Marc-Antoine Laugier’s (1713-1769) second edition of Essai sur l'architecture (1755), whereupon the cherub’s forehead is gifted with the flame of genius. The ‘invention’ of the Vitruvian primitive hut is emblematic of the power to enlighten, held by author Abbé Laugier and engraver Charles-Dominique-Joseph Eisen (1720-1778). (4) The ‘other’ figure in the engraving is that of Architecture who, allegorized as a woman, directs our attention to the dual origins of artifice. She points to ‘nature’s’ temple with her right arm, while resting atop the symbols of architecture with her left. In this modern version of ‘contrapposto’, Eisen represents Architecture as a seated female figure gazing at structural principles while physically surrounded by the ruins of language. Our muse binds the ideality of composition and abstraction (in the freestanding columns and pedimented rafters taking form out of the wooded wilds of the forest) with the corporeality of ornamental fragments and building details (in the entablature, Ionic column capital, and remnants of fluted shafts scattered in the landscape). In and across her body, Architecture joins theory to practice, idea to ornament, and figure to fragment. As the cherub’s mind is gifted with the flames of genius, Architecture’s body rejoins nature and artifice. 

Various versions of this narrative have appeared across the history of Western thought. Beginning in the Italian Renaissance, allegories of the arts and sciences were routinely characterized using the female figure. Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera from 1482, Jacob Toorenvliet’s Allegory of Painting from 1675-79, Pompeo Girolamo Batoni’s Allegory of the Arts from 1740, and François Boucher’s 1765 Allegory of Painting are but a few examples. Even Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1656) painted a version of the allegorical female figure, except in her case she pictured herself in the starring role (Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, 1639-1639). Amongst the representational arts, women and their bodies have repeatedly been the preferred sight for the intellectual projection of artistic and cultural ideas.

In the Light of Creation 

Bio/Matter/Techno/Synthetics: Design Futures for the More than Human (B/M/T/S) challenges, rejects, and overturns this all-too-common positioning of women in the design arts. Instead, it offers much needed insights into the design and intellectual work of women who create, make, and ideate at the intra-section of nature, artifice, and technology. Their desires to propagate, generate, calibrate, fabricate, interrogate, and animate all manner and matter of things motivates this collection of essays. The women of (B/M/T/S) have charted critical paths to design inspiration and material productivity from positions both embedded within and tangential to their disciplines. Future-ready visions and historically grounded critiques are offered across twenty-two texts authored by designers and thinkers who, living in a world of both abundance and trauma, take seriously their responsibility to make ethically. Operating in ever more complex aesthetic, ethical, environmental, and socio-political contexts, and practicing at the intersection of art, architecture, landscape architecture, environmental design, material studies, emerging technologies, digital fabrication, media studies, robotics, and critical theory, the women of (B/M/T/S) have redefined the very origins, principles, and values of design. The women of (B/M/T/S) are Viola Ago, Rachel Armstrong, Dorit Aviv, Anne Beim, Martina Decker, Sonja Dümpelmann, Amber Farrow, María José Fuentes, Behnaz Farahi, S.E. Eisterer, Ayasha Guerin, Aroussiak Gabrielian, Susan Kolber, Andrea Ling, Marta Llor, Julia Lohmann, Mae-Ling Lokko, Laia Mogas-Soldevilla, Patricia Olynyk, Stefana Parascho, Rebecca Popowsky, Gundula Proksch, Jenny E. Sabin, Lucinda Sanders, Clarissa Tousin, Franca Trubiano, Kathy Velikov, Jacqueline Wu.

1) Assuming a critical mass of intellectual production by women since the early 1970s and designating the origin of recorded thought in sixth century BCE of the pre-Socratic philosophers, women have been active during fifty of the over two thousand six hundred years.

2) Katy Hessel, “Why do we still define female artists as wives, friends, and muses?” The Guardian (February 20, 2023), https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/feb/20/why-do-we-still-de…

3) Cody Delistrary, “When Female Artists Stop Being Seen as Muses,” The Paris Review (July 6^th, 2018) https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/07/06/when-female-artists-stop…

4) Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essai sur l’architecture (Paris: Chez Dechesne, 1755).