Carolee Schneemann (1939–2019) was one of the most influential artists of the second part of the twentieth century. Her pioneering work in a range of media—painting, film, video, dance and performance, installations, and the written word—is characterized by radical formal experimentation and critical investigations of subjectivity, the erotic and taboo, images of atrocity, and the social construction of the female body. Schneemann was the subject of numerous exhibitions and publications throughout her six-decade career, including the retrospective Body Politics at the Barbican Art Gallery, London (2022–2023) and Kinetic Painting, presented at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg in 2015–2016, the Museum für modern Kunst, Frankfurt, in 2017, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2017–2018. Her work has been shown at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Reina Sofia, Madrid, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, among others.

Film and video retrospectives have been held internationally, including at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Film Theatre, London; and Whitney Museum, New York. Recent publications include From Then and Beyond (Verlag für Moderne Kunst / Kunsthalle Winterthur, 2022), Uncollected Texts (Primary Information, 2018). Unforgivable (Black Dog, 2015) and a book of her early writings, Schneemann holds Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degrees from the California Institute of the Arts and the Maine College of Art and, in 2017, was awarded the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale.