Beyond the Brush: How Women Artists Navigate Communication and Creativity Amidst the Rise of AI

In this book, Carrie T. Welch investigates how women artists working with physical media paint, charcoal, clay, pencil navigate communication and creativity in an era increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence (AI).

Women, historically marginalized in the art world, now face both systemic inequities and the disruptive presence of AI. Drawing on 20 in-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews, this book explores how women artists perceive, adopt, reject, or negotiate AI within their practice and how these choices influence their artistic processes and digital communications.
Using an interdisciplinary approach, Welch weaves together communication studies, art history, AI and technology studies, and feminist inquiry. Feminist principles are embedded in both the conception and design of the research, with women artists' lived experiences recorded and contextualized within the history of gendered oppression and erasure in the arts. This book also builds on the theoretical framework of diffusion of innovations as well as scholarship such as data feminism, the book examines the social, cultural, and structural factors that may grant or restrict access to AI.
Through this dual feminist and communications lens, the analysis identifies five key themes that reveal a complex and, at times, surprising portrait of how AI may influence the making of art and the ways artists share and promote their work. It considers the implications of AI in redefining human value, artistic meaning, and the evolving role of art itself.
Ultimately, Beyond the Brush illuminates how women artists negotiate creativity and visibility at a cultural crossroads where art and AI collide, offering valuable insights for understanding the future of artistic communication.