Season 3 Episode 12: This women's thing: feminism and the arts

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[Theme music plays]

Faith Ringgold: I decided that I couldn’t work with men anymore. They use you and you don’t grow. You just work for them and it's stupid. You know, what are you doing that for?

Linda Nochlin:  I think nowadays we're not so interested in greatness, which was the subject of my—or we think of greatness as somewhat different from the way people thought of it before feminism.

​Shelly Justement: Hello and welcome to ARTiculated. I’m Shelly Justement and I work as an oral history intern at the Archives of American Art. This podcast receives support from the Alice L. Walton Foundation.

Anne Wilson: When you say "post-feminist," it doesn't mean that the ideas of feminism are over, but it means that there was a defined period of time that was called "feminist," and there are dates that give certain kinds of parameters for different histories and waves of feminism.

Emma Amos: Yeah. So I was a member of a very famous clandestine women's group that worked at night and did not ever go out without masks on our faces. So that was one.

Patricia Spears Jones: We can figure that one out.

Shelly Justement: Feminism is not a method or monolithic sociopolitical cause, it's an ongoing project to lay new foundations for equity while recovering voices that have been lost or elided along the way. In the arts, this means enabling women to create art that speaks to their experiences, connecting across humanity through the unique powers of the visual arts.

Women's equality isn't a one-dimensional issue, and women of different national, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds encountered an array of obstacles as they brought broader experiences into view through their work. Feminist practice isn't monolithic either, as there are many nuanced approaches to advocating for equity for people of all gender expressions, ensuring fair treatment for everyone and not just women. Part of the effort became recuperating women's work from history after years of neglect while laying the foundation for a more inclusive future.

While many individual artists made prominent efforts, they also worked collectively, in organized groups like the Guerrilla Girls, an anonymous group of women artists formed in 1985 who wore gorilla masks and brought attention to the sexist and racist shortcomings of institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Activist efforts coalesced around questions of identity as well as aim, such as the Woman's Building in LA, founded by Judy Chicago, Sheila de Bretteville, and Arlene Raven in 1973 and which taught women's art history and fostered a new generation of feminist artists, or Judy Baca's Social and Public Art Resource Center, founded in LA in 1976 with a general public mandate rooted in Mexican muralism.

Difficulties emerged both in the form of barriers to active women artists as well as the barriers to career paths that women faced in other fields as well. In addition to requiring intense skill and study, art is also deeply intertwined with history as artists find new ways to express and propagate history, and as there was no critical mass of celebrated women artists or scholars, it required a concentrated effort to turn the tide. Besides the inertia of tradition, there were practical issues like earning a living and having a family, and women artists embraced a gamut of approaches to find fulfillment in themselves and in their communities. In this episode, we'll survey a range of eddies and currents in the many feminisms that have shaped and continue to shape the American landscape today.

Joan Semmel’s nude self-portraits that play with notions of landscape have been hugely influential since her career took off in New York in the 1960s. A major proponent for women’s agency in the world and the art market, Semmel detailed the perfect storm of insights that sparked her feminist revelation and how her work has unfolded since in her 2023 oral history with Gail Levin:

Joan Semmel: Spain was very formative to me in a lot of ways. First of all understanding repression, in terms of how the personal life was so connected to the political life in the fact that women's role in Spain were—was much more restricted than here. It was so blatant. I mean, you couldn't—you couldn't sign a lease. You couldn't you couldn't take a child over the border without your husband's consent. It was amazing that you couldn't—I had—you couldn't sign a lease without your father or your husband's signature, one of the other. A female signature wasn't worth anything. If you had a bank account, your husband could use your—could use your bank account. You couldn't use his. Things of that nature. So that—the societal restrictions were much clearer than they were here—they were here, but they weren't as open about it. You had to be home

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before 10:30, or there was a cop on the street, a sereno, he was called. You had to clap your hands for the sereno, and he would unlock the door for you to get in the house.

Gail Levin: Really?

Joan Semmel: Yes, because that was dinner time, and you were supposed to be home by then if you were a decent woman.

Gail Levin: Oh, they were worried about streetwalkers.

Joan Semmel: They were worried about everything, you know? There was really about control of everything. So I mean, there were just lots and lots of things like that, and also the whole thing of the religious aspect of life there was very clear also. So all of that became very clear on my mind as to—so that when I got back to the States I was primed for feminism.

[Musical transition]

Joan Semmel: And at the time in New York, pornography was a new kind of thing. But I was convinced that most of the pornography was male-determined, and that I personally couldn't respond to it in any way except by being negative.

Gail Levin: Was it also true that it took institutions like MoMA a while to kind of catch up and pay attention to feminist art, and artists associated with feminism? I remember they had a big symposium, must be 20 years ago now, and they got a woman patron to pay for it. Did that kind of thing affect your renaissance, we could call it?

Joan Semmel: Well, I think that all the feminist agitation that we did in the early days was cumulative, and it kept building and building. And gradually, but very gradually, the institutions began to take notice. So there was, I remember—I don't remember it exactly. The Guerilla Girls also in the '80s, came out very strong. I worked with them for a couple of years also, and we did all kinds of things to make that point, and that, I think, had a real effect. Because what the Guerilla Girls did was that they made it clear that it was not so much personal discrimination as it was institutional and commercial discrimination that prevented women from getting in, so that the galleries and the museums were instrumental in keeping women out of a system instead of bringing them in.

Gail Levin: And now they have to make up for their terrible deficit in collecting women artists.

Joan Semmel: And now—and now they finally are trying to compensate for some of that, and paying attention. And aside from that, I have to say that just as a feminist, and as a woman, I used to joke around when I—when we were struggling early on. It was always clear that occasionally the museums would pay attention to some very old woman, somebody who was in their eighties or nineties, and I always said that well, you have to hang on by your fingernails until you are old enough to no longer be sexually threatening to these men. And that was part of the psychology behind allowing us into the group, once we were 80. [Both laugh.]

[Musical Transition]

Joan Semmel: Well I have to say that a lot of friends have at this—in this period gotten exposure and success that took a long time to get. I say to some of those who are still struggling for visibility that you really, really have to just stay the course. It's—you never know

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when the timing just comes together of the right gallery, the right person, the right moment that your work can be seen in a way that it will be appreciated. It doesn't mean that it's any better or any worse. It's just that moment, at a particular moment, there's—there's access.

Gail Levin: There's something to say for being resilient, isn't there.

Joan Semmel: It's about being resilient, but it requires this one other thing that artists—that women have had a lot of trouble gaining, and it's why feminism has been so important, and that is a confidence in one's own vision, and that one's own vision is worthwhile.

Gail Levin: I really agree with that, and your trajectory is such a wonderful illustration of that.

Joan Semmel: It's been a great vindication and I'm very grateful to have been alive to see it, because I have friends who died before they had the pleasure of seeing their work out there, and it's out there now.

[Musical Transition]

Shelly Justement: Born in Venezuela, Luchita Hurtado was a tremendous force for women’s autonomy in paint. She made her career in southern California, where her canvases brought together a huge array of visual influences in a singular lexicon. In her 1994 oral history interview with Amy Winter and Paul Karlstrom, Hurtado talked about her origins in art and the importance of solidarity with women artists:

Luchita Hurtado: I started to draw when I was about 10 or 12. I don't remember. I had a very stern grandmother. And if she saw you idle, idling, she'd say, "Idle hands tempt the devil." And she would make you undo a hem of a skirt and do it over again, because you were not supposed to just be dreaming or thinking or…So it was not approved of. Especially women. Men, you know, that was another matter. If a man was doing—just sitting, looking out into space, oh, he's dreaming up something fantastic.

Amy Winter: A double standard.

Luchita Hurtado: Completely.

Amy Winter: Were women not only not supposed to dream or be artists, but did they have their tasks assigned to them, and expectations.

Luchita Hurtado: Yes, yes. When I first married, my mother said to me, "You have married your cross, now you bear it."

Amy Winter: Because of who he--

Luchita Hurtado: No, no. Because this is their attitude towards marriage.

Amy Winter: Well, they were right. [laughs]

Luchita Hurtado: Well, I'll tell you, Paul, life has a way of holding up your work, too. And it has in my life certainly. I t's difficult to—I've never been able to pursue a career properly. I'm always involved in life too much. And so, I write poetry, I paint, I do all these things, but I'm not running in any way after a dealer, to show or to publish or to do any of these things. I don't think it's, in a way, I think I'm even afraid of this. When the women's movement came about here in this town, it was a very strange because Joyce Kozloff, who is a very interesting artist, who is here with her husband, Max, and she said, "The women have to get together, women painters have to get together." She invited all the artists, all the women that she knew, to an afternoon at her house. We all went around the room and everybody gave their name. You gave your name and you said what you did, you're either a writer, you're a painter, you're a sculptor. It came my turn and I said, at that time, I was "Luchita Paalen," I said, "artist." And I remember

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June Wayne from the other side of the room said, "Luchita, what?" [laughs] And I said, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, [laughs] I'm sorry, June, Luchita Hurtado." [laughs]

Paul Karlstrom: When was this?

Luchita Hurtado: This was '71. [laughs]

Paul Karlstrom: June gives no quarter.

Luchita Hurtado: "Luchita, what?" I'll never forget it. So it's always been a problem to me. For instance, today's my life today. I have very little time to paint. We're either going to one place, or coming from one place. There's a lot of work involved in entrances and exits.

Paul Karlstrom: And you're usually the one responsible for it.

Luchita Hurtado: And I'm the one that's responsible.

Paul Karlstrom: Let's talk about that, because I think it's a question that interests many people, that we're much more aware of now. Here you thought of yourself, to some extent, as a professional, or at least able to operate in that capacity. You chose to be an artist, and yet you've lived a kind of life almost, I won't say a conventional one at all, but certainly in terms of your domestic life, mother, wife, homemaker, grandmother, all these things. And what about that? Men are in domestic situations as well. And yet, generally speaking, I in no way want to prime you for your own response to this, but I think everybody acknowledges, including most men, there is a difference in terms of demands upon time and the opportunity to either, within a domestic, a nice family situation, pursue a career. How did you find it through all the years for yourself?

Luchita Hurtado: Well, I really haven't ever resented any time I've given, because I don't think it's time lost. I think it's bigger than any of it. I think it's important that I paint. It's important for me to read. It's important for me to write. It's important for me to hear music. It's important for me to have children. I knew at a very early age that children were very, very number one in my life. As a matter of fact, I told my mother, when I was in my teens, I said, "I'm going to have children right away, I want a baby," and I really think that's the most important. I said, "I'm not interested even if, whether I am married or not, if I need a child, I'll have a child." She crossed herself and she said, "What priest have I hit?"

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Shelly Justement: Emma Amos blazed her own trail through vibrant canvases and prints that told profound stories about injustice and her own experiences. In the 1960s, she was a member of Spiral, a prominent group of African American artists in New York, and in her 2011 oral history she told Patricia Spears Jones about her experience with Spiral and about the power of women’s activism and friendship over the course of her career:

Patricia Spears Jones: Did you feel strange being the only woman in the group?

Emma Amos: I didn't have the sense that it was unusual for me to be there. I did question why they didn't have Vivian Brown. And I brought that up a couple of times because Vivian was a friend of mine, and she was a crackerjack artist. I understood that they did not want Faith Ringgold. They did not want two or three other artists of, you know, great note.

They just didn't want them. Vivian wasn't invited—I just don't know [why –NdC]. And so what I thought of at the time was, well, they wanted somebody who was going to go and, you know, bring them coffee and run errands and stuff like that. So I put my foot down from the first day, and I just yelled and screamed and cursed just like they did. And I did not do any of those things.

Patricia Spears Jones: Good. I can't imagine you would. [Laughs.]

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  I was as close to being one of the boys as you could get, you know. [Laughs.]

Patricia Spears Jones: Yeah, I guess so. So I guess the other side of it—one of the questions I asked was since you were involved in some of these feminist actions, were you involved in the sort of feminist—I mean, I also remember the feminist consciousness-raising sessions and stuff like that, and were you involved in any of that? Was there an art world equivalent?

Emma Amos: Well, the whole time that I was doing Spiral—I'm not ever supposed to say this. Where does the Smithsonian print this stuff?

Patricia Spears Jones: Oh, it goes everywhere, so if you don't want to say it then don't say it.

Emma Amos: Yeah. So I was a member of a very famous clandestine women's group that worked at night and did not ever go out without masks on our faces. So that was one.

Patricia Spears Jones: We can figure that one out, okay.

Emma Amos: I was busy doing that. And there were other feminist groups that I was a member of as a cover because everybody knew that I was involved in a lot of things.

Patricia Spears Jones: And I guess I'm just trying to figure out, you know, did this in some way—as you were moving through the '70s, did this start to inform the way you were going to start—because you started teaching in 1980 at the Mason Gross School [of the Arts, Rutgers University]. Was that part of what was informing the way in which you were going to carry out your pedagogy? I'm just wondering.

Emma Amos: I don't think it had anything to do with it. I think that being female faculty was—at Rutgers, Mason Gross—was a privilege and a real challenge. And I was pretty young, but I had been to such great schools, from Antioch to London to all those things that I had learned.

Patricia Spears Jones:… Not so much with the activism stuff but just the friendships, mean for you? You talked about Norman Lewis and—so I'm just curious about what did Vivian, as a fellow artist, give to you, in terms of friendship?

Emma Amos: It was the friendship. It was the being able to talk and to know so many people in the world of art and to be able to commiserate about—the only difference between us was I had children and she didn't. But that didn't make us that different because being artists was what we were and what we felt we were.

I read a lot, and I read about women writers. And they have the same problems that I think that women painters have, which is that they're kind of underground and people can not know them. I wonder who—you know, if we did a straw poll—who would come out as being the most important—women artists or women writers.

I guess, to me, it would be women writers because books are not as expensive as paintings. They're harder to find, you know. They're harder to find the publisher. But once they're out there, everybody can have them. You know, they're within ownership terms. They're cheaper. Whereas women artists—you know, you can just stumble over them. You really can.

[Musical Transition]

Shelly Justement: Miriam Schapiro was a major force for feminism in the arts starting in the 1970s through her painting, sculpture, and community-building efforts. Schapiro collaborated with Judy Chicago to develop the California Institute of the Arts and subsequently on Womanhouse, a monumental performance and exhibition space that brought women's intersecting domestic, social, sexual, and artist concerns to the fore in 1972. While reflecting in her 1989 oral history with Ruth Bowman, Schapiro gave insight into the figures who inspired her work and the great social aims of her efforts in the art world.

Miriam Schapiro: These women were all, are all heroines. Certainly, it was her life as well as her work. And also her attitudes toward society, and her particular way of being a feminist. For example, she had a lot of trouble joining groups. A lot of women have trouble joining groups. But that doesn’t stop you from expressing your point of view in whatever manner you choose to do it. That’s what she did.

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She made her little pamphlets, and she was a journalist. She published books, and she wrote her own books. She and her husband were a partnership; they published together. And ultimately she took her life. And all of that made for a genuine kind of myth for women who were at that time being so conscious of the fact that they were women, and that they had a history. We needed to have role models. Everything came together at the same time: Art and consciousness, myth and reality. You asked me before, and I don’t think we went into it, why did I think that California was a particularly fertile ground for all this to happen? I don’t think it could have ever happened in New York. New York is hell-bent on separating one person from another because of the competition. And in California there was some chance for us to get together. And it was as simple as that.

Miriam Schapiro: Ruth I hate pieties. I hate saying things should be like this or that. When you get to be my age you realize how there isn’t black and white, that most of us live in an enormous area of gray, and that that gray itself has incredible numbers of shadings. So you can’t say a feminist should be like this, or people should be like that, or if you’re a Marxist you should only wear black, as some of my friends do. [both chuckle] You know, you can’t legislate all these things. You can’t be pietistic. You just have to take people as they are and learn from them.

Ruth Bowman: But you used the word “democracy” earlier.

Miriam Schapiro: Yes. Because I think what we women did was to democratize art. I think today a lot of what goes on in galleries—I’m not saying it’s successful—is a democratization of art.

[Transition]

Shelly Justement: Judy Baca’s murals have transformed narrative art, especially in southern California, as have her educational Social and Public Art Resource Center, or SPARC. In her 1986 oral history with fellow artist Amalia Mesa-Bains, Baca talked about the importance of imagery in her work and her connections with women’s art groups in Los Angeles in the 1970s and beyond:

Amalia Mesa-Bains: What other major influences around the forming of S.P.A.R.C. really affected you? It's a woman's organization in some people's eyes, besides being, you know, cross-cultural.

Judy Baca: Umhmm.

Amalia Mesa-Bains: Was that a period of time in which your associations with the woman's movement were stronger than they were—

Judy Baca: I was living a kind of schizophrenic life around that time, [of, with] Mi Abuelita. In the chronology, it was Mi Abuelita, and then Wabash Recreation Center, then Medusa Head. and the next image was the, the series was the Mountain Second Street Mural, which I tried a large-scale 400-foot-long piece, with a large number of people—that was a predecessor, I think, of The Great Wall — with some 65 people involved in that process. And that was on the Little Sisters of [Poor Com Lewison] Home wall. I was working in the eastside, and by that time, was living in Venice. And I had this dual life, in which in Venice I had come to a place in which I had left my husband, from the San Fernando Valley. I stopped being a housewife. I never really was a housewife, as you would say.

 But I stopped being married. I had moved to Venice, because it was a sort of freer atmosphere, and I moved smack-dab into a building, the landlord of which, was a feminist, who invited me promptly to a C.R. meeting.

Amalia Mesa-Bains: Consciousness, right?

Judy Baca: Yeah, consciousness-raising. So I began to, for the first time in my life, meet other professional women. Women who were doctors, and lawyers, and biologists, and chemists, and I had never met anybody like that. I was like completely amazed at the possibility of what was available for women. And the images somehow, either subconsciously, had become feminist images. I mean, I was starting to be known for making images in the neighborhood that were the counterpoint to the adelitas, with the shoulder straps down and the breasts exposed, with the straps of bullets across them, which is what the men were making -- which was a sexist kind of image of a Mexican woman, making some kind of deference to her as a revolutionary. So the Medusa Head, in contrast, was an image of a, you know, kind of, almost a goddess image,

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of a woman whose hair turns to snakes and flowers. It comes from [Herajerone] image.

Amalia Mesa-Bains: In the period of time of the consciousness-raising groups, what people began to affect your work? What associations with other women artists?

Judy Baca: Well, I was . . . I had this problem at this point in which I was sort of divided because I had this life in the east side, which began after three o'clock, and then I had a life in Venice, which was associated with other feminists, and it was the early formation of a place called "Woman's Space," in the west side. And Judy Chicago was involved in that, and the woman's—hat was really the predecessor to the Woman's Building. And the Feminist Studio Workshop was happening at Cal Arts. And Christina who was, had become a volunteer, who signed up, just in one of my projects, as I was trying to organize the [Vettas] community. She was in the Feminist Studio Workshop, under Judy Chicago, and enlisted me in her projects in certain ways, as I enlisted her in mine in the eastside. So I did things with her; I helped her in some of her photodocumentation projects. And I began to get a feminist education, through my C.F. group and through these other women. But I always felt like I was a visitor, in a certain way, because there were not that many Latin women, or—

Amalia Mesa-Bains: Yeah, Third World women.

Judy Baca: —Third World women, at all. And so I would go and listen, and I really felt like, "They have some things to offer me." Because in my other world—in the eastside and in the area of Latin Culture, and Chicano culture —I was really an oddity. I wasn't the girlfriend of one of the men, and I was an artist in myself, and I was not either treated seriously by the men, or considered as a peer. So I wasn't getting the support from them, or anything. So I found what I lacked there within the feminist movement, other women who were willing to be interested and treat me fair, treat me in an equal way.

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Shelly Justement: Alexandra Juhasz is a media theorist who has been writing about feminism and queerness for decades; she currently teaches at Brooklyn College, CUNY. In her 2017 oral history with Theodore Kerr, she described her own trajectory in activism, and how the AIDS crisis informed her values:

Alexandra Juhasz: ​​But AIDS—people say now that AIDS is over. It's not. But, you know, I imagine there'll be a time in the future when it's over in the sense that it will be a disease that has a cure, and it won't afflict huge segments of the people in the world and America. So in that future, I look forward to people looking back to hear and gain insight how politically and personally engaged and enraged humans contributed to the end of something that they despised. So that's one audience.

But I don't know when that will be. I don't do my work anticipating it, but I assume, as long as the earth still exists, that it will happen, that AIDS will be over. But I guess the other audience in the future are feminists, and queer, and anti-racist activists engaged in whatever their despised, unjust, illicit, unattended-to blight may be. And I hope they get some sustenance and solace from the fact that disenfranchised people before them used the power of our intellect and the grace of our humanity, and our beautiful and complicated art, and our passion in the streets to respond and change something that mattered to us. So that, I suppose. Them.

My feminism was lodged in a nascent [01:02:00] project that later is what we called queer studies and queerness.

But it was a world that we built, many of us. And again, you know this history, that AIDS activism leads to queerness. Queer studies, queer activism. But I was in the nascent world from which that was going to emerge. It was a world of ideas and a world of activism. And I was a college activist. And I was an intellectual, in a stew where those things were evolving. And AIDS was part of that, as well, nascently.

So in a very quiet but known way, the world was beginning

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to shift, this very staid world that I lived in, that I was on the edge of. I was in college in a very staid place, as staid as it could be, as normative as possible. And I was friends with people on the edge. And the people on the edge were feminists, closeted gays and lesbians, artists [laughs], people of color. People politicized by our identities or by our politics or both. And that was the heyday of identity politics, so often our identities [were –AJ] our politics. Outsiders. So the outsiders were either—were strange for any number of reasons. Again, that's like the first place where I was in that small group of outsiders. And like, here's where I want to be, even though I saw what the normative middle could offer.  nd this is where art comes in for me, too. So it's one—it becomes one cluster in college and stays that cluster for the rest of my life.

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Shelly Justement: Also based in Brooklyn, Chitra Ganesh is an artist whose work across drawing, video, and installation celebrates epic and intimate relationships. In her 2020 oral history with Ben Gillespie, she described her mural installation at the Leslie Lohman museum in New York and how crises in the city shaped her and her work:

Chitra Ganesh: So I'm doing that and then I'm—my own commission, solo exhibition at the Leslie-Lohman Museum was postponed through—so that is set to open now in about a month and a half. And that that was postponed by, like, several months and it was unclear when it was going to open but I feel very lucky with that project because it's actually—it's a series of installations so it's almost like a mural that wraps around 10 windows of the museum. So at this moment particularly, it's meaningful because it's something that can be accessed from outside and doesn't require entry into an enclosed space and can be seen by a much broader audience of people. I mean anyway museums have more of a specific audience than the street does, but I think at this time that has shrunk even more because of these institutions being closed and just very slowly starting to reopen now.

Ben Gillespie: And has the delay made you think any differently about that project? I mean it sounds like the form is really ideally suited for people in the city right now but what about the work itself and thinking about queer representation and feminine representation in 2020?

Chitra Ganesh: Yeah it really made me—well so the project was about—was obviously going to be exploring those issues of queer and representation of queerness and femmeness, and femininity, but it was also going to draw on different kinds of utopias and thinking about the idea of queer utopia and thinking about this city in particular and gentrification, and, like, a number of other issues where how the architecture and sex and sexuality can be expressions of power and resistance. So I think that yeah, the pandemic, kind of, stopped me in my tracks because a lot of what I understand to be li ke queer life, queer joy, queer activism is about bodies coming together in public space, like, or private space but in privatized public spaces like clubs and other kinds of bars or institutions but also on the street, also in public sex, I mean, so there's like a lot of different ways in which obviously the pandemic would—and the social distancing and the radical rearrangement of intimacy and space would affect the work.

I think definitely I wanted to pause before I continued working on the piece. I took a little bit of a break because I felt like it was important to figure out how to I mean as it is in general in life but also with this pandemic, to respond rather than react. And to, kind of, figure out what that response would be in a more thought-out way. And a lot of my own experiences of approaching this time both as an artist and as a human have to do with being born and raised in New York and having lived here for much of my life and also having experienced September 11th here in New York. So that was the last time I kind of—I mean the financial crash

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and there were other things in between, but in terms of something where the city stopped in a way that I had never seen in my life, the last time that happened was around September 11th. And I know then, as now, that there were a lot of different kinds of modes of expression that were very necessary but that were, like, the kind of the very first layer of reaction to what was going on and also the question of how do you—how do you, like, talk about or create in relation to a traumatic event when that event is still ongoing, underway.

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Shelly Justement: Art historian Lucy Lippard has been a major influence in bringing more women’s work into the mainstream. She was a key figure in the Heresies collective, a group that published an eponymous journal and raised awareness around women’s social, political, economic, and artistic causes. In her 2011 oral history with Susan Heinemann, Lippard outlined some of her own journey with feminism and how she worked in community:

Lucy Lippard: So I went off to Spain and had saved up all this money. Ethan and I went off, and Seth was in Europe someplace; we were on an off-again thing. We stopped in Paris for a few days, and then we took the train down to Spain. And we got to this little village somehow. Rented a car—ran into a  motorcycle. It’s another long story. [Laughs.]

And I was writing this really abstruse little book. But feminism was chewing at me, sort of. And as I was writing it, I found—it was slightly autobiographical. There was a character I sort of identified with—“A”—nobody had names, of course, being very conceptual. [Laughs.]

And it really—writing this thing converted me to feminism in a funny way. The book became a lot less abstract; it was this book called I See/You Mean, which I only published years later, with Chrysalis Press in the late ’70s [1979]. So I rewrote it, and it became a sort of feminist tract at one point. But it was still very abstract, with a lot of descriptions of photographs. Do you have a copy of that?

Susan Heinemann: I do.

Lucy Lippard: [Laughs.] God.

Susan Heinemann: I copyedited it for you. [Laughs.]

Lucy Lippard: Oh that’s right. I forgot. Oh, funny, yes, because that was—of course, that was Heresies, yeah [Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics]. [Laughs.] But anyway, that was the book that in some peculiar process made me a feminist.

I came back and Poppy and Faith Ringgold and Poppy Johnson and Brenda Miller, who had all been involved in the coalition, had started thinking about how to organize, because WAR was not being successful. WAR was—they weren’t that involved in the art world, in a funny way.

And so nobody would listen to them. So we decided that we would—they dragged me in as soon as I got back from my Spain and Maine in the fall of ’70. And I was converted. [Laughs.] And we started Ad Hoc Women Artist Committee. That was the Whitney protests. We did some good stuff on that.

Well, then we started Heresies in ’75. That was the same year as Printed Matter started. No, it was—’76 was Her esies, and we started with just, again, sitting at a kitchen table at Joyce Kozloff’s house, is how I remember it. Everybody remembers it differently. And thinking, Well, we should have a voice.

We wanted to get—feminism was beginning to kind of flag, and we wanted to have something more political, and a real publication—more theoretical, more political. And so somebody said, “It needs a voice and a space.” So Mimi was going to start the school, which she did briefly. And we started the publication—The Feminist Art—what was it called—Art Institute or something.

And that didn’t last that long. Mimi had arrived from California a year—that year, I think—and she already knew Joyce and me and so forth.

 So Heresies—we had big meetings for about a year—open meetings—and picked up people as they sort of wandered in and out of the meetings. And at one point we said, “Okay, we’ve got to start [a] collective and whoever wants to be in it, is in it,” and that was about 15 of us, nine of whom were Aries. [They laugh.] We’re always like that. It was a bad idea [laughs].

Anyway, so the lesbian issue, and then Harmony did the big lesbian show at 112 Greene, which was the first lesbian show in New York, really.

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And then the issues came rolling out. One of my favorites was “Mothers, Mags & Movie Stars. “

Susan Heinemann: And why?

Lucy Lippard: We had some of the most fascinating—it was supposed to be about class. And we had some of the most fascinating discussions with this broad—that makes a 26-year age difference between the youngest and the oldest.

And we were trying to figure out how—America doesn’t like to think about class or try to think, Okay, how do we define class from a feminist viewpoint? So we started to look at our mothers and grandmothers, and everybody wanted to be working class. [Laughs.]

And you know, they had a farm so they’re working class. Yeah, but they owned the farm, so does that make them more—and we just went through all these endless little permutations of these—the discussions were really interesting, and I think the issue came out well too. And so forth, so anyway, that’s—which issues do you remember best?

Susan Heinemann: Well, I remember the ninth issue that we—“Power, Propaganda and Backlash”—

Lucy Lippard: Yes, yes, I like that one too. There were a few. Spaced every now and then would be these sort of really political issues. And we never really were that theoretical, but we had amazing people writing for it. Sally Stein, Chellis Glendinning, all kinds of—you’d go through it and you’d find sort of the usual suspects and a lot of other really good scholars that were in there.

And we turned down things by good scholars too. [Laughs.] Like too dry or too ordinary or whatever, and each—remember how each editorial collective statement in the front of each one got into it again, like, “Well, we didn’t agree about anything but we”—[laughs]. And the crit-self-crit just drove me nuts, like consensus. I’ve never been any good at that. I love collaboration, but when it gets standardized, I’m not fond of it.

But anyway, the crit-self-crit was at the end of every meeting. We went around, and everybody said how they felt the meeting had gone and how slighted they felt because somebody talked too much and nobody listened to me—[laughs]—and, “So-and-so hurt my feelings,” and there’d be tears and rage. [Laughs.]

[Musical Transition]

Shelly Justement: Linda Nochlin rocked the art historical boat with her 1971 essay, "What there have been no great women artists," which called upon women to reform the institutions of art, and in her 2010 oral history with James McElhinney, she reflected on the scope and attitude of feminism, as well as the shifts she'd seen in institutions throughout her career:

Linda Nochlin:  Right. I mean, I'm not going to change from a feminist to a, you know, misogynist. [Laughs.] That's for sure, no matter what evidence is offered to me, because—and I don't think feminism is a methodology. I mean, that is a lot of crap. You can't have a feminist methodology.

James McElhinney: Yeah, let's speak about that a little bit because since the late '60s there is a—there have been a number of programs instituted in women's studies, in gender politics, gender studies. And there is a museum in Washington, a National Museum of Women in the Arts. Was this effective, do you think, in leveling, you know, the playing field?

Linda Nochlin:  I think it was. I think absolutely, but I don't think it's a methodology. It's a politics. Feminism is a political position, but it is not a method. There are a lot of methods that feminists use. I don't think there is a methodology which we call feminist. That's ridiculous. How could there be?

James McElhinney: Well, I don't know that anybody is advancing that idea.

Linda Nochlin:  People sort of suggest there is, but I don't think they're very good thinkers. I mean, gender is always there. Either in one's own position or another. I try to be a sharp and careful and unsloppy and undogmatic thinker, but I do believe in justice based on gender. And a lot of my thinking is in some way conditioned by this, which doesn't mean that I'm going to pretend that a third-rate woman artist is better than Michelangelo, whom I don't like anyway, but I know he's good. I mean, I don't think—but I think nowadays we're not so interested in greatness, which was the subject of my—or we think of greatness as somewhat different from the way people thought of it before feminism.

James McElhinney: How would you define it today?

Linda Nochlin:  I think today, it's interesting…artists,

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artists that raise issues, artists that make you think and wonder and delight and so on, but we don't necessarily think of them as great in the sense that they're like patriarchal law-givers in the arts and we have to follow them and so on. I think the field is more open now. It's that Postmodernism is a much more open field.

[Musical Transition]

Shelly Justement: In her 2012 oral history, Anne Wilson, a Chicago-based multimedia artist, gave perspective on the cycles of activism that accrete into feminism as she spoke with Mija Riedel:

Anne Wilson: Particularly the younger generation, there’s lots of politics, debate that is  part of this renewed interest in craft. It might be about lifestyle. It might be about renewed interest in collaboration, social experiments, which were so key and important in the '70s as well. So I think there is a fair dose of that. But also—many who come and lecture at our school, like L. J. Roberts, see the word "craft" in alignment with the politics of queer culture. They see craft in alignment with DIY culture and personal agency and politics, alignments with histories of marginalized work of women or laborers of both genders—wanting to raise issues about the politics of labor and how things are made. Journals like the Journal of Modern Craft and Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture publish essays by so many different kinds of writers. And the audience for these journals moves between different definitions of craft and contemporary fine art and design.

I'm sort of interested in this idea of "post-craft," although I don't need to have my own terms used by others. When you say "post-feminist," it doesn't mean that the ideas of feminism are over, but it means that there was a defined period of time that was called "feminist," and there are dates that give certain kinds of parameters for different histories and waves of feminism.

[Musical Transition]

Shelly Justement: With her paintings on canvas or quilt that interrogate tradition across the spectrum of human experience, Faith Ringgold has been a leader in making space available for Black women in the arts. In her 1989 oral history interview with Cynthia Nadelman, she described the threads of activism that frayed and came together early in her career:

Faith Ringgold: And Carroll Green was the consultant for that. So she wrote a letter thanking him or commending him for hiring Carroll Green. I have the letter. I have a copy of the letter, but it didn't say anything about supporting the wing or I think it's wonderful that you're going to do this for my husband or whatever. She didn't do that. She did this other thing. so we didn' t get it, we didn’t get that. So we got the show for Romare  Bearden and Richard Hunt. I was not invited to the opening, because it was thought that I would be still angry and maybe do something .

Cynthia Nadelman: When did that show happen?

Faith Ringgold: 1971. So you know that was the end of that period. Of course that kind of thing might still happen again, you know, but it would be done differently . See, that period had its own special way of doing things, and we were right on top of everything. I worked so hard I didn’t do any art for a couple of years because everything I had went into working on that Museum of Modern Art. So after that I decided that I couldn’t work with men anymore. They use you and you don’t grow. You just work for them and it's stupid. You know, what are you doing that for?

Because before that I had said, "Look, I don’t want to get involved

00:55:00

in the women's movement." I had been invited to come to the first meeting of NOW in 1967 and I had said, "Look, I don’t want to go to that. I mean I have different priorities. I'm a Black woman. I'm interested in Black people. What is this women’s thing? I'm not going to that. But nobody ever embraces a political movement until it touches their needs. They have to have a need. And at that time I was not in touch with what my need was or the fact that I was not going to be able to achieve it in the way that I was going about it.

Cynthia Nadelman: Right, but you were giving it a try?

Faith Ringgold: I really had to go through all of these experiences. And later on when I talked to other black women and they said , "Oh, well I don't really think that the women's movement relates to Black women, I said, "Well, I can understand how they feel because they haven't walked in my moccasins." They haven’t done what I’ve done. They haven’t been out there supporting these men like I have. They haven’t gotten a show for Romare Bearden at the Museum of Modern Art. I did that, okay? I know for a fact he wouldn’t have gotten that show without me. It took all that dedication and all that time and all those years and all those demonstrations, all that typing, all those flyers, all that running around doing all that stuff, all those meetings with those trustees all those times in order for that to happen, see? That’s not my life. That’s not what I’m here for.I don’t know all of what I'm here for, but I know I’m not just here for that. I'm here to help to make change, but in the process of that not to eliminate myself. I am part of the change that I want to make.

[Outro Music Plays Through End]

Ben Gillespie: This podcast is produced by Ben Gillespie and Michelle Herman at the Archives of American Art. It was edited by the team at Better Lemon Creative Audio

Our music comes from Sound and Smoke composed by Viet Cuong and performed by the Peabody Wind Ensemble with Harlan Parker conducting.

 For show notes, work cited, and additional resources, visit aaa.si.edu/articulated.

A special thank you to Emily Shapiro, the formidable managing editor of the Archives of American Art Journal, for germinating this episode idea.

If you enjoy ARTiculated, please consider rating and sharing it.

The Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution is a nonprofit organization that relies on donations from individuals like you to sustain our ongoing operations and special programs like ARTiculated. To support our work, please visit aaa.si.edu/support. Thank you.

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