Entering the Picture
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Entering the Picture

Judy Chicago, The Fresno Feminist Art Program, and the Collective Visions of Women Artists

Jill Fields, Jill Fields

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eBook - ePub

Entering the Picture

Judy Chicago, The Fresno Feminist Art Program, and the Collective Visions of Women Artists

Jill Fields, Jill Fields

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About This Book

In 1970, Judy Chicago and fifteen students founded the groundbreaking Feminist Art Program (FAP) at Fresno State. Drawing upon the consciousness-raising techniques of the women's liberation movement, they created shocking new art forms depicting female experiences. Collaborative work and performance art – including the famous "Cunt Cheerleaders" – were program hallmarks. Moving to Los Angeles, the FAP produced the first major feminist art installation, Womanhouse (1972).

Augmented by thirty-seven illustrations and color plates, this interdisciplinary collection of essays by artists and scholars, many of whom were eye witnesses to landmark events, relates how feminists produced vibrant bodies of art in Fresno and other locales where similar collaborations flourished. Articles on topics such as African American artists in New York and Los Angeles, San Francisco's Las Mujeres Muralistas and Asian American Women Artists Association, and exhibitions in Taiwan and Italy showcase the artistic trajectories that destabilized traditional theories and practices and reshaped the art world. An engaging editor's introduction explains how feminist art emerged within the powerful women's movement that transformed America. Entering the Picture is an exciting collection about the provocative contributions of feminists to American art.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2012
ISBN
9781136638916

SECTION II

Re-Centering: Theory and Practice

7

ABUNDANT EVIDENCE

Black Women Artists of the 1960s and 1970s

Valerie Smith
The 1960s and 1970s saw dramatic changes not only in American social and political culture, but in the art world as well. As racial and gender relations were transfigured in the public sphere, increasing numbers of artists from communities that had historically been underrepresented in galleries and museums began to emerge. The heightened visibility of white women artists and artists of color during this period led to new strategies for reaching mass audiences, challenges to conventional distinctions between high and low art, and critiques of traditional exclusionary practices of exhibition.
Numerous artists, writers, activists, and scholars have noted that on both the political and artistic scenes, black women found themselves in a problematic ideological position.1 On the political front, black women held positions of prominence and responsibility in the Civil Rights and Black Nationalist movements. In the Civil Rights movement, for example, women such as Ella Baker, Septima Clark, Fannie Lou Hamer, Diane Nash, Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, and Jo Ann Gibson Robinson did the essential but often unacknowledged work of training and organizing activists and creating and maintaining networks of communication. Yet for the most part, their male counterparts prioritized the eradication of racial inequalities and failed to acknowledge either sexist practices within their ranks or the inextricable relationship between patriarchy and racism.
Likewise, figures such as Elaine Brown, Kathleen Cleaver, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur led Black Nationalist organizations; nevertheless, numerous accounts indicate that in this movement as well, black women in general were relegated to the roles of childbearing and nation-building. Both the Civil Rights and Black Nationalist movements privileged the powerful presence and voices of charismatic male leaders. Even as black women in both movements proved their commitment to the struggle against white supremacy and for social justice, they were expected to capitulate to male authority, ignore misogyny within the organizations, and defer their concern with “women’s issues.”
Black feminists had long been among the first theorists and activists to recognize that gender and race are mutually constitutive and interlocking modes of experience and social construction. Thus they rejected the notion that a concern for gender discrimination would detract from the anti-racism struggle. While some continued to work within the Black Nationalist movement in the hopes that a true revolution would radically alter relations of class, race, and gender, others affiliated themselves with the women’s movement, hoping to find common cause with white feminists. Their accounts regularly reflect their sense of marginalization in the feminist organizations as well, however, as they confronted white feminist claims that issues of race were diversions from the goals of the women’s movement. Black feminists in the women’s movement were expected to ignore white feminists’ racism and assertions of the class privilege and countenance an agenda that ignored the connections between gender, class, and racial oppression. Not surprisingly, in response some black feminists formed their own organizations or, as Kimberly Springer has observed, “found their activism institutionalized in social services, governmental bodies, higher education institutions, and other organizations they could attempt to influence with antiracist and anti-sexist ideology.”2
Black feminist analyses and the black feminist movement emerged as a way of theorizing the inextricability of various modalities of experience, such as race, gender, sexuality, and socio-economic status. While considerable attention has been focused on black women writers who came to prominence during this period, such as Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, and Michele Wallace (to name only a few), comparatively less attention has been given to their visual-art counterparts.3 During the 1960s and 1970s, black feminist visual artists working in a range of media and styles—film, performance art, collage installation, painting, and photography—also broke into a world that historically had been dominated by white men.
Organized in 1971, “Where We At” Black Women Artists (WWA) provided an opportunity for black women, marginalized by both the predominantly male Black Arts Movement (the cultural and aesthetic counterpart of the Black Power Movement) and the largely white feminist (and feminist art) organizations, to share concerns and resources. Although they made art, many of WWA’s members did not consider themselves professional artists. As Kay Brown, a painter, printmaker, and collagist, explained in a 1984 panel discussion held at the Hatch-Billops Collection in New York City: “They were conditioned to think that they could not really achieve the status of a professional artist.”4 By providing these women with a space in which they could engage in meaningful substantive conversation and exchange work and ideas, WWA helped them gain confidence and inspired them to continue.
Early in the history of WWA, the artists in the organization focused on the difficulties they faced in trying to exhibit their work. Most gallery owners doubted that either blacks or women could legitimately claim to be artists, so black women artists were doubly challenged. Moreover, few of the WWA artists had sufficiently large bodies of work to warrant solo exhibitions. Through the efforts of Dindga McCannon—a painter, printmaker, and muralist who had been exhibiting her work at Pat and Nigel Jackson’s Acts of Art Gallery in New York—Brown and others arranged the group show “Where We At: Black Women Artists 1971,” which led to the organization of the WWA. McCannon’s description captures the excitement of that first exhibition:
We produced our own catalogue. We had pictures [of the artists], because this was the first time in history that black women had come together and had an exhibition. So we produced a flyer, which had everybody’s picture and a statement by each woman about her art. We had a unique opening—we introduced [serving] food—and it became a media event. The press came; everybody wanted to interview us. All of a sudden, the [black] women artists were discovered!5
While the original group comprised painters and photographers who worked in a figurative style that romanticized black subjects, over time it expanded to include a wider range of artists and genres. As McCannon observed: “Now, we have a cross-section of everything from minimalism to realism, we have craftspeople, we have a musician, a writer, poets, sculptors.”6 Moreover, the group shifted its focus from seeking opportunities to exhibit in galleries to finding ways to show the work to wider communities. For instance, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts allowed several of the artists to show their work in hospitals. An America the Beautiful grant enabled them to work with the elderly at Cumberland Hospital in Brooklyn and inmates in the prison ward at Bellevue Hospital, New York. WWA also organized traveling exhibitions and workshops for children in Brooklyn and for prisoners at locations in New York State such as the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women and the Arthur Kill Correctional Facility for Men. By 1984, the group was large enough to consider purchasing a building where its members could have housing, exhibition and studio space, and a school, but regrettably, the idea never came to fruition.7
In a 1998 article, Brown described the range of ideological perspectives that black feminist artists brought to the group:
The women’s liberation movement, generally headed by liberal white women, also emerged during the 1970s. Some people link the gains made by black women artists to the influence of the feminist artists. I don’t believe this is an accurate assessment. Although WWA members and other black women artists agreed that women should empower themselves to gain economic and artistic equity, we generally viewed ourselves as integral to the black arts movement. Our struggle was primarily against racial discrimination—not singularly against sexism. We were not prepared to alienate ourselves from our artist brothers. Nonetheless, it is important to note that some of the artists (a few quite well established ones) chose to align themselves with the militant feminists.8
In her recollections of this period in the history of the organization, Brown described two collaborative exhibitions that dramatized the complicated position of black feminism from the 1960s onwards. In the first, held in 1972, WWA artists exhibited with the feminist organization National Conference of Women in Visual Arts at a range of venues in Greenwich Village, SoHo, the East Village, and midtown Manhattan. Brown noted that the two groups displayed strikingly different work. While the white feminist artists addressed issues of sexism directly, the black women artists “explored the unity of the black family, the ideal of the black male-female relation, and other themes relating to social conditions and African traditions.”9
In 1986, WWA artists collaborated on an exhibition at the Muse Community Museum in Brooklyn with selected black male artists. For “Joining Forces: 1 1 3,” WWA invited men and women artists to work in pairs in order to display in a visual medium “the means through which male/female had come together to create something that ‘went beyond the normal vocabulary to make an entity of a third thing.’” As Brown described it, this exhibition was “one of the crowning achievements in WWA’s history.”10
One of the co-founders of WWA, Faith Ringgold has long been recognized as one of the leading black feminist artists. The media in which she works, her subject matter, her collaborations, and her political activism on behalf of women artists and artists of color all bespeak her commitment to an ethics and a practice of empowerment for the disenfranchised. Perhaps her best known work, Ringgold’s story quilts confound distinctions between fine and folk art, focusing viewers’ attention on the artistic potential of a medium so fully associated with women’s work. For decades she has been drawn to women as subjects and made numerous projects with her mother, the Harlem fashion designer Willi Posey, and her daughter, the feminist writer and critic Michele Wallace. During the 1960s and 1970s, whether independently or in her capacity as a founding member of such organizations as the United Black Artists’ Committee; WWA; Women, Students, and Artists for Black Art Liberation; and the Ad Hoc Women Artists’ Group, she denounced the exclusionary curatorial and exhibition practices of major New York museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Guggenheim Museum.
Born in 1930, Ringgold was raised in a lower-middle-class Harlem family. Her mother cultivated her interest in art during her childhood. Although she studied art as an undergraduate at City College in New York, she was only able to pursue a degree in art through the School of Education, as university regulations prevented women from declaring a major in the School of Liberal Arts. After graduating in 1955 with degrees in fine art and education, she taught art in New York City public schools for many years. From 1970 until 1985, she also taught at various colleges and universities in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Staten Island. In 1985, she was appointed a full professor in the visual arts department at the University of California, San Diego.
Ringgold began her American People Series—what she described as her earliest mature body of work—with Between Friends in the summer of 1963. She completed the series in 1967 with the three largest works: The Flag Is Bleeding, U.S. Postage Stamp Commemorating the Advent of Black Power, and Die. Painted in what was for her a new style she called “super realism,” these works responded to the political climate of the Civil Rights movement and expressed the ambivalence she and many of her contemporaries felt during this period of dramatic social upheaval.
The ninth painting, The American Dream (1964), captures something of the complicated legacy of integration in the depiction of an ostensibly wealthy woman whose body is half dark and half white.11 On the side of the face that is white, shadows are conveyed in blue, a technique that highlights the paleness of the face, the neck, and the breast. On the dark side, the woman has raised her hand and bent it at the wrist to reveal a large diamond ring and long, manicured red nails. Forming a downward arch from left to right over the woman’s head is a blood-red arrow that matches her nail color; the right hand is positioned almost as if the color from the nails is dripping into the tip of the arrow.
An expensively dressed woman who is both black and white appearing in a painting suffused with red, white, and blue might be read as a symbol of the achievement of the dream of integration and equality of access to opportunity. Both races seem to co-exist in a figure bearing symbols of wealth and the colors of the flag. But the prominence of red, the downward pointing arrow, and the garish conspicuousness of the ring provide a less sanguine interpretation of the promise of integration. The painting thus evokes a fear that integration may lead to the fortification of capitalism instead of a means to profound social and political transformation.
Like many artists and activists of the 1960s and 1970s, Ringgold protested against racism, sexism, militarism, and other forms of oppression by confronting the iconic image of the American flag. The use of red, white, and blue in The American Dream manifests more explicitly in works such as The Flag Is Bleeding. In this painting, three figures stand behind a semi-transparent American flag, its red stripes seeming to drip with blood. A black man stands on the left, a white man stands on the right, and a white woman stands in the middle, a link between the two men. The placement of the figures correlates to the social and political power they possess: the white man is the tallest and most visible; the white woman is the most diminutive; and the black man fades into the background, his face partly obscured by the blue area on which forty-eight stars were placed.12 While the white man’s hands rest authoritatively on his hips, the black man holds a knife in his left hand while his right hand is placed ambiguously over his heart, simultaneously stanching a bleeding wound and pledging allegiance. The images suggest the incommensurate access to civil rights and socio-economic privilege enjoyed by whites and blacks—and men and women—within American society. Smaller than the white man but more visible than the black, the white woman occupies an intermediate status, privileged on the basis of race but disenfranchised because of her gender. The black man, gripping a knife and holding back his own blood even as he pledges allegiance, has had to risk his life to claim his identity as an American.13
In the American People series, Ringgold’s works comment on contemporary race politics in American cu...

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