CINDY NEMSER'S FORUM

2011-05-30T11:15:00.004-04:00

My Unfortunate Interlude with Joan Mitchell--or the Evils that Gin Can Wrought

Before I ended my stay in Paris, Chuck, Cathy and I took a train from the Gare Saint Lazare to Mauntes La Jolie and then a taxi to Véteuil to see Joan Mitchell. I was glad that she had agreed to be interviewed.
She met us at the center of town accompanied by her daughter-in-law Sylvie, who had just lost twins in childbirth. We went to the local inn, and, in fluent French, Joan ordered an excellent lunch for us.
Joan looked like she lived hard. She was needle-thin, and despite somewhat worn, heavily lined face, quite handsome. Her hair was shoulder length, with fluffy bangs in the front of her face, sheepdog style, and while she talked she had a habit of constantly putting her hand through her hair, ruffling her bangs and pushing them back. Throughout the meal, she touched no food but drank wine and then beer and then Scotch. We chattered in a causal but guarded manner all during the luncheon, and when we had finished, Joan led us through the small town to her home.
On the way we passed a church that had been a leper colony in the twelfth century. But most important to Joan was the fact that Véteuil was a place where Monet had lived and where his wife Camille had died. With great pride and affection, she pointed out his unpretentious little house. Finally we entered her property through a gate one the street and walked many scarped graveled steps up the house that was located on the top of a hill overlooking the river.
It was a beautiful, sprawling two-storied stone building, and its windows and lawn offered a variety of magnificent views of the river and the boats that often make up the subjects of Monet’s paintings of the 1870’s. The interior of the house was very attractive too, dark and cool, with lots of antique furnishings, but I noticed that only the paintings of Jean Paul Riopelle, the Canadian artist with whom Mitchell lived, adorned the white-washed walls. When I asked Joan why none of her own work was hung in the house, she replied that she was a very private person and didn’t like to put her work on exhibit. Riopelle owned the only painting of hers on display, and it was located in an inconspicuous space over a door in an upstairs room. Then she introduced us to a puppy named Vishnu who my daughter took to on sight.
Next we were given a tour of the grounds at the back of the house. There were gardens, fields, and a little orchard in which I discovered the sunflowers that occasionally turn up in Joan’s paintings and drawings. She also told me that there were fields beyond the boundaries of their property that often made up the subject matter of her paintings. Then she and I went into her studio and closed the door.
I asked if I could put the tape recorder on, but she told me she wasn’t ready. She would let me know when it would be all right. She talked slowly at first. Lying on the bed like an odalisque, making jerky motions, every once in a while she would throw her head back and wave her arms around a bit in a spastic movement. When I asked her a question, she would think about it for a few minutes and then make a long-winded reply. It was not easy to have a real dialogue with her. Rather, I would say something and she would expound on it. I spent much of the afternoon listening and suggesting ideas for her to elaborate on.
When we first sat down, she told me that there were no paintings for her to show me as they were all out on loan. Recently Mitchell had had a show at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York, of paintings from 1966 to 1972. According to her, many of the works had originally been gathered from her collectors and many of the rest had been sold since then. She added that it would be very hard to get them together again, but she was going to have an exhibition of 15 paintings at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, Oct. 1972.
Joan told me that her art didn’t come easily to her and that she only turned out about 20 paintings a year. She had to feel them, and they were not just slopping a lot of paint together for the sake of adding color. Her defensiveness on that score I guessed to be an old reaction dating back to the 50’s when Abstract Expressionists were accused by an unsympathetic public of just smearing paint on the canvas.
Indeed, Mitchell made a great point of explaining that it wasn’t just impasto and building up color that was important to her, but rather the creation of form. It was necessary, she told me, to step back to see her paintings—one shouldn’t see them up close. Showing at the Martha Jackson Gallery, in New York, was not entirely satisfactory, to the artist, because there was no way of stepping back in that limited space to see the paintings in their proper perspective. In contrast, the Everson Museum had been a joy to her, because it offered the spectators distant views of her paintings. Then she said that it was very hard for to talk about her paintings, “after all paintings are meant to be visual—not really meant to be discussed.” After this pronouncement, I decided not to press hard and to put off the discussion of her work until later. Even though she had brought me transparencies of various paintings to look through, I thought she might not feel enough at ease with me to deal with them as yet.
I decided to question her about her background. She seemed eager to tell me about herself, and I learned she was born in Chicago, the daughter of a social register family. Her mother was a poet and her father a self-made businessman. It seemed that her father had expected her to be a boy and was disappointed in her sex. As time went on, he didn’t seem to be able to reconcile himself to her gender since he was always telling her that she acted like a boy, moved like a boy and so on. He constantly challenged her as a woman by saying, “You’ll never speak French as well as I. You can’t draw as well as I. You can’t do anything as well as I because you are a woman.” Yet both her parents encouraged her to do things as well as she could. “I wasn’t allowed to waste what I got,’ she ruminated, “and I won plenty of athletic prizes for my parents.” It was clear that she had defensiveness about being a woman and a terrible ambiguity about her identity She told me that she had been to several psychiatrists over the years as a result of this insecurity. The first was a Freudian, but she realized that he was not going her any good and was anti-woman to boot. A change to a woman psychiatrist, she contended, had helped her a great deal and she had remained with her for quite a while.
Despite her difficulties with her parents and problems of social adjustment, Joan was a determined girl. Her sister, she said, went to a fashionable, socialite kind of school, while she attended a school that practiced a different brand of snobbishness—the intellectual variety. Afterward, she went to Smith College for a couple of years and then picked herself up out of there to go to art school in Chicago. Next came a Fullbright Traveling Fellowship and Mitchell was off to Paris to study. From Paris it was back to New York and the beginning of her mature career as an artist.
Joan met the painters of the New York school whom she deeply admired and who became her friends. A member of the second generation of the Abstract Expressionists, her contemporaries were Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, and Sam Francis. Grace, she said, had been one of those very aggressive women who had tried to act like a man--be one of the boys. That was her way of getting ahead. Joan recalled how difficult it was for women artists then, but she had been accepted to some degree anyway. “It was hard for people male or female to get galleries in the 50’s,” she told me. “Hardly anybody had a gallery then.” Kline, whom she admired tremendously, never had a one-man show and DeKooning had only one exhibition. It was very difficult.”
Adamantly, Joan declared that she never thought, at that time, of getting an exhibition for herself—a “one-man show.” She reiterated several times that she viewed her art and her personal self as two separate entities and that her art was not that great, not that important. “Never do I think of myself as a genius,” she said emphatically, “because I don’t have a that kind of egotism.” She did concede that some of her paintings were good but not all of them.
Nevertheless, I could not help but recall that as soon as we had met at the inn, even before we exchanged more that a dozen words, Mitchell had pulled out clippings of the complimentary reviews she had received from Peter Schjeldahl of the New York Times and other newspaper critics as well. It struck me that a form of self-deception was operating in this woman.
Yet at other times, Mitchell would be excruciatingly candid and insightful. When I asked her if she thought women artists were discriminated against, her answer was an empathic yes, especially as they grew older. It worried her a great deal that older women were no longer viewed as sex objects. “Yet,” she asserted adamantly, “they still had sexual desires and still want to fuck just like men—but nobody wants to fuck with them” As for her own relationship with Riopelle, she didn’t discuss it sexually, but it hadn’t done her any good professionally in France where she was viewed as the great man’s wife. Anyway, she said, in her own consistently inconsistent manner, she wouldn’t want to show in his gallery or take advantage of his connections as she really wanted to remain independent.
Nevertheless, in their life together, she had the burden of running his household, cooking and cleaning, and taking care of his children and grandchildren, although she was not legally his wife, “Well,” she admitted truculently, “I let things pile up, but if the housekeeper doesn’t come and it gets too bad, I have to do it. How can I let Riopelle do it, he’s not well? But, of course, I have a bad back myself.” (I noticed that during our entire conversation, Joan had been constantly sipping Scotch. At regular intervals, she would take a little mug into the bathroom and fill it up as soon as it became empty. Judging by the quantity and rapidity of her consumption, I had first assumed she was drinking beer, but she told me it was Scotch which she used for medicinal relief for the pain in her back.) She went on to say that she hadn’t been able to paint in the last few months because of Riopelle’s daughter-in-law’s loss of the twins. It was all too upsetting.
Riopelle, however, did expect her to work and respected her as a painter even though he saddled her with all the household chores. He went off the Paris practically every day because he enjoyed seeing all his cronies, while she stayed at home in Véteuil most of the time. “But it’s not that I couldn’t go,” she insisted, “I prefer not to.” Mitchell seems to be caught in the typically married woman artist’s bind. She had assumed all the responsibilities of the artist’s wife and while she seemed to resent them, she was powerless to slough them off. Unwilling to fight for equal distribution of household duties, she had resigned herself to carrying the load alone, all the while rationalizing to herself that it is her duty to do so.
The unwillingness to fight for her own rights was also apparent in Mitchell’s relation to the art world. She had taken herself out of art world politics by living in an out-of-the-way suburb of Paris and by keeping her mouth shut. No matter what kind of skullduggery goes on she says, “People should be above that—it isn’t right to complain—you just wait it out.”
Indeed her anxiety and defensiveness in connection with confronting art world politics was apparent from the minute Joan and I met. The interview I did with Louise Nevelson, in which she spoke out against the New York Mafia, Clement Greenberg, Tom Hess, Harold Rosenberg, etc., was the first topic Joan questioned me about. Even though she had not seen the actual interview in Changes, she thought it would have been better if I had not printed actual names, rather just descriptions of the people, even if Louise had been so literal. It was wrong, she insisted, to fight these people out in the open, although everything Nevelson had said about them was true. Greenberg, she informed me, had done her injuries in the past and had made her career very difficult in terms of getting in with the right collectors and galleries. He and Motherwell and Frankenthaler had helped to ruin many artists—to spoil their careers by making it financially impossible to exist. No, she certainly had no love for the Greenberg crowd. Frankenthaler, who according to Joan, had been a close friend of hers in the old days, had recently refused to attend a Mitchell opening because Helen didn’t care for impasto painting.
We had been talking for over an hour, and I was beginning to get nervous as she still refused to let me record her words. When I asked her permission again, she shook her head, gave me a hostile look and “sneered, I’m surprised that you haven’t asked to see my paintings, because if I were you, it would be the first thing I’d want to see.” ‘But,” I reminded her, “You said you didn’t have any here. “Well,” she rejoined looking annoyed, “I would have asked for even the few that might be here or else looked at the transparencies or the catalogues.” She then accused me of being more conceptual or intellectual rather than visual. At that point, I realized that Joan really thought I hadn’t wanted to see her paintings and was upset and insulted. Then, of course, I did ask to see the work and out it came.
First she showed me a small triptych done in heavily brushed-on oils. It was carried out in reds, violet, and gold. She said it was a painting of a field, and though one would be hard pressed to trace any exact configuration of the subject in the work, the essence of that natural phenomenon certainly pervaded the painting. Out came another ‘field “ image. This one was a was a diptych with one side composed of square-like color forms on a white background and then another much more suggestive, to me, of a mountainous or hilly terrain built up out of thick globs of red, blue and, yellow, I found Joan’s paintings difficult to get into at first, not easy to read. Yet as I stared at them, over a period of time, I began to appreciate the intense care and feeling that went into their creation.
Then the artist showed me a four-part painting of a snow scene. She told me that it had been inspired by a trip to Canada that she had taken with Riopelle, and she was just working it out now. All the elements of the painting were suggestive, the rigor of the underlying formal structure kept the loosely handled paint from disintegrating into aimless areas of color. Although there was nothing literal about the image, with its violet and blue tints glowing from beneath a white over coast of color, it was totally evocative of the snow covered North Country.
In contrast to this Canadian inspired depiction, the paintings that were connected with Véteuil were crammed full of brilliant color and vibrant sunlight. “I could never get that kind of color in New York,: she insisted. “You simply don’t have that kind of color there.” It is true that the paintings were definitely linked with particular places and specific objects. Not that they are realistic, but the sensations that they conjure up in the viewer are undoubtedly referential to some external phenomena. I saw the golden hues of the Véteuil landscape in many of her works. There was a sketch of a sunflower, which resembled no member of that fauna I’d ever seen, yet I know it was none other than the large sunflower I’d seen growing in her garden earlier that afternoon.
Next several large completed paintings made their appearance. One, composed out of heavily stroked-on areas of blue paint, suggested, to me, a somber night scene. Joan didn’t agree and said she didn’t feel that way about the work at all. Each painting, it came out, was a product of the artist’s internal mood interacting with the time and place of her chosen subject or as the critic Pierre Schneider had so aptly put it, “ A picture begins with a confession and ends up as a landscape.”
A red and green diptych came next with one section conjuring up, for me, earth, hills and sky while the other side, constructed out of more abstract forms seemed to leave nature behind leading me into a less familiar territory. Where I was, I could not say, but there was a challenge and a mystery here.
Like the Joan herself, her paintings projected a great deal of restless energy that twisted back on itself, not quite resolved yet structuring its own irresolution all at the same time. These paintings unite, in an uneasy cohabitation, an imagery that is blatantly aggressive and all the while tenderly reticent
After this delicious sampling of supposedly unavailable canvases, I was dismayed to be told by Joan that the show was really over. I was double distressed because so far none of our conversation had been captured on tape.
In desperation, I went back to the transparencies of the paintings displayed at the Everson Museum and once again I asked her to let me turn on the machine.
No. I’d don’t want to be recorded. Not this time,” she responded adamantly.
Trying to hide my frustration, I listened to her comment on the transparences but I got little satisfaction from her conversation, as it is necessary to experience the actual size, texture and color of the paintings to gain any true knowledge of them. Nevertheless, I looked closely at a transparence of another lovely field painting with a vaguely horizontal motif of squares, and after having seen some of the original work, I could better appreciate the color reproductions. I noted that her work revealed a definite Hans Hofmann influence and certainly the spirit of Monet hovered over all Mitchell’s work. She openly admitted her adoration of Monet and urged me repeatedly to visit the Marmottan Museum in Paris where many of his best paintings are to be found..
Several hours had passed since we began the interview and I began to feel guilty for leaving Chuck and Cathy to fend for themselves. I also was annoyed to have spent so much time with her with nothing to show for it. True, I could do a profile of her and her work, but it couldn’t be in my book that was made up solely of conversations. I came up with a way to salvage the situation. I asked if I could send her written questions and if she would return them with written replies. She hesitated a minute, and then she said that would be all right. I felt hopeful again that she could be included in my book as I thought she was a truly notable artist.
After spending an afternoon with Joan, it was hardly surprising to me that her paintings should exude these disturbing, but not unappealing contradictions. Mitchell herself was a strange but mesmerizing combination of passivity interacting with forcefulness, exterior toughness shielding a vulnerable interior. In contrast to her spoken belief that she and her art were very much separated from each other, I would insist that they were very much one and the same.
When we finally emerged from her studio, Chuck told me Cathy had been playing with the puppy all afternoon and the poor thing had collapsed from exhaustion. Both he and Cathy were eager to leave. Joan gave us a warm handshake on parting, and I departed believing our encounter had been a success.
When I returned to New York, I wasted no time sending carefully thought out questions to her. Most of the questions were the same as the ones I had asked her in her studio. Imagine my astonishment when she sent my questions came back to me with this notation scrawled on the top of the first page. “I have no intention of answering these Mickey Mouse questions.” I couldn’t guess where this hostility was coming from. I speculated that she had to be mentally off balance. But I was still angry and disappointed.
Later on, when I was talking to Marcia Tucker, with whom I had developed a rapport, I confided to her the treatment I had received at Joan’s hands. Marcia laughed and told me of her experience with the artist. It seemed that she and a male companion had been invited to Véteuil to spend the night. At dinner, however, Joan and Riopelle drank too much, had a terrible fight, and taking out their fury on their guests, asked Marcia and her friend to leave in the middle of the night. As there was no train at that hour, they pair had to hitchhike back to Paris. When I heard that story, I was thankful that I got off comparatively easily. Joan Mitchell, might be a stunning artist, but when soused she was a terror. I had written down an account of my meeting right after it occurred. I decided to publish it in the spring 1974 issue of the F.A.J. Some people were very angry with me for exposing Joan’s bad behavior. Unfortunately, in the art world, there is an adage that a great artist is permitted to behave outrageously no matter how many ordinary folks he or she mistreats.

2011-04-29T10:00:00.000-04:00

CINDY NEMSER - ARTIST, WRITER, ART AND THEATER CRITIC, CURATOR, EDITOR OF THE FEMINIST ART JOURNAL, AUTHOR OF THE FIRST BOOK ABOUT WOMEN ARTISTS, ART TALK: CONVERSATIONS WITH 15 WOMEN ARTISTS

In 1969, I met a group called WAR was planning an all women exhibition called "X to the 12th Power." I was invited to one of their meetings and someone asked me the question that changed my life. "Have you ever experienced any discrimination due to being a woman?"

That query woke me up!!!

I began to realize how much sexual discrimination I'd experienced from the time I was born in 1937. As the daughter of Jewish middle class parents who sought to be "Americans," no one thought of preparing me for a Bat Mitzvah. None of the women in my family had ever had one, although the boys had Bar Mitzvahs. So I was deprived of a serious religious education. But I visited my grandfather at the synagogue on high holy days, and I loved Passover, when my grandmother and my mother's sisters and their husbands all got together.

I was a fat kid, teased by my cousin Barry, (who to this day addresses me as Cecil the Nicil). When he called me names, I cried. His father, Uncle Eddie called me a cry baby. No one stood up for me. From the time I was a small child I loved to draw and paint and art became my consolation. I wanted to be like my much admired Aunt Shirley, who had her own art school. When I was 12 I read Irving Stone's Lust for Life and immediately identified with Van Gogh, who was also an outcast but became a famous artist. So, though I had no encouragement from anyone, including Aunt Shirley, I was determined to be an artist, too. In high school I made it my major. To my despair, none of my art teachers ever praised my work. With great misgivings, I let go of art as a vocation. However, my art teachers had sent us to the Met and to M.O.M.A. and in those magical places my fascination with art was cemented.

I attended Brooklyn College, majored in education, and married Chuck Nemser in my junior year. After graduation in 1958, I was assigned to P.S. 44, an elementary school in a poverty-stricken area of Brooklyn, where the children were ill equipped to absorb the curriculum and the teaching staff consisted of hard working but discouraged women while the administration was comprised of harassed men, some also sexist.

I taught there during the day, and took classes at night at Brooklyn College graduate school and obtained an M.A. in literature. I also joined the newly formed Union and went out on the first teachers' strike. This experience, which taught me I had courage, and Emerson's dictum that nothing was as important as developing as a person, encouraged me to keep searching for a situation where I could be more effective and more fulfilled.

After 6-1/2 years at P.S. 44, I learned that NYU had a graduate division, the Institute of Fine Arts, which offered courses in every period of art history. I was ecstatic to discover I could become an art historian and study with the greatest minds in the field. With no hesitation, I gave up teaching and enrolled. I was also thrilled, though a little overwhelmed, that after eight years of marriage, I was also to become a mother. I gave birth to my daughter Catherine after my first year at the Institute.

But, as a wife and a new mother, my illusions of the joy I would have being instructed by greatest minds in the field were soon shattered. I had no encouragement from my professors, although I studied assiduously and had excellent marks. My thesis advisor, Donald Posner, told me I wasn't fit to obtain a PhD as I was too old to sit at the feet of a professor (I was 29). Another professor, Colin Eisler, told me that, since I was a wife and mother, I should become a volunteer. But I still retained the illusion that hard work and dedication were all that was needed to reach the heights. I was still too insecure not to believe that somehow I hadn't worked hard enough or wasn't smart enough. I had no clear idea that without a male mentor, I could never make my way up to the highest positions meted out by the men's club that controlled the snobbish, sexist world of art history

Once I attained my M.A. from the Institute, in 1966, I obtained an internship at M.O.M.A. where cronyism and prejudice toward women also prevailed. I had no powerful male helping me, so I left and created a successful art tour business. While I enjoyed the lecturing, I didn't want to be a business woman.

Through my first artist friend Irene Moss, I found my way to the world of artists that I had yearned for in my youth. Moss connected me with Arts Magazine, and eventually, I wrote articles for all the art journals. I was the first to interview Chuck Close, Vito Acconci, Eva Hesse, and many famous artists.

In 1969, I encountered a feminist organization called Women Artists in Revolution, (W.A.R.),( See intro paragraph.) A visit with that group changed my life. I became an avid feminist, determined to fight for women's in the arts.

As a critic who had worked briefly at the headquarters of Arts Magazine, I had seen from the inside how dismally dealers, art publishers and writers dealt with women artists. Fortunately, around 1970, Arts hired a sympathetic editor, Gregoire Müller, who allowed me to do an article about the situation. It was one of the first published pieces about sexism in the art world. I called it, "Forum of Women Artists," as it was made up of quotes. I asked the women how they felt about their status. Most refused to answer honestly, for fear of angering the establishment. The piece caused a stir.

I also contributed to an alternative newspaper called Changes; it gave me the opportunity to do a taped interview with Louise Nevelson. In it, one minute she spoke like a queen, declaring, "I am a women's liberationist." But, when I provoked her by asking how she felt about being left out of an important exhibit at the Met, she morphed into a guttersnipe, hissing, "I'd like to sue Harvard. I'd like to take a gun and shoot that other little snot nose, (She meant Rosalind Krauss, an historian and critic, much influenced by Clement Greenberg, an art world king maker, whose disciples taught at elite schools, owned top galleries and curated at premier museums including the Met and M.O.M.A.]). The interview was an art world sensation.

At my suggestion, Brian O'Doherty, the editor of Art in America, commissioned me to write an article about the treatment of women artists before the present day. I researched thoroughly and discovered that there were great women artists in the past, but they had been written off by art historians and critics in the nineteenth century. I tested the premise right up to the present by sending queries to all the prominent 70's critics. Most of them revealed their misogyny. Entitled "Stereotypes and Women Artists" my article contradicted Linda Nochlins's claim that there have been no great women artists. Then I met Patricia Mainardi, an artist, writer and member of "Red Stockings," a radical organization. The feminist activist Robin Morgan had given Pat $200 to start a feminist art newspaper and Pat invited me to contribute. I showed her some of my writings spoofing the haughty, hypocritical sexist art establishment, and she wanted them all. She invited me to join the board. I brought Irene Moss with me and Women and Art was born.

Cindy holding copy of F.A.J.

However, when we began the second issue there was a split in the political ideology of the board. Moss, Mainardi and I left and started The Feminist Art Journal, into which I introduced a "Male Chauvinist Pig of the Month" page. We had contributions from women's artists and art historian organizations both locally and around the world. I considered my "Stereotypes" piece to be the most significant analysis of the reasons that the status of women artists' was so low. There was not one female artist mentioned in Jansen's Key Monuments of the History of Art, the bible of the field, therefore I published it on the front page of F.A.J. It later was featured in the Journal of Aesthetic Education and included in Judith Loeb's Feminist Collage.

In 1971, I became a founding member of "Women in the Arts" and joined them when they picketed M.O.M.A. Chuck took the historic photograph of the event.

After my articles appeared in Arts Magazine and the F.A.J., I was invited to lecture and conduct seminars at colleges, museums, and women's organizations all over the country. I did a slide talk as part of the presentation based on my "Stereotypes" piece. I enjoyed working with the eager women students and even sparring with the skeptical males.

In the spring of 1972 I was invited to speak at a National Women's Conference at the Corcoran School of Art, in Washington D.C., where I distributed the Journal to women from all over the country. This was a terrific launching for the magazine and our readership increased greatly. At the event I had the opportunity to speak with Patricia Sloane who was the key note speaker. I wrote up the conference for Art in America.

In 1973, Pat Sloane and I did three panels about women artists and the art world at the College Art Association held at the N.Y. Hilton. Some of the participants were Marcia Tucker, Audrey Flack, Betty Parsons and Lee Krasner. All the sessions were jammed. At the third one, Louise Nevelson strode into the auditorium and spoke forcefully of her struggles, but though she could have, she never hogged the microphone. Later women artists and historians from all over the world began to testify about the male prejudice of art teachers, dealers and curators. The room was pulsing with energy and the women vowed to take actions to remedy the situation. What an experience!!!

The young woman sitting next to me hugged me when I told her I had put the panels together. "I'm a painter from Philadelphia , she said. I want to put on an all women artists' exhibition there. Could I come and see you?" Of course, I said yes!

As Diane Burko and I conferred as to how to go about putting on a major exhibition, I got a flash and said: "Why only one show?" Why not have a city-wide festival with as many institutions, both public and private, presenting the work of women in all the visual arts, as well as panels of significant art world women? The main exhibition would be entitled "Women's Work," and should be a juried exhibition made up of Marcia Tucker, Adele Breeskin, Anne d'Hanoncourt, Lila Katzen and myself. Each juror could invite 20 American artists she thought to be the most gifted."

I also offered to curate my own exhibition called "In Her Own Image." The whole festival would be called "Philadelphia Focuses on the Visual Arts" or "Focus."

Diane was ecstatic. She got together a committee of women supporters. I traveled back and forth to Philadelphia, once to help convince the supporters to take on all the necessary work that would be required; later to help persuade powerful Philadelphia people to participate in making the festival come to pass. In the spring of 1974 "Focus" became a reality!

The main exhibition was held at the city's Civic Center. My show, in which I displayed 46 artists, was at the Fleisher Memorial Art Gallery. The Philadelphia papers raved about the events, and The New York Times sent Grace Glueck to write it up. I created a black and white catalogue, reproducing the art works in my exhibition, as a centerfold in the F.A.J. and wrote about "Focus" there.

After the third and forth issues of the F.A.J., both Mainardi and Moss ceased editing the magazine. But with Chuck keeping the books, and second reading, Carolyn Mezzello, and later Jeri Bachmann doing the layout, and Barbara Jepson copy editing, we soldiered on, publishing articles by Gloria Orenstein, Lucy Lippard, Frima Fox Hoffrichter and other distinguished art historians and writers who did pieces on little known highly creative women. Most articles were on the visual arts but sometimes they covered the other arts as well. I did so much writing for the magazine that I had no time to contribute to other publications, some of which, I and other contributors, had attacked for their corrupt behavior and sexism. The subscription list accelerated and I found it hard to keep up with assessing the art scene for significant subjects, assigning articles, editing submissions and answering letters. Fortunately I found a dedicated college student, Diane Addrizzo, to take care of the subscriptions and mailings.

Before I cut my ties with the art magazines, I published an interview with Lee Krasner in Arts and an article in Art Forum, which drew attention to her "Little Image" paintings that indicated that she influenced her husband Jackson Pollock. I also helped to make Alice Neel a feminist cause célèbre by writing about her bohemian life as well as her work in Ms. Magazine. In 1975, Neel painted a portrait of Chuck and me in the nude, which was reproduced in New York Magazine and the Village Voice.

At this point I put my taped interviews into a book and called it Art Talk: Conversations with 12 Women Artists. I had a hard time getting a publisher as they couldn't understand the need for it, even though a book about women artists had not appeared since the 1930's. Because of an article in Ms. I was contacted by Scribners. It was published exactly as I wrote it.

It was exciting interviewing the artists. Some like Sonia Delaunay, Dame Barbara Hepworth and Louise Nevelson were historic figures and grand dames. I formed a friendship with the tragic Eva Hesse, and there was a lot of laughter with the wicked, but hilarious Alice Neel.

When Art Talk came out, Scribners gave me $100 for my "book tour," which I supplemented by giving slide talks at universities and institutions around the country. In California I met Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago. Chicago was determined to have me see vaginas in all her paintings, but I resisted, saying I felt entitled to interpret her works as I saw fit. Judy strongly resented my response, and, in one of her autobiographies, called me "Cindy the Nemesis."

In 1975, I was proud to receive an Art Critics Fellowship from the N.E.A. In 1977, I was completely wowed when The Minneapolis College of Art and Design asked me to be their Commencement Speaker.

In the summer of 1976, I wrote my first novel, a satirical roman á cléfé about a woman artist ready to do anything, including providing sexual favors, to reach the top. I think the book scared the publishers because it exposed the misogyny and dishonesty of the art establishment. It was way ahead of its time.

By the summer of 1977, I was burnt out and had to close the F.A.J. and leave the public arena for a time, though my heart was always with the fight for equality. I turned inward and began to write fiction. My next novel, Eve's Delight, dealt with a woman's sexual needs, and it found a home in 1982 with Pinnacle Books.

In 1989 Patsy Cunningham, the widow of Ben Cunningham, asked me to do a monograph about her husband. I'd met Ben many years ago and had written a favorable review in Arts about his fabulous optical painting. I had also done a catalog introduction for his traveling exhibition, so I agreed . The result was Ben Cunningham "A Life with Color" JPLArt Publishers/Texas.

In the 90's, I wrote an article about women artists for Ms. depicting violence, and a piece about the lack of produced women playwrights for the Dramatist Guild Quarterly. I published humor pieces for the New York Times and Newsweek and did theater reviews for many publications.

In 1995 HarperCollins did a reprint of Art Talk, adding three more 70's interviews. The book is has been translated into many languages and is in libraries and museums all over the world. It is considered a classic and is always available online and in bookstores.
Cindy with Betty Friedan and Barbara Seaman

In 2005, I wrote a memoir, Tales of the 70's Art World: As Told by A Feminist Art Critic. The book is filled with historical facts and stories about my encounters with a few male artists, but mainly the great women artists, some of whom, such as Lee Krasner, have finally come into their own. It also fills in the gaps in women's art history missing from other books about the period.

In 2007, I curated an exhibition at the Tabla Rasa Gallery in Brooklyn called "Women's Work: Homage to Feminist Art." consisting of women artists' of the 70's, dialoging visually with young artists of the twenty-first century. The exhibit received super reviews.

I also created my blog in 2008 called Cindy Nemser's Forum, and I have continued to lecture about the need to hold demonstrations and sue, if necessary, for the equal validation of women's art in all important venues.

Cindy Nemser is in the process of archiving her tapes and papers, seeking a publisher for her memoir, and attending to her blog at www.cindynemser.blogspot.com

Comments to Jacqui Ceballos: jcvfa@aol.com

Back to Table of Contents

2011-04-29T09:53:00.001-04:00

2011-02-15T17:02:00.000-05:00

A Story from my memoir Tales of the 70’s Art World

How I Met Vito Acconci

Basically, I am not a person drawn to nihilism and perversity, yet back in the 70’s I such forms these qualities were so fascinating and original at times I could not resist the pull of its attraction. The outrageous was fun; it interrupted the boredom of doing and thinking the conventional thing from day to day. It was like being at the circus with nose-thumbing artists as the clowns. A part of me longed to be outrageous too, but I was too timid, too hemmed in by the bourgeois constraints that had held me in all through my childhood and youth. I had always sought to be proper and ladylike suppressing deep-rooted urges to break out of the mold I had been poured into. Seeking out the outrageous, along with the beautiful and idealistic answered a need in me that needed to be liberated. Soon my need was met. With no encouragement on my part, the outrageous sought me out.
I had gone to see an exhibition at the Jewish Museum called “Software,” and while I was examining one of the works in a glass case, I noticed that a man was standing much too close to me. I felt uncomfortable, so I moved away from him. To my consternation, he followed me, and I was deliberating if I should call a guard, when he laughed and said,
“Don’t worry, I’m not a masher. I’m an artist and I’m in this show. This is one of my pieces—seeing how close I have to get to make someone uneasy or to move away.”
Knowing artists of that period had begun to do anything if they called it “conceptual art,” much relieved, I turned eyed him closely. He had a long, sad, basset-hound-like face and light brown hair that hung in limp strands down to his shoulders. He wore a kaki army jacket, that I guessed came from a thrift shop, nondescript kaki pants; and laced-up combat boots. His complexion was pasty as if he didn’t get enough fresh air. His complexion was pasty as if he didn’t get enough fresh air. His complexion was pasty as if he didn’t get enough fresh air. His complexion was pasty as if he didn’t get enough fresh air. His complexion was pasty as if he didn’t get enough fresh air. He could have almost passed for one of the homeless.
My curiosity was aroused, and I asked him to tell me about himself and his art t in more detail... He said his name was Vito Acconci and that he thought of himself as a sculptor who used his body as his material. His work was to explore the reactions to various behavior types of actions like the one he had tried out with me. He called it a “Proximity” piece. His action had made had made me move away, so he considered the piece accomplished. He had explored other types of behavioral interactions such in as a series of “Trust Pieces.” In one such piece, he had himself blindfolded while standing on a pier with his back to the water, and then followed directions from another person to keep moving backward, trusting that the participant would not maneuver him into the Hudson River. I was hooked. I knew Vito Acconci would be my next interviewee for Arts Magazine where the editor Gregeoire Müller and I were very simpathico.
Vito lived in the top floor of a walk-up in the Village and had a small studio that which had a few pieces decrepit furniture including who chairs and a table on which I put my tape recorder... When I entered he was wearing the exact same outfit I had seen him in at the Jewish Museum, and his hair was as straggly as ever. He invited me to sit down and placed himself opposite me. As we began to tape the interview, as he spoke in a monotone voice, he kept rocking back and forth in his seat as if he were a rabbi reading from the Torah. However, he was very organized and concise in his response to my questions. He told me he had been educated by the Jesuits and learned from them how to be logical and economical in presenting himself.
Then we discussed his method of using himself to make art works... In a very dead pan voice, he said, “I bite myself and then apply printer’s ink to the bite marks to make prints. I’ve also pulled the hairs along my naval, so that it gives the illusion of opening further and starts to resemble a vagina. This piece called “Openings, allows me to break out of being a male and experience the possibility of being a female. I’ve done pieces about one entity being absorbed by another such as the one when I rubbed a cockroach into my chest.” I refrained from saying “Yuck and kept my response very neutral. . .Actually my editor liked this image so much he put the cockroach sitting on Vito’s hair chest on the cover of the issue that contained the interview. .It was the first full length piece about the artist.
We did not however, discuss Acconci’s most infamous Installation piece in which he masturbated under a wooden platform made for him at the Sonabend Gallery since it was still in the future. In that art work, as you approached the platform, you heard his ecstatic groans as if he was in the throws of a sexual climax, but you could not see him. That show was considered scandalous and it made Acconci famous. From then on anything he did was considered significant. Graduate students make him the subject of their PhD theses but he never topped the bridge piece. (It’s fun to note that in April 2004, Acconci mounted a partial reprise of his 70’s exhibition and presented another platform from which orgasmic groans could be heard throughout the gallery. The artist was not under the platform, but there was a full documentation of the piece with all sorts of notes and diagrams, and most titillating of all, there was the black and white video tape of Acconci performing the act itself.)
During our interview, Acconci kept to a low monotone voice as he continued to move back and forth in his chair as if he could not rest for a moment and he told me how he constantly used his physical presence to interact with the world outside him.” I had my mail sent to the Museum of Modern Art during the Information Exhibition so that anyone could read it.
Then he said, “My works have both and masochistic and sadistic elements in them, since it is sometimes necessary to use outrageous actions to break out of society’s structures and limitation. I use art as an instrument to break through these structures. That’s why I’m always stressing the idea of an artwork as a means to improve, to correct, to open myself up, and to make myself vulnerable. Art is a way to make my life bigger than it is”
I found myself mesmerized by his bizarre actions and his methodical explication of the motives that had led him to perform them. Though Acconci’s behavior assaulted both social and sexual taboos; I chose to interpret them positive and humanistic. Acconci through the use of his own body and presence was attempting to break down barriers and connect with others. Though he said, “My immediate purpose is not to reach other people but to reach into myself; I think one essential for this kind of art is for the artist not be in an alienated position any more.
But he also said that he was s not divorced from other people. “My work is to get away from walls, not just museum walls. The goal is to break out of spiritual and social confines as well.”
These were rousing ideas and I was galvanized, yet after the Sonabend exhibition a little part of me was skeptical. Acconci said he wanted out of the art world system but here he was having one man shows and participating in museum exhibitions. And wasn’t performing sexual acts in public a sure fire way to get attention? Yet Acconci was so sincere when he spoke about his ideas and his goals. And he was a decent person with nothing the nothing pretentious about him although he seemed to have absolutely no sense of humor.
At the time my husband was doing photography development in the basement of our house, Vito, needing photographs developed in a hurry, came out to Park Slope since Chuck offered to do the prints for him. He brought along his companion Kathy Dillon, a pencil thin hollow-cheeked young woman who was dressed all in black. Acconci wore his usual shabby,-army jacket and heavy boots. They both made an odd presence in our conventionally furnished house with its wall-to-wall carpet and flowered wallpaper in the kitchen. We had by then started an art collection, but Acconci took no notice.
While the men were working on the photographs, I took Kathy to the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens that were in glorious bloom, with the pink and white Japanese Cherry Blossom trees at their peak. As we strolled through the Japanese Garden, with its azaleas and peonies, Acconci’s bizarre, taboo busting art seemed far away. When we returned, the photographs were done, so I invited Acconci and Kathy to dinner. They were polite and appreciative, and I detected none of the snobbery so prevalent in the art world in either of them.
Yet though I fascinated by the physical and psychological activities that made up Vito’s art, a part of me was disturbed, even repulsed by some of the methods he used to create them. In one case, he had treated two women like rats in a disastrous lab experiment. In his customary monotone voice, he said, “While I was teaching at Visual Arts, I invited a young female art student to come and live with me and my girl friend. Of-the-moment, but soon the situation evolved into a disastrous ménage à trois. The women disliked each other. They were competitive for my attention. I enjoyed their conflict and was able to detach myself from the rather nasty implications of this life style by viewing this situation as one of my pieces. I even began to score each woman in terms of her successful attempts to claim my attention.” I kept this situation going until emotions came to a head and the student attempted to commit suicide. Then, I realized that my conscience would not let me continue this satisfying piece any longer and subsequently I had had to content myself playing a pimp to my girlfriend’s prostitute in a piece called “Broad Jump” where she and another girl were to be the prizes awarded to the a man making the longest leap”
I wondered if he had read about the way Picasso had abused two of his mistresses by playing one against the other for his affections although he never thought of it as a piece of artwork. I did not include an account of this sadistic “piece” in the Arts interview. I was a feminist by then and it revolted me. I wondered if he had any idea how sexist it was.
After I included him and some of his circle –Denis Oppenheim, Barry LeVa, Bruce Nauman etc in the first article about Body Art called “Subject+Object =
Body Art.” Looking back the dawning years of feminism, I am not surprised that neither Vito nor one of these male body artists ever suggested I include Marina Abramovic, who was also doing art of that nature to be included in my piece. It was still a men’s club. Now she is as well known as any of them for that kind of work and among many other factors, The Feminist Art Journal and my book Art Talk: Conversation with 15 Artists helped to lay the groundwork.
I never wrote about Acconci after that but I did do admire him as a true innovator and a strong influence on the work of younger artists up to today.
He lectured at the New York Studio School on February 8. I wonder if he was still wearing his Salvation Amy type jacket.
More tales will be coming tell you friends to come and read about the 70’s art world. I met many of the people we think of as icons today especially, but not exclusively women artist and the founders of the Feminist Art Revolution. Leave a comment and it pertains to my story I’ll put it one the blog. If you know an agent or editor who would be interested in getting this material published please let me know.

2010-12-27T14:48:00.000-05:00

Fat: The Insidious Killer
By
Cindy Nemser
My friend’s 36-year old daughter just died of a massive heart attack! She weighed 250 lbs. The obesity that probably caused her sudden death filled me with a profusion of excruciatingly painful memories.
Fat filled my life with misery from the moment I was born. While pregnant, my mother, a heretofore 5’2” slender, attractive woman reached 230 lbs. Her size created the need for a cesarean birth causing peritonitis, and an extended hospital stay where enforced bed rest resulted in phlebitis. It was a stay during which my father accrued 40 lbs as well as, on the side, a voluptuous Puerto Rican bottle blond who gave him good times and a son. He gave her a house, a car, fine clothes, and luxurious vacations.
My mother’s compensation for life as a wife and mother was a small railroad style apartment, rented from her demanding immigrant mother, and all the food she wanted. She also had me, a picky eater of a child, whom she induced to wipe her plate clean by reading her romantic fairy tales as her reward. Perhaps mom hoped that the romance that had passed her by would flower for me.
My mother was probably consciously unaware that stuffing us both would never produce the enchanting princesses she longed for. Instead she remained a corpulent food addict and I became a hefty kid-- an object to be tormented.
So my early days were filled with tension and disenchantment. I had to go to stores that sold clothes for chubbies. I used to pray that one of these pretty but large outfits would hide my rolls of unwanted flesh and get me a first kiss when we played Spin the Bottle at a party; but it never happened.
I was melancholy and lonely just like my mother. She was always complaining, “Your father comes home too late, has to work on Saturdays and never takes me anywhere." Mostly that was true. But when he wanted to give her a good time, even taking her to splashy nightclubs like the Copacabana, she refused to go. She was ashamed of her appearance.
Since we both were deprived of the positive attention we craved, we turned to food as our substitute for Prince Charming. We had a huge refrigerator and an enormous freezer that was so stuffed with all types of meats and other kinds of foods that something always fell out if I opened the door. There was also a pantry loaded with bread, crackers, supermarket cake and cookies, as well as canned vegetables and fruits.
For real occasions mom went to the fabled Ebingers. They were still all over Brooklyn in the 50’s. There she bought fabulous blue berry crumb pies, lemon and chocolate hard icing cakes, éclairs, and much more. For candy she turned to Baricini chocolates as well as Lofts Butter Crunch squares.
However, though we had all these goodies in the house, my mother told my mr and my father, also a food devotee, not to touch them.
“These things are fattening and we all need to lose weight! They are for company; we should eat only low calorie food. I don‘t want to see you eating them.” But despite her own commands, she continued to buy all these forbidden items. None of us said anything about her hypocrisy. I suppose she had to imbibe no matter the consequences. We just turned into sneaks who gobbled the fattening food on the sly at different times of the day and made sure to eat them out of sight.
I wolfed down brownies and other sweets in the bathroom or in my bedroom. My mother had huge pockets in the apron she always wore and she stealthily popped crackers and chips into her mouth all day when no one was looking. I remember how hard it was to get her to sit down and talk over my life problems with her when I was a pre-teen. She was always “busy” trying to keep out of sight so she could eat. Late at night, when my mother and I were in bed, my stealthy father would be in the kitchen, tearing off large chunks of Vanilla pound cake or 7- layer Chocolate cake.
We never dined together, but that was no surprise as everyone was swallowing on the sly at different times of the day.
Then when I was eighteen and had managed to become what was called “pleasingly plump” (I was never pleased with the term), fat among other things began to exact tragic payments from my parents. First my overweight father’s body and lifestyle gave him hypertension and high blood pressure. They resulted in two heart attacks: one serious; at 48; one fatal; at 57.
But his early death wasn’t enough. After he perished, my mother learned about his deceitful behavior. It was a horrible blow. Even food did not provide comfort. She lost a tremendous amount of weight too rapidly, suffered from diabetes and angina that led to two massive heart attacks and death at 6.2. Before she died, she became seriously manic-depressive. She even tried to blame me for my father’s transgressions and once spit at me and said, “I wish you were never born!”
I am more fortunate than my parents. At 73, with a history of diet pills, Weight Watchers and Overeaters Anonymous, I am still overweight due to a chronic pain problem, but I am not obese and I have a lovely daughter, who has always stayed slender. I also have a treasured skinny 10- year old moving machine of a grandson. True he does adore sweets. And bad as I know it is, I am always tempted to ply him with the goodies I mainly forbid myself.
I am torn. Much as I bask in his pleasure while stuffing down a Mallomar or a Milky Way, I never want him or his loved ones to suffer the wretchedness inflicted by killer fat.

My friend’s 36-year old daughter just died of a massive heart attack! She weighed 250 lbs. The obesity that probably caused her sudden death filled me with a profusion of excruciatingly painful memories.
Fat filled my life with misery from the moment I was born. While pregnant, my mother, a heretofore 5’2” slender, attractive woman reached 230 lbs. Her size created the need for a cesarean birth causing peritonitis, and an extended hospital stay where enforced bed rest resulted in phlebitis. It was a stay during which my father accrued 40 lbs as well as, on the side, a voluptuous Puerto Rican bottle blond who gave him good times and a son. He gave her a house, a car, fine clothes, and luxurious vacations.
My mother’s compensation for life as a wife and mother was a small railroad style apartment, rented from her demanding immigrant mother, and all the food she wanted. She also had me, a picky eater of a child, whom she induced to wipe her plate clean by reading her romantic fairy tales as her reward. Perhaps mom hoped that the romance that had passed her by would flower for me.
My mother was probably consciously unaware that stuffing us both would never produce the enchanting princesses she longed for. Instead she remained a corpulent food addict and I became a hefty kid-- an object to be tormented.
So my early days were filled with tension and disenchantment. I had to go to stores that sold clothes for chubbies. I used to pray that one of these pretty but large outfits would hide my rolls of unwanted flesh and get me a first kiss when we played Spin the Bottle at a party; but it never happened.
I was melancholy and lonely just like my mother. She was always complaining, “Your father comes home too late, has to work on Saturdays and never takes me anywhere." Mostly that was true. But when he wanted to give her a good time, even taking her to splashy nightclubs like the Copacabana, she refused to go. She was ashamed of her appearance.
Since we both were deprived of the positive attention we craved, we turned to food as our substitute for Prince Charming. We had a huge refrigerator and an enormous freezer that was so stuffed with all types of meats and other kinds of foods that something always fell out if I opened the door. There was also a pantry loaded with bread, crackers, supermarket cake and cookies, as well as canned vegetables and fruits.
For real occasions mom went to the fabled Ebingers. They were still all over Brooklyn in the 50’s. There she bought fabulous blue berry crumb pies, lemon and chocolate hard icing cakes, éclairs, and much more. For candy she turned to Baricini chocolates as well as Lofts Butter Crunch squares.
However, though we had all these goodies in the house, my mother told me and my father, also a food devotee, not to touch them.
“These things are fattening and we all need to lose weight! They are for company; we should eat only low calorie food. I don‘t want to see you eating them.” But despite her own commands, she continued to buy all these forbidden items. None of us said anything about her hypocrisy. I suppose she had to imbibe no matter the consequences. We just turned into sneaks who gobbled the fattening food on the sly at different times of the day and made sure to eat them out of sight.
I wolfed down brownies and other sweets in the bathroom or in my bedroom. My mother had huge pockets in the apron she always wore and she stealthily popped crackers and chips into her mouth all day when no one was looking. I remember how hard it was to get her to sit down and talk over my life problems with her when I was a pre-teen. She was always “busy” trying to keep out of sight so she could eat. Late at night, when my mother and I were in bed, my stealthy father would be in the kitchen, tearing off large chunks of Vanilla pound cake or 7- layer Chocolate cake.
We never dined together, but that was no surprise as everyone was swallowing on the sly at different times of the day.
Then when I was eighteen and had managed to become what was called “pleasingly plump” (I was never pleased with the term), fat among other things began to exact tragic payments from my parents. First my overweight father’s body and lifestyle gave him hypertension and high blood pressure. They resulted in two heart attacks: one serious; at 48; one fatal; at 57.
But his early death wasn’t enough. After he perished, my mother learned about his deceitful behavior. It was a horrible blow. Even food did not provide comfort. She lost a tremendous amount of weight too rapidly, suffered from diabetes and angina that led to two massive heart attacks and death at 62. Before she died, she became seriously manic-depressive. She even tried to blame me for my father’s transgressions and once spit at me and said, “I wish you were never born!”
I am more fortunate than my parents. At 73, with a history of diet pills, Weight Watchers and Overeaters Anonymous, I am still overweight due to a chronic pain problem, but I am not obese and I have a lovely daughter, who has always stayed slender. I also have a treasured skinny 10- year old moving machine of a grandson. True he does adore sweets. And bad as I know it is, I am always tempted to ply him with the goodies I mainly forbid myself.
I am torn. Much as I bask in his pleasure while stuffing down a Mallomar or a Milky Way, I never want him or his loved ones to suffer the wretchedness inflicted by killer fat.

2010-03-27T11:52:00.000-04:00

Visibility or invisibility at the Brooklyn Museum

A.I.R. Gallery, The Feminist Art Project &
The Institute for Women and Art, Rutgers present:

Invisibility to Visibility:
Are Museums Opening Up to Women Artists?

At The Brooklyn Museum on Saturday, March 27, 2pm
Press Release

A.I.R. Gallery, The Feminist Art Project and The Institute for Women and Art are pleased to announce the panel discussion, Invisibility to Visibility: Are Museums Opening up to Women Artists?, part of a two-panel series, The Issues of the Moment: What is the Future for Women Artists? For the third year, this series considers the most current critical issues and concerns for women artists, and celebrates Women in the Arts during National Women’s History Month.

Introduction by Elizabeth A. Sackler
Panelists: Chrissie Iles, Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art; David Revere McFadden, Curator, The Museum of Art and Design; Alexandra Schwartz, Coordinator of the Modern Women’s Project at the Museum of Modern Art; Jorge Daniel Veneciano, Director of the Sheldon Museum of Art.
Moderated by Ferris Olin, Co-Director, Institute for Women and Art at Rutgers, and Kat Griefen, Director, A.I.R. Gallery.
The panel will be held in the Cantor Auditorium of The Brooklyn Museum and hosted by The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. The Brooklyn Museum is located at 200 Eastern Parkway. Free with Museum Admission.

For more information on this panel, including a full press release, please click HERE

This panel series is made possible by The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art and The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with A.I.R. Gallery, The Feminist Art Project, and The Institute for Women and Art at Rutgers.

For further information contact A.I.R. Gallery Director, Kat Griefen at 212-255-6651 or kgriefen@airgallery.org .

I think it is terrific that a panel consisting of powerful people are discussing the visibility or lack thereof women artists at this time However, I have a sinking feeling that when the numbers of women on exhibit at the major institutions are added up, the results will still not be impressive.

I believe that one of the reasons women artists do not move ahead is because they have allowed themselves to be written out of art history in the past and sadly enough they continue to allow it to happen today. With s prettily packaged bone tossed to them by a member of a fabulously wealthy family, they have been essentially marginalized both here and in Washington D.C, (the Sackler Center for Feminist Art and the Women’ Museum in our capital). These venues should be a significant jumping off place for gifted women artists to enter into integrated new exhibitions. But more important they should provide an incentive for major museums like MOMA, the Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim and the Brooklyn Museum as well to rethink their permanent collections always on view. I recently visited MOMA and saw very few works by women artists on view. The contemporary wing of the Met isn’t any better. The same situation exists at the Guggenheim or the Frick. reconstructed have an important place The current crop of female artists have been lulled back to a ghetto and still do not understand that in 2010 separate is not equal. As Patricia Mainardi wrote back in Women and Art in 1971

There have been a few events and exhibitions at the Sackler Center for Feminist Art but a scarce amount of them have included the people who made the women artists' movement happen right here in Brooklyn and in the other boroughs. Where are the women who were ready to confront the establishment and demand more gallery and museum shows and made it impossible for a dealer to say, "I'm not taking on any women this year. In 1971, women representing different organizations confronted the director of the Brooklyn Museum, Duncan Cameron in his office and demanded a show of women's work. Faith Ringgold of WASABL was there with her daughter the writer Michele Wallace, Kay Thompson of Where We At an all African American group came. Diane Levin of the Ad Hoc Women’s Committee, Patricia Mainardi and Janet Sawyer, of Red Stockings, Muriel Castanis of Women Artists in Revolution (WAR) came as well, as did June Blum the curator of the museum at Stony Brook. I was there as a writer and member of Women and the Arts, and Woman and Art Journal (that was before the Feminist Art Journal) ready to write the episode up. Irene Peslikes was there and so was Alice Neel, God bless her. Cameron refused to have an all woman's show at the museum proper and not in the Community Gallery, unless the women paid for it and then sold it to museums elsewhere. For free he only offered the Museum’s auditorium as a place inside the sacred bastion where women could gather. Little did he know what he had wrought? Women poured into the place in huge numbers and finally let their anger spill forth.

2010-03-24T13:44:00.001-04:00

For Immediate Release
A.I.R. Gallery and The Feminist Art Project Host Panel Series:
The Issues of the Moment: What is the Future for Women Artists?
At the Tribeca Performing Arts Center and The Brooklyn Museum
NEW YORK, NY, MARCH 2010 – A.I.R. Gallery and The Feminist Art Project are pleased to announce a two-panel
series, The Issues of the Moment: What is the Future for Women Artists? For the third year, this series celebrates
Women in the Arts during National Women’s History Month. The first panel, Breadlines to Broad-based Support, will
be held on March 10th at 7pm at The Tribeca Performing Arts Center. The second panel, Invisibility to Visibility, will
be held on March 27th at 2pm at The Brooklyn Museum.
Wednesday, March 10, 7pm – Breadlines to Broad Based Support: Funding Opportunities for Women Artists
Panelists: Grimanesa Amoros, Artist; Susan Ball, Program Director, New York Foundation for the Arts; Tom
Finkelpearl, Executive Director, Queens Museum; Catherine Morris, Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for
Feminist art at the Brooklyn Museum; and Joan Snyder, Artist.
Moderated by Judith K. Brodsky, Co-Director, Rutgers Institute for Women and Art, and Kat Griefen, Director,
A.I.R. Gallery.
Held at The Tribeca Performing Arts Center at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, 199 Chambers Street,
New York NY - admission $5, includes reception.
Saturday, March 27, 2pm – Invisibility to Visibility: Are Museums opening up to Women Artists?
Introduction by Elizabeth A. Sackler
Panelists: Chrissie Iles, Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art; David Revere McFadden, Curator, The Museum
of Art and Design; Alexandra Schwartz, Coordinator of the Modern Women’s Project at the Museum of Modern Art;
Jorge Daniel Veneciano, Director of the Sheldon Museum of Art. (Confirmed to date)
Moderated by Ferris Olin, Co-Director, Institute for Women and Art at Rutgers, and Kat Griefen, Director, A.I.R.
Gallery.
Held at the Cantor Auditorium and hosted by the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at The Brooklyn
Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn NY - free with museum admission.
This yearly two-panel series considers the most current critical issues and concerns for women artists. The 2010 panel
series will address funding for women artists’ projects and recent museum exhibitions that highlight women artists’
work. Looking to the future, the panels will also address such questions as: In the current economy, have opportunities
for woman artists diminished or increased? Do recent surveys at major museums mean increased visibility for all
women artists? How are museums re-envisioning their permanent collections? Are women artists gaining ground on the
walls of museums and in permanent collections?
This panel series is made possible by The Tribeca Performing Arts Center, The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist
Art, and by public funds from The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with A.I.R. Gallery,
The Feminist Art Project, and The Institute for Women and Art at Rutgers.
Please see www.airgallery.org for biographies of the panelists, directions and further information or contact Gallery
Director, Kat Griefen at 212-255-6651 or kgriefen@airgallery.org.
ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE • 111 FRONT ST, #228, BROOKLYN, NY 11201 • 212-255-6651• WWW.AIRGALLERY.ORG

2010-03-19T14:23:00.001-04:00

2010-02-01T14:15:00.000-05:00

At 4:47 PM, Susan Schwalb said...
Dear Cindy,

So sorry to hear you haven't been well. You seemed quite chipper at the Sylvia Sleigh film screening last month. I hope your book of memories of the feminist days gets published, I for one would love to read it. Have you tried the Feminist Art Press?

Good luck

2010-01-15T14:26:00.001-05:00

Dear Blog Readers

Check my blog for my complaint about the Access A Ride program. I appreciate what it does, but it doesn’t do it entirely that well. What’s your opinion?
I am also looking for a publisher and agent for my memoir Tales of the 70’s New York Art World: Told by a Feminist Art Critic. It is a personal history of my entry into the art world, both the men and women I met there and my conversion to feminism and all the feminist activities in which I and lots of other women in the arts participated. The book is an historical document, but it is also a lot of fun to read.
I will also be putting more stories from the book among other things on my Forum.

2010-01-15T13:54:00.001-05:00

Access A Ride Should Be More Accessible

As much as I appreciate Access A Ride as an incredibly inexpensive means of travel for a person who cannot use public transportation I must register a complaint about the way it is run. First of all the person to be transported must wait up to 30 minutes for the vehicle, while the transporting van or car will only wait five minutes. This puts a heavy burden on an individual like myself who is suffering from various serious ailments and cannot always more that quickly. (I have chronic pain in my feet and cannot stand for more that a few minutes without unbearable suffering.). And then what if that person can find no shelter where it is possible to be seated while waiting for the vehicle and one is forced to stand in the street for up to thirty minutes in rain, snow or excessively cold weather AAR is really not a viable especially if the vehicle is does not arrive after the designated time and a private service must be called?
There is a solution to this problem, but officially drivers are forbidden to use it. (Some kind-hearted souls do it anyway). All these drivers have the disabled persons’ home and (if they supply it) cell phone telephone numbers. They can easily get in touch with their scheduled passengers. A call would be the most efficient and compassionately means of alerting clients that their rides are ready to take them on and they must get to the vehicle and be ready to depart.
There are other problems as well that I have encountered while attempting to use this service. It very difficult to schedule a return trip when one doesn’t know how long an appointment will take. For example, it is impossible to know when one will be finished with doctors’ visits. One can only guess a return time, but more than likely it won’t be the correct one. Then it is necessary to call and cancel the return ride and reschedule a new one again having to face the possibility of a long wait that can also include the half hour waiting period... This is most unfair as it can make it possible for the patient to spend half a day or more seeing a physician
. Again if a better use of cell phones, the patients could call Assess A Ride and let them know when they are finished and a driver in the vicinity could call the patients and quickly pick them up.
I must add that although I abhor the lack of efficiency that went into the planning of the AAR program I am grateful to the parts of it that I can use. I am lucky enough to live in a house that has a large picture looking out on the street and in front of it is a large soft couch on which I can stretch out as I wait for my ride. I can be outside in a few minutes.. So I use ARR for one-way trips only and for the return I take a car service or a taxi. That’s expensive and it shouldn’t be necessary.

2010-01-09T16:42:00.000-05:00

January 9, 2010

What Gets Printed on My Blog

Dear Readers,

Since my blog is called a forum I invite you to respond to what I have written. However, after receiving a vitriolic missive from a person who only signed his or her name anonymous I guess I have to lay down a few basic rules.

1. I will not print a response that is nothing more that a torrent of name-calling.
2. I will not print anonymous responses.
3. I will not print foul language.
4. The blog is not meant to be a platform for advertisements of any kind.
5. The blog cannot be a space for long-winded theoretical dissertations that have nothing to do with the subjects I am addressing.
6. I will reserve the right to accept, or reject what I receive. However, I will not edit it, as I believe if something written is worth publishing the writer’s words should not be tampered with.

I do not mean to slight my readers but these are some of the ground rules. They do not mean I will not print points of view that disagree with mine, but I will not distress my friends with messages that are offensive tedious..

2010-01-07T19:04:00.000-05:00

Nurse Practitioner—My Torment!

I complain, I rant, I yell, I whine, I am no longer the funny competent person my family, especially my daughter used to know. I can go head to head with Job. Why this drastic personality switch?
For the past 17 years I have had a chronic aching, burning pain in my rectum along with burning, aching tingling feet, and burning dry mouth. I am literally physically up.
So far I have found no medical person to diagnose the cause of these afflictions but I keep on trying. I have seen neurologists, proctologists, gynecologists, gastroenterologists, urologists, neuropathests, psychiatrists psychologists, urologists (do I sound like a character in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta?) plus saliva specialists, oral surgeons, naturopaths, chiropractors, and physical therapists. I also have insomnia, mainly caused by the pain and I have severe constipation and uninary tract infections due to the medicines some of these folks have proscribed for me. It is agony to walk or to move my bowels and my teeth constantly need crowns, root canals and implants also due to the dry mouth caused mainly by the medicine.... After all my unproductive searching for a diagnosis, let alone a cure, I ended up in the offices of those peddlers of hope to the hopeless--: the: pain specialists. I went to two different clinics in renown hospitals and both doctors I encountered told me would never be able to speak to the them except during a visit. I had never heard of such a thing before but I was desperate. Both doctors tried a few procedures, which did no good. With one doctor I ended up on morphine the other only offered methadone... These medications, along with my other drugs for my insomnia due to the pain, gave me a small amount of relief but they also caused terrible constipation for which I was told to take laxatives. These potions gave me a form of diarrhea that led to urinary tract infections and antibiotics. And for these doctor induced problems I had to have rectal surgery and needed to resume my visits to gastroenterologists and urologists.
Throughout all my ordeal I have become increasingly incensed by the total lack of real caring I have received from all the specialists, have seen. For the most part they give me less than five-minute visits with no time to thoroughly discuss my issues or to write down the course of treatment. Often I go home not sure what I am to do. But here come the worst. If I have a severe problem, with the medication say less than a week after I have seen the doctor I am either told to come back for another visit at $500 a pop or relegated to the nurse practitioner. The doctor is always with other patients or at a meeting or in the OR. With the exception of a sparse few, they are unreachable and it turns out that the nurse practitioner is left to proscribe my treatment. Since they do not know what to do about my complicated problems some of them give me suggestions that make matters worse. Some of them get annoyed with me for taking up their time with the same old problem. They insist I come to see the doctor who I have seen the week before.I have seen the week before. I suppose they are not allowed to tell me that none of these specialists will get on the phone so they get a little surly on my demand to speak the them. I guess I am somewhat to blame in realizing that these big guns do not come to the phone.. Their attitude and inaptitude along with the doctors’ behavior can ruin my cause additional physical pain and that puts me completely out of sorts. I feel as if the doctor and his minions could not care less about me and being pretty much an atheist I rant at my poor family not Jehovah.

2009-07-29T14:57:00.002-04:00

Dear blog readers,

I really need to know that you are out there. Please, please post some comments to my stories and commentaries so I will know you are out there. I appreciate your e-mails and letters, but comments on the blog are really necessary.

Thanks so much in advance.

Cindy

2009-07-29T14:50:00.002-04:00

I had a letter published in the New York Times Magazine on July 26, 2009 and I thought you might be interested in perusing it. Just follow the short cut below and it will get you there.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/magazine/26letters-t-002.html?_r=2&ref=magazine

2009-07-09T19:24:00.000-04:00

Hi,
As I promised, I will try to keep up the blog with accounts of events that might interest of hopefully provoke enlighten or at least entertain all those who care to take spend a little time with it. If you have a response to anything that I have written please send it to me via my email cindyn@att.net and I will post it. This is a forum.
A few Saturdays ago Chuck and I went to see the documentary about that now famous art collecting couple Dorothy and Herbie Vogel. The film which told their fascinating story was done in the honorable but rather ponderous style familiar to the viewers of public television. Sadly Herbie who was always the dominant one of the pair was subdued, barely saying a word, a shadow of the feisty man I knew in the 70’s and Dorothy, who had always remained in his shadow now talked a great deal in her serious librarian manner that paralleled the academic style favored by the selected artists, curators and critics who continued throughout the movie to laud the amazing collection the little Vogels had been to able to amass on their small salaries. The film was interesting though there was too much repetition on the part of the talking heads, but, for the most part, it lacked the humor and bite that the younger Herbie would have provided. Their characters were not developed. One came away not really knowing the Vogels as they really are or were those thirty odd years ago when I first met them.

The movie inspired me extract the story of my visit to the Vogels from my as yet unpublished memoir, that I am considering entitling Cockroaches and Queens. The phase is a quote from my interview with Eva Hesse in Art Talk. Eva told me that at times she felt either like a cockroach or a Queen. Her turn of speech grabbed me. I had felt like that many times in my life and some of the people I met in the art world could fall under either one or the other of these rubrics and sometimes both. Somehow the Vogels seemed to me, at the time, like rapacious little cockroaches eating up every piece of art they could snatch away from an artist for as little money as possible or for nothing at all if the artist was unknown. As you can guess my take on these little gnats who became giants is not as flattering as their solemn, but at times endearing, cinematic portrayal. But was there ever a collector who was really a nice guy? It doesn’t come with the greedy nature that will get what it wants no matter what or who it takes. After all, it is their ticket to posterity and only a great ego believes he or she is worthy to be known through the ages.

The Underground Collectors

It was during early 70’sl that period, when I still was ardently seeking to penetrate the establishment art world, that I had an amusing encounter with two other art world notables Herbie Vogel and his wife Dorothy, who I christened the underground collectors since they were not at all what one thinks of when the word collector comes to mind. For me, the word collector always conjured up some enormously rich personage in some elegant mansion or huge art filled Fifth Avenue apartment like the one owned by Robert and Ethel Scull, which I had once visited to review the famous portrait of Robert by the realist artist Al Leslie.
Herbie was a postal employee: short, squat, close-cut iron gray-haired, usually dressed in a worn brown leather jacket. Dorothy, tiny and mousy, with large horn-rimmed glasses, was a librarian. Moreover, they did not live in a Duplex on Park Avenue; their home was in nondescript rent controlled high-rise on Upper East Side where they occupied a tiny one-bedroom apartment.
Yet these were collectors if ever there were ones. Several people I knew including Jock Truman, the witty knowledgeable director of the Betty Parsons Gallery, told me of their unremitting zeal in tracking down the latest, most promising artists. They were avid in their eagerness to sniff out new discoveries, grab them before they entered a gallery, and buy their work in a small size (they could not afford nor store large pieces), before it was necessary to pay their galleries a commission. The desire to avoid paying more was, of course, part of their motivation, but even more challenging to this pair was the triumph of being the first to recognize new talent. Herbie adored racing from studio to studio, carefully sifting out the “winners,” second-guessing the curators, dealers, and rich collectors, the purveyors of art world taste. His greatest fear was that his selections would not end up in museums. Like most collectors who seek status through buying art, he worried that he would make the wrong choice and be stuck with a loser. So he agonized over every artwork that attracted him, checked and rechecked it, dragged his wife, who was enthusiastic, but sometimes appeared wilted, from studio to studio, gallery-to-gallery, museum opening to museum opening, determined not to miss a trick.
I was eager to meet the Vogels and eventually we were introduced. They were overjoyed to encounter a critic who was writing about their current art interest “Body Art,” and we quickly received an invitation to visit them at eight o’clock’ on a Saturday night. We, assuming it was a dinner invitation, brought a bottle of wine.
Their living room was startling. There were shelves and cabinets lining the walls of the room, and on every inch of free space were small pieces of sculpture: Sol LeWitts, Carl Andres, Robert Smithsons, Kenneth Snelsons, all the most approved of avant-garde artists. On the shelf space behind the sculptures, were paintings, drawing, and graphics by Richard Tuttle, Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Ryan, Robert Mangold, and so on. Everything was lined up side by side. Works one above the other where the space was in small supply. In front of the art works was a nondescript sofa and some chairs all covered with plastic, and over the plastic were draped big pieces of cloth. I was left to wonder about the treatment of the furniture for only a moment for Herbie proudly informed us that he had five cats in the apartment at this time. Sure enough, next to the tangled wire of a Robert Lobe sculpture, in the middle of the small room, was a large scratching post for the cats.
I stood gawking like a tourist in the center of the room, hardly knowing where to look first, when my eye was momentarily caught by the large fish tank full of lizards, which my host informed me were prize members of their species. At that moment, one of the cats, an Abyssinian, haughtily strode toward me. Herbie informed us that the cats were also rare creatures. He asked if I minded if the cats jumped up on me. I had two cats of my own that were well behaved, so thinking he meant that the animals would sit on my lap when I sat down, I said it wouldn’t bother me. No sooner had I said uttered those words, when something leaped up, came plummeting at me like a rocket, and dug its claws into my shoulder. I began to shake, thinking I had stepped into some sort of bizarre fun house. My hosts apologized saying the cat was just trying to be friendly, but if I didn’t like it they would try to stop him from doing it. I laughed and said it was nothing, but every time the cat made a move that evening, I half jumped out of my seat.
I handed Dorothy the wine we had bought and she opened it then and there. I said, “Why don’t you open it when we have dinner.” She said nothing, but she looked horrified. I glanced out of the corner of my eye into the kitchen and realized nothing was on the stove or in the oven. Then I understood that we were not invited to dinner. I resigned myself to the cheese and frozen chicken liver she brought out for our nourishment, but I could see Chuck, who travels on his stomach, who had also caught on by this time, looking daggers at me over the wine.
I suggested Herbie and Dorothy give us a tour of their collection as the cats were making me very apprehensive by constantly jumping up and lunging at the chopped liver. The Vogels scolded them, but it didn’t help. All the time we were there, they behaved like a bunch of spoiled brats, knocking over the wine and stealing the food when Herbie wasn’t looking. He continually had to interrupt himself to yell at them, but they just ignored him.
I was anxious to get a detailed look at their whole collection so I willingly followed Dorothy around the living room. We stopped before each piece, but she only singled out the works that had been shown in a museum, and all she told me about them was the artist’s name and the name of the museum in which he had shown. Evidently if the artwork had not made it to a museum it wasn’t worthy of her mention.
Dorothy told us that she saved everything she got in the mail from an artist, because once a practitioner of conceptual art had sent her a picture postcard, and thinking that was all it was, she had thrown it out. It turned out to be one of his most vital artworks and she could have had it for nothing. She never forgave herself and vowed that she would never make the same mistake twice. Consequently her draws were packed with an incredible amount of waste material.
We went on to the bedroom. There instead of a throw rug at one side of the bed was a Lynda Benglis mat made of multi colored latex. I was surprised to see an artwork in such a precarious position. I asked Dorothy if it got damaged when she or Herbie, whoever slept on that side, got out of bed. “Oh no,” she looked at me aghast. They would never, never dream of stepping off that side of the bed. The other side was their way of life. I wondered if they had ever met Barbara and Eugene Schwartz collectors with a similar approach to the placement and treatment of their art.
When we finished the tour, the Vogels invited us into the kitchen for some Sara Lee Cheesecake. Then my host began to give me his views on different subjects. On cats: Herbie said he’d never remove his cat’s front claws even if they wrecked his apartment. On blacks and Puerto Ricans: they were making his life miserable at the post office and were a group of misbegotten people. On women’s lib: he was for it excepting that for either men or women the art had to be good. Our conversation went on and on, and every once in a while Herbie would stop short, look at us intently, and intone solemnly, “Listen carefully. I’m about to say something significant.” He would also stop after some remark I had made and give a critique of my statement to the effect that it was perceptive, insightful, quite penetrating, etc. I began to imagine that I was in a seminar being led by a benign, but slightly barmy professor.
At one point the conversation turned to extinct animals. I noted that the Vogels seemed to have more sympathy for animals than for people. I remarked that when people were miserable and hungry they didn’t care whether birds like the bald eagle became extinct or not. Dorothy and Herbie immediately declared that they were very much concerned about the bald eagle. Feeling a bit perverse, I egged them on. Well the dinosaurs became extinct.” Dorothy chimed in, “I’ve felt very bad about the dinosaurs too.” By then, I felt a little lightheaded. I wondered if it was because I had had no dinner, or if I was getting totally rattled by having a conversation with the Mad Hatter.
Chuck kept kicking me under the table. He eyes were telegraphing loudly, “I’m Hungry.” We finally made our adieus and the Vogels thanked us over and over for visiting them. We couldn’t have given them more pleasure. We told them we had a marvelous time and made our getaway.
Once outside my ravenous husband was furious beyond caring that we had met two extraordinary people. It was too late for China Town, so we had to go home and settle for toasted cheese sandwiches at 1:00 in the morning.

RIGHTING THE WRONGS OF WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS
A few weeks ago, in the art s section of the New York Times, there was an article about how few plays by women playwrights are produced in both Broadway and in off Broadway theatres. The most disturbing part of the story was that it was women producers who dominate the off Broadway scene that were doing the rejecting. This piece of information may have been fresh news for the Times readership, but it was old news to me. In 1995, after I became deeply involved in writing theater reviews, articles and also in writing plays, I noted the dearth of women playwrights. I approached Ms. with the sexism that was running rampant in the theater world and asked if I could write an article about it. They thought it was a good idea so they commissioned me to do take it on.
First I contacted as many distinguished playwrights as I could. A few who had managed to make to Broadway were loath to make any statements. It reminded me of the early 70’s when women artists feared to acknowledge that being a woman artist might limit their chances to be taken seriously. They were playwrights, not women playwrights. Most were forthcoming about the discrimination they had experienced. The real shocker was for me, the haughty treatment I received from the women directors and assistant directors of the off Broadway venues: the Second Stage, Lincoln Center, the Manhattan Theater Company and the Second Stage to name the ones in New York. I remember walking along upper Broadway with tears of frustration staining my cheeks after leaving an interview with one dismissive female director. Even out of town regional theaters many run by women also had the same attitude. Gender had no part in selecting playwrights to produce. They only cared about quality. It would seem that they agreed with Bernie Jacobs who I also contacted—there just weren’t enough first rate women playwrights despite the fact that Wendy Wasserstein had received a Pulitzer Prize for the Heidi Chronicles and Suzanne Lori Parks and Cheryl West had received many distinguished awards. Jacobs just told his secretary tell me to contact Julia Miles, as she was the only one who concentrated on the work of women playwrights. He wouldn’t even come to the telephone. I was so disheartened. It was the 90’s and the theater world still had not caught up with the art world that at least allowed that there was prejudice toward women artists.
I spent a great deal of time on that article calling women playwrights and theatre directors all over the country, but for some reason the Ms editor did not care for my piece. After so much work I decided not to give up and to continue to try to get the word out about how shoddily women playwrights were being treated by both the men and the women in power. I was therefore very pleased when the editor of the Dramatist Guild Quarterly, the organ of the prestigious Dramatist Guild, home of the most distinguished playwrights (mainly men who made up its board and voting membership), accepted the article. Some lesser-known women playwrights with whom I connected even did a panel discussion there. Now I thought I might get somewhere by alerting the playwrights themselves as to the injustice taking place in their midst. I can’t believe, considering how much of a fight it took to get the art world powers that be—dealers, critics, curators and collectors to admit their sexist evaluation of women artists, how naïve I still was. And it was the early 90’s Susan Faludi’ s book about backlash had still not come out. Feminism was this F world, an evil word, a diminishing word, a word to be swept under the rug. We were in a post feminist world were those strident unattractive old feminists were an embarrassment.
Yet despite all this, I thought I had broken through the wall of silence surrounding the disparagement of women playwrights. Was I wrong! The editor, a young man, was the worst kind of editor with whom to work. He kept finding fault with every strong statement I made, but instead of telling me what he wanted me to say, he insisted that I guess what he had in mind for me to say. I did rewrite after rewrite thinking that any piece about discrimination toward women in the theater was better than none. In the end he had made me suck the juice out of the work to the point where all its zing was gone. At the time, there seemed to be no other vehicle for the article so I let him print it his way vowing never again to have anything to do with this sneaky male chauvinist.
When I article finally came out, it was place in the back of the magazine with no mention of it on the cover. It was so brief, so watered down that I could see it would make absolutely no impact. The Guild had thrown the women members the tiniest bone they could find and succeeded back then to silence them completely. I am glad to see the issue of the lack of women playwrights being produced on and off Broadway once again raised. Perhaps this time there will be more women in the theater world willing to fight harder to rectify all this existing gender prejudice.

2009-06-26T11:28:00.003-04:00

June 2009

Hi Everyone,

I’m sorry I haven’t been able to post much on my blog during the last year as my health has held me down. But now, despite continuing problems, I am coming back, and in between those fun-filled doctor’s seniors like myself (according to right wing politicians) love to make, I will try to post as often as I can.

I want to make Cindy Nemser’s Forum a place where you can all post if you have responses to what I have written. You can also link from there to my Front Row Center blog, which deals with theater reviews and issues when the times require them and the Art Talk blog on which you might want to send your reactions to the book.

In 2007, when the blog began, there was a reactivated interest in women’s art that created a little rivulet that promised to transform into a much larger, stronger body of moving water. Here in New York that rivulet is still small, but growing slowly, due to the entrance of a few women artists into prestigious galleries, museums and collections and the continued activities of the indefatigable A.I.R and its director Kat Griefen. An example of how sluggishly the streaming is flowing is the fact there that there is not even one important museum bookstore carrying Art Talk; Conversations with 15 Women Artists-- not even the Brooklyn Museum. The book has been translated into Spanish, German, French, Dutch, and Chinese, but evidently the English version is not worthy of being offered by the New York City art museums. Perhaps it is still deemed as controversial now as it was in 1975 when it helped open people’s eyes as to how sexist and how corrupt the art world was and probably still is. Evidently the Brooklyn Museum images of women’s vaginas, on display in perpetuity, are not threatening enough, after years of Eve Enslor’s Vagina Monologs, to generate more than a yawn, while the exposes imbedded into the conversations of the women in Art Talk are still too shocking to be set before the American public’s eyes.

It was not surprising that on the day that I discovered there was no Art Talk in the bookstore was the day I attended a panel that purported to discuss how art became part of art history. I came expecting to hear a discussion of aesthetics with participation by critics, historians, curators, and perhaps a collector. To my surprise there were only people involved with money making. The art that would go down in history was the one that commanded the most in the market place. I had had a violent argument with my son-in-law who is in finances that there were no clued-in people who bought art because it meant something to them intellectually, or emotionally or spiritually. He, with no art background, scoffed and said it was only about money. I was furious and we decided not to speak about art again. Was he right? It seemed that in today’s world I had lost the argument. But I still don’t believe it.

In any case after going off on a tangent in my usual fashion, I am not all together pessimistic about a more sanguine future for women in the arts. There are more books about women artists coming down the pipeline including one about the great first generation abstract expressionist Lee Krasner, by art historian Gail Levin and another about Alice Neel. Finally the amazing Alice Neel is about to be given her due wit the help of some key art world players, the gallerists (fancy world for gallery owner which I suppose is too crass) David Zwirner being among them. Unfortunately, the owners of her works (her sons and their wives and children) have not been the least bit gracious in acknowledging the help of the women artists’ movement.. I was the fist writer to who the artist revealed her fascinating, if notorious life story. Ms. published my piece that included her personal material as well as my historical and critical assessment of her work. Unfortunately, the magazine changed my designation of Neel as the greatest portraitist of the twentieth century to only one of the greatest. Even Ms. was timid about giving women artists their due. In 2007, when I curated an exhibition, “Women’s Work: Homage to Women’s Art” at the Table Rasa Gallery in Sunset Park in Brooklyn, I asked Nancy Neel, who I thought was appreciative of my support of Alice, if the family would loan a drawing Alice had made of me (Alice never told me about the drawing or I would have bought it in a heart beat.) The family absolutely refused to be in my 2007 show saying that they did not want Alice in some little show in Brooklyn with a lot of feminists. The drawing was valued at $40,000. There were artists such as Eleanor Antin and Audrey Flack in the exhibition whose work was valued way above that figure and they were kind enough to let me have them. I felt very hurt by the Neel’s behavior and I imagine Alice wouldn’t have liked it either. She was always anxious for her work to be seen. She was neither a total materialist (though she like a good time) nor a snob. She was a fabulous creator or art, but she did not raise kind-hearted children. Given their history it is not surprising, but more about that in my book.

You can read my published conversation with Neel in Art Talk, which can be purchased on Amazon or Barnes & Nobel or in any bookstore as it is still in print. You may also be able to read my account of my hilarious experience about how Alice got my husband Chuck and myself to take off our clothes and be painted the nude in my still unpublished memoir of the 1970’s art world if I ever decide how to market the book.

I also could use some help from anyone who cares to give me some feedback as to how to begin the first chapter of the book. (Should I begin with Alice Neel painting my portrait and then go back and tell how I got to be in such a situation that I was willing to take off my clothes for art) Or maybe I should begin in the place where I became a feminist and then go back. The book is my personal remembrance of the 1970’s art world, mainly based in New York and mainly focused on my role as a feminist art critic. The parts about my presence at art world events are accurate as to time and place, as are my participation in art demonstrations and happenings. My writings about the art world, some of which are interpolated into the book, are also accurate. My take on those events are solely my own as are my memories of my early years.

I am also having trouble with a title. I have the sub-title that lets you know what the book is about. It is Tales of the 70’s New York Art World: Told by a Feminist Art Critic. But what I need is a truly eye and ear grabbing short title right about those sub-titles. All suggestions would be appreciated and if I use it, I’ll give the author a big thank you in my acknowledgements, but that’s all. Art books are not big money makers so if you want money don’t put in a suggestion. Sorry

2007-06-10T16:03:00.002-04:00

Reclaiming Women Artists History

Let Roberta Smith of the New York Times know that woman painters and sculptors were known and honored until the 19th century.

If letters to the editor were part of the June 8th “Friday Weekend Arts, Fine Arts Leisure” section of the New York Times here is the letter I would write for publication to Roberta Smith about her article “When Home Was Where the Art Was.” Since there is no place in the Times for to be printed, I will put my response on my blogspot.

I certainly commend Smith on acknowledging the beauty and mastery in rugs made by women. In the 1970’s the Feminist Art Journal, of which I was the publisher/editor, printed a major article about women’s quilts by Patricia Mainardi, and Rachel Maines wrote about the exquisite items of lace making, needle work and knitting created by the family of Carrie Montgomery among many others.

What I object to is her introduction to her article, in which she insists that in the last five hundred years practically all women artists have been anonymous.

If Smith had done some reading beyond Linda Nochlin’s misguided article, “Why have there been no great women artists, she would have encountered Eleanor Tufts’ landmark book Our Hidden Heritage or Woman Artists 1550-1950, by Ann Sutherland Harris and a recanting Linda Nochlin, where she would have learned the names of artists like Sophia Anguisola, a portrait painter to royalty the 16th century, Artemisa Gentileschi famous in the 17th century for painting “Judith and Holofernes,” Vigèe-LeBrun, painter to Queen Marie Antoinette, in the 18th century, Rosa Bonheur, .a painter, greatly admired for her depictions of horses by 19th century academicians , Mary Cassat, a great impressionist, also in the,19th century. There were sculptors as well i.e. Harriet Hosmer, and Anna Huntington and many more greatly revered artists in the twentieth century such as Frida Kahlo, Georgia O’Keefe, etc.

However if Smith looked in Janson’s History of Art, 1991 edition, she would have found the names of just a few historical figures including the genre painter Judith Leyster, and the still life painter Rachel Ruysch, Rosa Bonheur, Harriet Hosmer. Not great progress, but an improvement considering that up to then there were no women at all.

An artist does not to be counted out because she does not paint nude men and women in classical or Biblical poses. Men like Caravaggio, Frans Synders, Willem Claesz Heda, Franz Hals, Rembrandt, Georges de la Tour, Gainsborough, Chardin, Turner, etc painted still lifes genre scenes, landscapes and portraits and were designated to be great.

But because of the rampant sexism in the 19th century when art history was becoming a discipline un to itself in Germany, England, and other parts of Europe, women’s art that was honored from the middle ages, through the renaissance and up 19th century was denigrated by the use of unflattering stereotypes. (See my article “Stereotypes and Women Artists,” the Feminist Art Journal, April, 1972 and reprinted in Feminist Collage, ed Judith Loeb, 1979 Barnard Teacher’s College Press, Columbia University) as weak, hysterical, timid, imitative or asexual if it was too masculine looking like the horses of Rosa Bonheur.

It would seem that despite all the feminist revisionist art history that has occurred from the 70’s up to the present, influential twentieth century critics like Roberta Smith are perpetuating the lie that women artists of the past did not do significant and sometimes even great art. Right up to today women’s art is undervalued. Just check the list of women artists who were invited to the Basel Art Fair.

I think we should all write to the Times protesting Roberta Smith’s blatant error. Despite what she or others think, women painters and sculptors were not anonymous. Up to the late 19th they were part of the mainstream. We have a history to be proud of but we must continue to work to have it recognized and honored.

P.S. I have completed my book Firebrand: Tales of a Feminist Art Critic and I am looking for a publisher. If anyone has any suggestions as to which editor or agent would be interested in the book, please let me know.

Cindy Nemser

2007-06-10T15:57:00.001-04:00

no place in the Times for to be printed, I will put my response on my blogspot.

I certainly commend Smith on acknowledging the beauty and mastery in rugs made by women. In the 1970’s the Feminist Art Journal, of which I was the publisher/editor, printed a major article about women’s quilts by Patricia Mainardi, and Rachel Maines wrote about the exquisite items of lace making, needle work and knitting created by the family of Carrie Montgomery among many others.

What I object to is her introduction to her article, in which she insists that in the last five hundred years practically all women artists have been anonymous.

If Smith had done some reading beyond Linda Nochlin’s misguided article, “Why have there been no great women artists, she would have encountered Eleanor Tufts’ landmark book Our Hidden Heritage or Woman Artists 1550-1950, by Ann Sutherland Harris and a recanting Linda Nochlin, where she would have learned the names of artists like Sophia Anguisola, a portrait painter to royalty the 16th century, Artemisa Gentileschi famous in the 17th century for painting “Judith and Holofernes,” Vigèe-LeBrun, painter to Queen Marie Antoinette, in the 18th century, Rosa Bonheur, .a painter, greatly admired for her depictions of horses by 19th century academicians , Mary Cassat, a great impressionist, also in the,19th century. There were sculptors as well i.e. Harriet Hosmer, and Anna Huntington and many more greatly revered artists in the twentieth century such as Frida Kahlo, Georgia O’Keefe, etc.

However if Smith looked in Janson’s History of Art, 1991 edition, she would have found the names of just a few historical figures including the genre painter Judith Leyster, and the still life painter Rachel Ruysch, Rosa Bonheur, Harriet Hosmer. Not great progress, but an improvement considering that up to then there were no women at all.

An artist does not to be counted out because she does not paint nude men and women in classical or Biblical poses. Men like Caravaggio, Frans Synders, Willem Claesz Heda, Franz Hals, Rembrandt, Georges de la Tour, Gainsborough, Chardin, Turner, etc painted still lifes genre scenes, landscapes and portraits and were designated to be great.

But because of the rampant sexism in the 19th century when art history was becoming a discipline un to itself in Germany, England, and other parts of Europe, women’s art that was honored from the middle ages, through the renaissance and up 19th century was denigrated by the use of unflattering stereotypes. (See my article “Stereotypes and Women Artists,” the Feminist Art Journal, April, 1972 and reprinted in Feminist Collage, ed Judith Loeb, 1979 Barnard Teacher’s College Press, Columbia University) as weak, hysterical, timid, imitative or asexual if it was too masculine looking like the horses of Rosa Bonheur.

It would seem that despite all the feminist revisionist art history that has occurred from the 70’s up to the present, influential twentieth century critics like Roberta Smith are perpetuating the lie that women artists of the past did not do significant and sometimes even great art. Right up to today women’s art is undervalued. Just check the list of women artists who were invited to the Basel Art Fair.

I think we should all write to the Times protesting Roberta Smith’s blatant error. Despite what she or others think, women painters and sculptors were not anonymous. Up to the late 19th they were part of the mainstream. We have a history to be proud of but we must continue to work to have it recognized and honored.

P.S. I have completed my book Firebrand: Tales of a Feminist Art Critic and I am looking for a publisher. If anyone has any suggestions as to which editor or agent would be interested in the book, please let me know.

Cindy Nemser

2007-05-24T20:44:00.000-04:00

Hi, Cindy. . I always have warm feelings about the Brooklyn Museum but they sure dohave a knack for pandering to dumb ideas. John>>

Feminisms in the Singular
John Haberin New York City
The Sackler Center for Feminist Art
Global Feminisms and Role Play
"Global Feminisms" is nothing if not single-minded. Sure, the first word amounts to a demand for pluralism. And, sure, the second gives an already capacious and powerful idea an unusual plural form. However, the Brooklyn Museum knows women when it sees them, and what it sees reduces them to one thing—bodies, especially aching bodies and smiling faces. How many feminisms does it take to light up Brooklyn? All too few.
"Global Feminisms" accompanies the March 2007 opening of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. The works all date since 1990, leaving the future wide open. It also gives Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party a permanent home. With all this, the Brooklyn Museum has made a major effort toward giving women artists their due. Make that an effort unmatched by other museums—or, for that matter, by the galleries. Guess who still gets far more shows?
However, it does neither women, globalism, nor feminism a favor, and it adds up to a stiflingly simplistic exhibition. Women have suffered through enough categories and cages in the past without this one. Meanwhile, "Role Play: Feminist Art Revisited," a group exhibition in Chelsea, looks back to some artists funny and defiant enough to break out.
Solidarity and pain
The Center's curator, Maura Reilly, selected eighty women artists with Linda Nochlin of NYU's Institute of Fine Arts. Nochlin herself did as much as anyone to make feminist art history essential reading. One passes through the Center on the way in, and it creates an imposing context. A long-term display of ceramics, from the permanent collection, affirms that "women's work" belongs in the Brooklyn Museum. Another show, "Pharaohs, Queens, and Goddesses," boasts of a granite head from the fifteenth century B.C.E. It also boasts of women as authority figures from the beginning of time.
Why, then, does "Global Feminisms" center around two attractive young women clinging to one another and smiling ever so broadly? Boryana Rossa calls her video Celebrating the Next Twinkling, but they could just as well be celebrating their junior-high reunion or their American Express gold card. True, it comes only with the exhibition's fourth and last segment. However, it hangs over the main aisle like guidepost—or perhaps like the head of aerobics class. It also serves as the show's promotional image. More important, it could stand for plenty more works like it.
Melanie Manchot welcomes an older, heavier woman to the celebration, With Blue Clouds and Laughter. Marji Geerklinks rejoices in motherhood, while Miwa Yanagi remembers My Grandmother. In the past, Catherine Opie has faced the blankness of American cities and human encounters. Her self-portrait as a nursing, tattooed, lesbian mother could present an act of defiance or an unsettling of photographic conventions. Here it seems only another happy tribute to mothers of all shapes, sizes, and colors. Tracey Rose's Hottentot Venus gives them a genealogy as long and serious as "Pharaohs, Queens, and Goddesses."
Others take the woman's collective from inspiration to armed struggle. Michèle Magema presents Congolese woman marching, accompanied by a revolutionary flag and a proud cheer, Oyé, Oyé. Kate Benyon likewise has a Warrior Woman Collective. Amy Cutler's Army of Me—the small, identical figures issuing from herself—lends the march a rare note of irony and self-reflection. One might do well to look again at Magema's army with its heads cut off by the frame. Does the facelessness mock the male gaze and the brutal anonymity of war, or does it repeat and reinforce them?
Not everyone is having a good time, then, not even in Brooklyn. Teresa Margolles sums up both halves of what the show wishes to overcome—"insensitivity to pain, lack of solidarity." Sigalit Landau mimes the former, in her endless dance with a barbed-wire hula hoop. Parastou Forouhar paints torture in Iran, in a cross between breaking news, a Persian miniature, and bunny comics. Milica Tomic depicts a Serbian women's wounds, Mary Coble and Ryoku Suzuki their own painful self-binding. Anna Baumgart remembers suicides, and Rebecca Belmore enacts a ceremony for the abducted in Canada.
Men appear rarely, but they clearly spell trouble. In Julia Loktov's Rough House, the man takes his place on the sofa in front of the TV, while the woman vacuums. For Tanja Ostojic, divorce means a deceived, abandoned woman who loses her EU passport. Claudia Reinhardt's staging of Sylvia Plath's suicide could raise questions about representation and reality. Here it merely plays out the narrative of Plath as victim. Male voices cannot appear, and yet women's voices cannot sound. Once again, an attempt to "complete" feminism with a complementary agenda, here globalization, ends up marginalizing women as incomplete.
Waving feminism goodbye
Feminism does belong in the plural. One often speaks, for example, of three waves—a fluid metaphor that already sets different priorities than for men. That kind of history usually appears, in fact, in debates over yet more conflicting aspirations in the present. Each wave has a legitimate foundation in successive achievements and thus renewed aspirations, and naturally enough each has a rough parallel in art. Nochlin caught them in their early stages, with a pioneering 1971 article, later the core of a book, Why Are There No Great Women Artists?
The first wave refers to struggles for the right to vote and to work. In art, one thinks of women who competed with men on their own terms, from Artemisia Gentileschi to Lee Krasner or Joan Mitchell. The second wave means "movement" feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, with demands for equality, choices, visibility, and a reconstruction of society to match. The same period saw a bolder, more flourishing art as well, with witty, aggressive performances from such artists as Marina Abramovic, Lynda Benglis, Ana Mendieta, Carolee Schneemann, and Yoko Ono. In the Third Wave, one argues over the costs and benefits of making femininity part of the equation along with politics. Appropriations of the 1990s introduced the same themes, with Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Lorna Simpson, and others.
Like most linear histories, this one has problems, especially if feminism opposes male, linear histories. Does the present—with greater diversity but less confidence in the outcome—continue that third wave or begin a fourth, now that anything goes in art and politics has become a branch of the media? Conversely, can one really distinguish the generations so easily? As it happens, I have taken all my second-wave examples from "Role Play: Feminist Art Revisited," a splendid group show at Galerie Lelong, and they look quite as at home as the title says with third-wave role playing and a biting irony. Then, too, so does Gentileschi. Conversely, Lee Bontecou, Elizabeth Murray, and Chantal Akerman found erotic or threatening undercurrents in the first-wave art forms and personal memories that "Role Play" leaves out.
It does not leave out much. Helena Almeida's cry of Hear Me, in Portuguese, or Senga Nengudi's taped body anticipates the Brooklyn Museum's global politics. Adrian Piper's bruised lips, which "embody everything you must hate and fear," uses text and image as effectively as Kruger or Simpson would later, and she reminds one how few African Americans appear in "Global Feminisms." Helen Chadwick turns herself into major kitchen appliances—much the kind that Martha Rossler stands before while slicing and dicing a man's world. Hannah Wilke's nude in high heels and a revolver feels very third wave indeed, and so does her clothed self strutting her stuff from the other side of Duchamp's Large Glass. Birgit Jürgenssen's fox-fur face would fit in a fashion spread by Hanna Liden now.
Mendieta's body imprints, like the pained and lyrical art of Kiki Smith, reflect something else that my brief history leaves out and that the Brooklyn Museum definitely leaves in. It aligns a woman's essence with flesh and blood. "Global Feminisms" has four parts, but they keep coming back to the same thing. "Life Cycles" means nurturing bodies. "Identities" means marked bodies, "Politics" means suffering bodies, and "Emotions" means laughing, crying, or hysterical bodies. Only one work after the ceramics outside alludes to craft and design, and there Tania Bruguera incorporates human hair along with fabric.
The body unites both side of the show, the laughter and the pain. It places the show well within the "eternal feminism" of pharaohs and goddesses—and The Dinner Party. In the late 1970s, back when Abramovic and Wilke were strutting their stuff, Judy Chicago set places for fertile goddesses, Christian martyrs, and mystics along with more modern icons. As a gallery show of preparatory sketches makes clear, Chicago thinks of them all in terms of eternal life and the eternal victim. For example, she describes Emily Dickinson as a textbook case of repression. And each dinner plate bears the stylized image of a vagina.
Cheerleading
The Dinner Party is kitsch. "Global Feminisms" is merely monotonous. It also misses a chance to probe the issue at its heart, the puzzle today of reconciling urgency and pluralisms. It cannot ask when globalization opens things up—and when it serves market economies and international art fairs. The show has some high moments. However, they come largely from artists familiar in New York and willing to put more than their bodies on the line.
Sometimes, they allow themselves to play with sexual desire. Ghada Amer hints at porn in an abstract arrangement of threads, and Pipilotti Rist sticks her tongue up through her own grave surrounded by fallen leaves. Sometimes they play with images of women in a media-driven age. Tracey Emin interviews her notorious self, and Tracy Moffatt stages Love as a TV soap opera. Sometimes they play with bodies as pathetic as those in the real world, like Sarah Lucas's The Sperm Thing or Jenny Saville's oversized nude. Sometimes, they just play, as when Sam Taylor-Wood throws an entirely reasonable hysterical fit.
In a show supposedly about gender, Tejal Shah and Oreet Ashery supply the only cross-dressing. In a show about global politics, only Emily Jacir troubles herself with facts—a video record of crossing Israeli checkpoints. In a show about the plural, only Fiona Foley permits layered images and broken text. She builds a screen of words and an image of the body from hanging strips. In a show about confining alternatives, only Priscilla Monge involves the viewer, in a padded cell of sanitary napkins. Each of these artists goes beyond the singular.
This generation deserves a feminism as diverse and witty as the one that "Role Play" found in the 1970s, and for all my talk of waves and changes, it already has one. A museum should not have far to look, but it might have to deal with role playing and global particulars along the way. It could observe social constraints as real as the secret police headquarters or mental institution taped by Jane and Louise Wilson. It could face women in the Third World as frankly as Shirin Neshat. It could face women at the end of the male gaze, like Carla Gannis or Christina McPhee. It could face women at the end of a shotgun, like Maria Epes.
It could allow Janine Antoni's long hair, desires as naughty as those of Marilyn Minter and Nathalie Djurberg, and sexual awakening as risky as for Sue de Beer and Erzstbet Baerveldt. It could acknowledge gender instability and the ugliness of sorting it out, as for Nan Goldin and Judith Eisler. It could include the fluid universes of Julie Mehretu and Jessica Rankin or the solid ones of Andrea Zittel and Jessica Stockholder. It could consider women who still do worry about "male" forms like abstraction. It could see what happens when a woman appropriates the museum itself, like Amy Wilson. It could include men in feminism, like the take on Edouard Manet's bar by Jeff Wall.
What happens when a museum strips all these from feminism, along with the plural? It ends up with the damaging myth of a female essence lying somewhere between her legs. It ends up with cheerleading. Because of feminism, colleges now count cheerleading as a sport, but it does not count as art. Asked what feminism means to her, one artist in the show, Lin Tianmiao, says that she knows "only individual cases." A more daring and pluralistic show would invite them to dinner.
jhaber@haberarts.com
"Global Feminisms" ran at The Brooklyn Museum through July 1, 2007, and "Pharaohs, Queens, and Goddesses" through September 16, in conjunction with the March opening of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. "Role Play: Feminist Art Revisited 1960-1980"ran at Galerie Lelong and Judy Chicago's preparatory work for "The Dinner Party" at ACA Galleries, both through April 28. Related articles in this webzine—along with those linked within the review and others listed here—consider varieties of feminism, men in feminism, Freud and feminism, and difference feminism, the last with a brief bibliography.

2007-05-24T20:28:00.000-04:00

Dear Ms. Nemser,

I believe this is the link you requested from John Yau:

http://brooklynrail.org/2007/5/artseen/fasf
Thomas Micchelli
Managing Art Editor
The Brooklyn Rail

----- Forwarded Message ----**************************************See what's free at http://www.aol.com.
-----Original Message-----From: Cindy Nemser [mailto:cindyn@att.net] Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2007 12:44 PMTo: jhaber@haberarts.comSubject: excellent review and analyis, but you don't mention "Women'sWork: Homage to Feminist Art"Dear John,I enjoyed your review and analysis of the Brooklyn Musuem Gobal Feminisms----I just wish you had included my show in your analysis ofthe current feminist art scene. I was gratified the reivew that you gave "Women's Work:Homage to Feminist Art and I'm happy for your round up ofthe other women's shows. If you send the article to me as an e-mail, I'llpost it on my blog. Tuesday, May 22, 2007 3:47 PMSubject: Re: Lousy Celebration> Lemme offer my own two cents, in perhaps much the same spirit:>> http://www.haberarts.com/globalf.htm>> John H>>>>>>
Sick sense of humor? Visit Yahoo! TV's Comedy with an Edge to see what's on, when.

2007-05-23T16:55:00.000-04:00

Dear Ms. Nemser:
I am an artist, male and a feminist. I have always supported the feminist movement, I'm married to a very active feminist of the "first wave", and agree with you that feminism is a male issue as well as a female issue.
I'm troubled by the malicious and acrimonious bickering that has been going on for several weeks now over the decisions of the Brooklyn Museum and the Sackler Center. I agree that Judy Chicago's work is questionable on many levels, not least of all artistic, but this last message from Estelle Levi is beyond the pale, gratuitously nasty, childish and smug. Why was it circulated? In what way does it contribute to any kind of intelligent discourse? It's pure vituperation, and against whom?
I also challenge this writer to produce work of better quality...I want to see the cliche free, non-trite work of the artists who she feels represents the positive alternative. I attended the A Place At the Table event, and I felt it was a very positive thing, it engendered good spirits, and a sense of celebration over the inauguration of an institution that will be around for a long time, and from which the art community can only benefit. I'm far from a pollyanna about institutions and the art establishment, but I feel that the curator of the Center is an open-minded and thoughtful individual who really wants to serve the art community. I personally have nothing to gain in this. I know that Estelle Levi's motives are vindictive. I'd hope that your motives are not opportunistic at the expense of your sisters. I'd like to see you circulate this letter.
Sincerely,
Robert Bunkin
On May 22, 2007, at 10:47 AM, Cindy Nemser wrote:
Cindy……..First………ha: the check is in the mail!

Erin and I went to the BM which may be a good reference point.

The Reception Antics were soooooooo very trite making the reputation of women artists and fiminists in particular very appropriate…….not a quality performance there. AND what was provided during the Reception Antics was just as cheap.

About the Sackler and the Dinner Party……………..well all I can say: If this is how work is presented and curated, were they to ask me to show there, I’d refuse…………………HAAAAAAAAAAAAA. I was, very frankly, appalled…………….and embarrassed…………..and wonder about the quality
of harmful attitude such an exhibit promotes towards WOMEN ARTISTS in general…….

Your talk to WIA and guests really went well and we were delighted…………..do stay in touch with us…………..

Estelle

2007-05-22T13:17:00.001-04:00

Cindy……..First………ha: the check is in the mail!

Erin and I went to the BM which may be a good reference point.

The Reception Antics were soooooooo very trite making the reputation of women artists and fiminists in particular very appropriate…….not a quality performance there. AND what was provided during the Reception Antics was just as cheap.

About the Sackler and the Dinner Party……………..well all I can say: If this is how work is presented and curated, were they to ask me to show there, I’d refuse…………………HAAAAAAAAAAAAA. I was, very frankly, appalled…………….and embarrassed…………..and wonder about the quality
of harmful attitude such an exhibit promotes towards WOMEN ARTISTS in general…….

Your talk to WIA and guests really went well and we were delighted…………..do stay in touch with us…………..

Estelle

2007-05-22T12:53:00.000-04:00

Dear Daniel,

Thanks for the comment about Louise Nevelson's interview. I think she is an artist who transends all races and religions. I'm glad you can appreciate her contribution. Please let your friends and acquaintances know about my interview on my blog. Please spread the word about the feminist art discussion that we are having and tell them to join in.

Regards

Cindy Nemser

2007-05-17T14:25:00.000-04:00

Dear Cindy,
Thank you for your persistence and your firebranding. I will now lay Judy Chicago to rest in our discourse. We probably agree far more than we disagree but I love the fact that you hold your course and speak your mind. I helped to curate a small feminist show in a small gallery in Park Slope. It lasts for only for four days (and unfortunately the opening falls on the day of your talk, which I will be unable to attend) and I would love it if you came by sometime and let me know what you think of the work. We are at 440 gallery, 440 6th Avenue between 9th and 10th Streets. We are open thursday &Friday from 4 - 7 PM and Sat & SUn from 12 Noon -6 pm.

Nancy

Dear Nancy,

Brova for you. I get to your show. The more women's art on display the better,

Best wishes

Cindy

2007-05-17T14:22:00.000-04:00

Hi Cindy: I forgot one great female artist icon of our times who also sells: Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera's wife whosework now outprices his on the market.The best is that she was rediscovered by Harmony Hammond's biography of her, a feminist historian.I don't remember when it was written, but I do remember when I returned to Mexico in 1974,to revisit looking for the women, and going to her little house in Coyoacan, it was practically desertedof tourists. I was the only one there that day and used a little super 8 camera to film the paintings on thewalls, the photographs,memorabilia etc. No objection from the one guard I could chat with.When I returned in '92 I think, the paintings were all gone, it was a touristy house, bars on the windows,selling T-shirts, etc. Inside were other painters, only one or two minor Frida's. No photos allowed.The paintings were either in the Museum Dolores Olmedo, a rich rival of hers for Diego who bought all her work, built a joint museum and put them next to Diego's or sold, and exhibited world wide.Frida though is a heroine for women artists, with even the great film Salma Hayak did of her, directedby Julie Taymor.

Cindy it's great that you are taking up the fight for women artists! And that you remember the earlyroots of our anger...not at each other, but the system, run by and for the male establishment.Silvianna

2007-05-16T20:30:00.000-04:00

An Excerpt From Firebrand: the tales of a Feminist Art Critic
a memoir by Cindy Nemser, art historian, critic and author.

In honor of the fact that the legendary Louise Nevelson is having an one woman exhibition at the Jewish Museum this month, I thought that her public would like to know what the Louise was like as both a woman and an artist. Therefore I am sharing my experience of interviewing her with you and relating all the facts that came before and after our meeting. I know you will enjoy our encounter.

In May, 1971, I met Sue Graham, a woman who would help change the course my writing career would take. Sue was the editor of a weekly alternative newspaper called Changes, which was financed by rock music record producers. She was forced to include some articles about the rock stars, but most of the paper was devoted to the more serious arts. When I told her about my background, she immediately asked me to write for her. She was a pretty woman with shoulder length red hair, and a regular featured face sprinkled with freckles, which went along with her delicate pale complexion.
Her walk-up Greenwich Village apartment from which she worked was rather dark and cramped, and when I visited there, we held meeting in her small kitchen. One day I was surprised to see a very hefty black man emerging from one of the back rooms. Sue introduced me to Charlie Mingus, the immortal jazz musician, who later became her husband. He politely said hello and left. I was surprised and impressed. He was the last person I had expected to meet at the very WASPY Sue Graham’s apartment.
The first assignment she gave me was to interview the famous sculptor Louise Nevelson. Sue also provided me with a photographer to take pictures of the artist and the work. I was to use a large tape recorder with big wheels on which you had to thread the tapes. I was thrilled but anxious about meeting Louise Nevelson. However, I wasn’t as nervous about interviewing her as I was about having to deal with the tape recorder. As I have said before, I’m mechanically challenged so I knew threading that tape was going to be a problem for me, as I could never do the microfiche at the library.
I met the photographer outside Louise’s five storied house on 29 Spring off Mott Street in what is now called Nolita, but then was just a part of the Lower East Side which was considered lower working class and not at all fashionable. We entered through a double glass door decorated with wrought iron, climbed narrow stairs, and when we reached the landing were confronted by one of the artist’s sculptures composed of different objects melded into one impressive form. Louise’s assistant and photographer Diana MacKowan, a plump compact, young woman with a cheery face, welcomed us politely. She led us into a room, which had another large black sculpture next to the wall and an oblong, redwood picnic table with matching benches all painted black. There was no other furniture. I learned later on that Louise had gotten rid of all but the absolute necessities in furnishings, and the house was filled with little else but her sculptures. She wanted to live in an environment that consisted of little but what she had created.
Louise Nevelson, was decked out splendidly in a long strikingly colorfully embroidered silk jacket, black silk trousers, a necklace made of small wooden objects, and earrings made of wooden circles painted black. Her hair was a close-cropped cap of gray and white; her eyes dark, deep-set and arresting were even more emphasized by a double set of false black eyelashes that were her trademark. High cheekbones gave her face a grandeur, and her chin was strong and determined. She was in her seventies, but she seemed ageless. As she told me in the interview about her appearance on a panel at the Academy of Arts to celebrate Picasso’s 90th birthday, “I put on a show. You can’t miss me. I had a Scassi on.” (He was a famous couturier known for outré clothes during the 70’s.)
Louise greeted me graciously, but I was immediately intimidated, and I felt impelled to start the interview immediately and not waste any of her valuable time. I began to set up the tape recorder and, as usual, I fumbled around not sure of what I was supposed to do. Fortunately, the photographer, a good-hearted man, offered his assistance and put everything right.
In the beginning of the interview, Louise expounded, in a deep, senatorial voice, on her philosophical views and how they were reflected in her art. While she provided some valuable insights about the meaning of her work, mainly, she spoke in generalities and set herself apart from all mundane concerns and intellectual constrains. Her aim was “to have my art reveal to myself the greatest possibility of my life”.
When I asked her how it was to be a woman artist struggling for recognition in the art world, and what she thought of the women’s liberation movement, she drew herself up, threw out her chest, like an orchestra conductor, and said with a touch of haughtiness, “I am a woman’s liberation.” She felt that she could handle herself in the universe and being a woman could not stop her from becoming a renowned artist. It had been hard, but she was willing to pay the price. Men were no challenge to her personally. If others were left by the way side then they were flawed. “They didn’t have the confidence.” She also insisted her work was feminine but it was powerful, a mirror of herself, although she did admit that “for maybe forty years I wanted to cut my throat,” and that she never thought of herself as strong, as a fighter. “If I fought it was out of despair—drinking and despair.” Nevertheless, she informed me that, “I have no guilt about everything else I did with men, liquor, or anything.” (Later on, Alice Neel, naughty as ever, had informed me that she remembered Louise turning tricks at the Astor Hotel during the 1930’s in order to keep maintaining herself as an artist.)
I was starting to get frustrated by Louise’s sanctimonious attitude which insisted that she was, at this point, far above the struggle to gain top recognition in the art world. However, when I asked her how she felt about not being included when Henry Geldzahler curated the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum which was supposed to be presenting the most influential artists of the second half of the twentieth Century, Louise immediately stepped out of her wise-woman-above-the-fray role and came out swinging, displaying the down and dirty stamina of a gutter fighter that had kept her going into her old age.
She was outraged about not being in the show. She blamed it on the fact that Geldzahler was a disciple of Clement Greenberg who believed that Color Field painting was the only significant art being done at this time. He also admitted a few sculptors who made pared-down shapes painted various colors to be of worthy of notice. Greenberg, according to Louise, also had his own little clique of critic disciples, Michael Fried and Rosalind Krauss, who taught at Harvard. Geldzahler, in a New Yorker article, had with tongue in cheek, called them “the Jewish Mafia.”
Louise felt they had used her badly. When some of her collectors’ children went to Harvard wanted to write their thesis’s on her, they were told that she wasn’t a suitable subject. This assessment put Louise in a rage. Eyes glowering she hissed that she wanted to “sue Harvard for having Michael Fried as a puppet for Greenberg.” She roared, “I’d like to take a gun and shoot that other little snot-nose (Rosalind Krauss)) up there for calling Greenberg every minute.” I was both shocked and tickled to hear Louise saying these things on tape. She saw Greenberg’s influence everywhere; in Artforum, the most influential art magazine in America, in London; all over the world. The painters he promoted, Jules Olitski, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Helen Frankenthaler who painted according to his dictums were also targets of her wrath. She resented Louis “whose hand Greenberg held to paint his pictures,” and she insisted that when it came to Noland and Olitisky, Greenberg had “been pounding the balls off those boys every since he got hold of them.” She hated the fact that everyone was afraid to confront or cross Greenberg.
Harold Rosenberg, the other art critic who held pride of place next to Greenberg also came in for a drubbing from Louise for being in cahoots with his artist friends when it came to creating exhibitions and handing out prizes.
Once the floodgates had opened and released her fury it came pouring out and nothing could hold it back. She related how Helen Frankenthaler had snubbed her at a woman’s group meeting and how the pedantic Motherwell, her then-husband, who was on the Picasso panel with her at the Academy of Arts, had also ignored her. “He wouldn’t know how to talk to you.” She added, that she “wouldn’t give you two cents for either one.” William Rubin, the curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, also on the panel, was labeled a monster, as were those in the Greenberg gang. David Levine, the famous caricaturist, another panelist, who she called both a monster and a “Goddamn cartoonist,” infuriated Louise with his highfalutin academic approach to art. She also felt uncomfortable with fellow panelist Tom Hess, the editor of Art News, who she felt had blackballed all the critics who wanted to write about her. He also failed to acknowledge her that day.
Hans Hofmann was not high on Louise’s list either, but it did please her when he contradicted Greenberg who touted him by saying, “I gave too much to teaching. I have not found myself.”
However, she did adore Diego Rivera, whose assistant, she became, for a time, when she was young. Her face relaxed as she smilingly, reminisced how he and his wife Frida Kahlo held open house and it was a free and easy environment. But though Diego tried to seduce her, Louise wasn’t receptive because Frida was her friend. Interestingly, as Louise was describing the pair, she never mentioned that Frida Kahlo was an important artist too. She had more to say about other critics as well, but most of it was not as electrifying.
As Louise unloaded all her resentments, she became merrier and merrier and all her hauteur melted away. The atmosphere was very bonhomie with all of us laughing and congratulating ourselves for speaking our minds whether it was politic or not. We breathed a mutual sigh of contentment, and then Louise asked Diana, who had been present all during the interview, to bring us a bottle of wine and, we all had a drink clinking our glasses spiritedly. I could hardly believe that I had heard Louise sounded off the way she did. I never expected anything so juicy, so revealing of art world politics, to come out of an interview with an artist I had never met before. It was a prize for me, but was she really ready to have it published? As we were ready to leave, nobly, I asked her if she wanted all the names of the people printed. She thought for a moment, and said,
“Use ex.’s. Oh, don’t. Do what you want.”
“Should I call you?” I asked
“I’ll be out of town. Do what you want.”
In a bit of a quandary, I called Sue Graham and asked what I should do. If we use ex.’s it won’t have any punch.”
Sue said, “Oh if she feels this way about the art scene, she should be able to have her say. We’ll print it the way she said it.”
I was exhilarated, but also nervous. I knew the interview was a stick of dynamite. No art magazine would ever touch it, but Sue didn’t care a fig about the self-interests of the potentates of the art world.
So the piece came out in Changes, in May 1972, about two weeks after my meeting with Louise. All seemed quiet for the first week it was on the news stands, and then I got a phone call from a friend who told me the whole art world was buzzing about the interview and everyone was scurrying around town trying to get a copy of the newspaper. I didn’t hear from Louise, but one evening, at an opening, I ran into Diana MacKowan and she was delighted to talk to me. She said Louise had gotten scared when all the chatter started and anxious about what she had said. Diana said that Dorothy Miller, who had been the curator at the Museum of Modern Art, who had given Louise her first show there and was her friend, had called and said, “I’ve heard you’ve said some very provocative things in a magazine called ‘Charges.’ I’d like to see it.” Louise started to stutter, but Dorothy reassured her that if she believed in what she said, then it was fine.” I decided to call Louise myself. She was very pleasant on the phone and did not recriminate me for using the names. In a confidential voice she told me,
“You know darling, (I loved the way she said ‘darling’ in delicious conspiratorial tones) I was at a restaurant and Tom Hess came over to me and said, ‘you know, Mrs. Nevelson, that was a wonderful thing you did in that interview. I really admire you.’ I could have fallen off my seat.”
From then on Louise was very friendly to me. She invited me to a party at socialite Barbara-Lee Diamondstein’s swanky apartment where she introduced me to Scassi, a pudgy little man who was polite and low key. She was wearing one of his special creations for her, a black, gauzy robe that went down to the floor along with a dark turban that covered her hair, and a bulky sculptural necklace and long earrings. She was magnificent. I had brought Chuck, and she took to him immediately.
Once I invited Louise to my house for dinner, and she asked if Diana could come too. Of course I said yes. However, on the night of the dinner party, Diana called and told me Louise couldn’t make it. Then she asked me if I still wanted her to come. I felt embarrassed and sad for her. Naturally, I said I’d be pleased to have her.
A few days after my dinner party, Newsweek had a tidbit about the Nevelson Interview in Changes. I think Louise was having second thought jitters about her candid assessment of the Greenberg crowd as she told the Newsweek people that I had gotten her drunk. When that fib got back to me, I didn’t get angry. I just had to laugh, especially, since it had been rumored that Louise periodically checked into rehabs to dry out. I never became part of her milieu, but anytime I met her at an art event, she was always cordial to me, always bestowing a kiss on my cheek and on Chuck’s as well. She was always the queen in public. I recall that at one of her openings at the Pace Gallery, she sat in the back room, and received selected visitors who came to pay her court. At that opening Tammy Grimes came to pay her respects. Louise looked at her blankly. The actress, completely cowed, blushed, and said in a small voice, “I’m Tammy Grimes, I am an actress.” Louise still looked puzzled, but she was polite. “How nice to see you.” She intoned regally.
I

2007-05-16T17:21:00.001-04:00

Dear Liz Gwinn,
I removed Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims from my list although I cannot understand why she would not want to know what women in the arts are saying about the nature of feminist art. Many African American artists are also feminists and are continuing to be excluded from the white male establishment. Is she not interested in helping women artists? Does she feel she is too far above her sisters to participate or be interested in their concerns? I cannot help but wondering about a woman who should be setting an example for what it possible for a black woman in the arts to achieve to be taking the position of setting herself apart from other feminists.

Cindy Nemser

2007-05-16T17:14:00.000-04:00

Dear Cindy,
Can you please remove director@studiomuseum.org from this mailing list? I had given you the address with the agreement that I would forward one message from you to Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims, but I cannot forward the volume of emails that you have been sending.
Thank you,
Liz Gwinn
The Studio Museum in Harlem

2007-05-15T21:31:00.001-04:00

Dear Nancy,
We may not know the names of the people who built the great cathedrals, bu they were craftsmen and were most probably were paid. Betty Dodson did a book of drawings of vaginas that were much more beautiful that those of Judy Chicago.

Best regards

Cindy Nemser the Firebrand

2007-05-15T20:36:00.000-04:00

Dear Cindy,
First, thank you for your thoughtful response to my letter. I still stand in defense of the Dinner party as a pivotal feminist work worthy of a place of honor in a major museum. I am familiar with Miainardi's writing but it is one thing to write of neglected feminist artistic traditions in a journal geared to a specific cognoscenti and quite another to shape and push these ideas (with whatever ego it takes) out into the world at large to be seen and judged alongside other great works of art. Like Rubens' Apotheosis...
Granted, Rubens was a great artist and a master of voluptuous flesh but the Apotheosis of Marie de Medici is a grotesque monument to baroque excess and if there were any women among his apprentices, they were shunted over to flowers and still lifes and denied any of the big historical commissions. Speaking of big commissions, Rubens was also a political operative, acting as a diplomat among European royalty, and had lucrative access to an incredibly wealthy and powerful clientele. Do we ever trash him for this? Should we? And where are all the slaves of Judy Chicago? I am sure there are some women who felt used but from what I understand there were many who gave willingly of their time and talents for what was at the time a great cause. Who built Chartres Cathedral? The faithful. Where are their names? I am a lapsed Catholic (anti Catholic actually) so don't get me started on the church's use of nuns and others as slave labor but when it comes to matters of the spirit like art and religion, there are those who willingly sacrifice their egos for what they see as a holy cause. Even after a loss of faith, one cannot dismiss Chartres Cathedral. If Chicago used and abused her work force as much as you say, what has happened to them since? Did she bury them in her back yard? I'm pretty sure she didn't rape their sons or deny them access to birth control.
I feel very strongly that we need to defend our sister artists in what is still a very inhospitable environment. We tear each other apart for a relatively small piece of real estate in the Brooklyn Museum. What about the rest of the museum? What about other museums and collections all over the world?
Glad you mentioned Betty Dodson. She truly is a feminist icon with a pretty overt Cock and Cunt show of her own. However, I feel her contribution is in the field of therapy and scientific illustration unless you classify her art with that of Jon Gnagy or Bob Ross. No disrespect intended. Gnagy and Ross showed people how to make their own art just as Dodson shows women how to have their own orgasms.
In the spirit of open dialogue, I remain
respectfully,
Nancy Lunsford
On May 11, 2007, at 12:46 PM, Cindy Nemser wrote:
Dear Nancy,

I too appreciate the creative marvelous works by women who quilted, stitched, crocheted, loved fine china and set a beautiful table. In fact the Feminist Art Journal was the first to print an article about quilts by the famous Red Stocking feminist writer Patrica Mainardi who wrote the classic “Politics of House Work” before Judy did her Cock and Cunt show.. It was called "Quilts: the Great American Art" and it is in the Winter, 1973 issue of the magazine. The writer declares the women didn't want to anonymous it was forced on them the society they lived in. We also published an article celebrating crocheting, lace making and other forms of needle work by women in FAJ, Winter, 1974- 75 called Fancy Work: the Archaeology of Lives”. In that piece by Rachel Maines the names of the women who sewed the work are mentioned whenever possible.

I am amazed that you could compare the “Dinner Party” with it's ill conceived. Poorly-executed ceramic vaginas to Rubin's masterpiece. It may have been an homage to an egotistical woman, but the artist made something magnificent out of it. He also painted chubby women beautifully for which, I for one, will always be thankful..

At that time that the artists of the period in which he worked there was a guild system and apprentices were not paid, but they were often given room and board, they had the chance to learn from a master. It was like art school but they didn’t have to cough up tuition. Later when they became journeymen they were given pay and credit

And for everyone who doesn’t know it Judy Chicago was not the first women artist to depict vaginas. The credit goes to Betty Dodson who published a book of realistically drawn vaginas stressing the unique patterning of each one. She also held classes in which she taught women who had never had organisms how to pleasure themselves. Dodson’s purpose was to enrich women’s lives not to force naïve women to slave for her and turn herself into a “feminist Icon.” Chicago is more like the pharaohs who forced slave to build their great tombs.

Cindy Nemser

2007-05-15T13:43:00.002-04:00

2007-05-15T13:43:00.001-04:00

Hello Everyone,

Join in the fascinating discussion about Judy Chicago and feminist art on Cindy Nemser's blog at http://cindynemser.blogspot.com/. See comments from Nina Yankowitz, Judy Bernstein, Deborah Remington and many more. Let your voice be heard; leave your opinions in the post section after each comment.

Let the games begin!

Cindy Nemser

2007-05-15T13:24:00.000-04:00

Dear Cindy:My dear friend Gloria Orenstein forwarded this to me. I'm Hannah Wlke's sister. My children and I inherited most of her art and are working very hard to place it in museum collections as was Hannah's dearest wish. You'll be happy to know we have placed work at MOMA, the Whitney, MOCA, and LACMA as well as several private collections and are trying to listen thoughtfully to Hannah's instructions from the past and from the beyond as to where she wants each piece to go.As a woman, a single parent, and a feminist therapist, I share your despair and anger at the lack of progress for women, not only for women artists, but for all women in their personall and working lives, their economic situation , and their relationships with men and one another. The world is much worse as the patriarchy continues to spread from the family to the multi-national corporations that promote war, greed, violence and indifference.I appreciate your strong voice in this struggle for yourself and for all women, and I hope you can stay of good heart and continue to speak out as I keep trying to do in spite of so much injustice. In Sisterhood,Marsie Marsie SchcrlattHannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles

2007-05-15T13:16:00.000-04:00

Dear Marsie,

I appreciate your supportive words. I was thrilled to have her diptych in my exhibition . If you don't have the Public Relation material let me know because it contains some of the pieces in the show called "Women Work: Homage ot Feminist Art." Just sent me your e-mail address. Hannah should have a retrospective at one of the main New York Museums. Her last show was amazing. I was astounded that she who was so beautiful and so concerned with putting it on display would have the courage to show how disfigured she was by the cancer that killed her. That show, in my opionion catapulted her into the realm of great artists. It should be on permant view at the Brooklyn Museum, rather than the Dinner Part or better yet at the Museum of Modern Art.. I'm sorry that you didn't get the chance to see my exhibition.

Best regards,

Cindy Nemser

2007-05-13T15:58:00.000-04:00

From Nina Yankowitz
Date: Tue, 8 May 2007 23:39:52 +0000 having open dialogues and diverse opinions is what needs to be embraced here. Although many of us display passionate responses to material and it can sometimes feel inflammatory, I think it's important to keep our eyes on the prize of encouraging open discourse. After all, we 're in touch with the female parts of ourselves and are sometimes emotionally driven with our conceptual presentations. I have heard Cindy speak about the Sackler show and Judy Chicago's work and my interpretation is that her concern is that not all women/feminist artists want feminism defined as art about their genitalia. She spoke clearly about the problem of a feminist art museum exhibiting a permanent installation of only one kind of feminist art. This can erroneously persuade a public perception of thinking that this kind of vaginal work was the main issue and what feminist art history was about in the 1970s. Judy's work was an important contribution to the history, but by no means the only meaningful asset to our history during those early days. I hope that many will participate in a continuing dialogue and I know that Cindy wants that too. Nina
Bless you Nina,
I thank for nailing the problem perfectly. No we don't want women to be categorized totally by their genitalia. I do however disagree with you about the worth of Judy Chicago's art which I think is vulgar and demeaning to women artists. The lighting which was done by Moira Reilly was ethereal and enchanting and the stitching and embroidery was beautifully done by the exploited seamstress who were paid nothing for their labors. But the vaginal images on the plates were, for the most part, repulsive and totally kitchy. What a waste of a grand space that could hold really beautiful and truly up lifting art- like Audrey Flack's majestic goddesses or the art world's beauty Hannah Wilke's last show which shows her still recording her presence and creating great art even as she is being photographed in the last stages of cancer. There are many other women artists much more worthy of this space which is now claimed fore ver by a woman who bullied and conned everyone she could to satisfy her monstrous ego.
This is how I see the "Dinner Party," but you have a right to your own opinion. Let's keep the dialogue open.

Love
Cindy Nemser
Date: Tue, 8 May 2007 23:39:52 +0000 having open dialogues and diverse opinions is what needs to be embraced here. Although many of us display passionate responses to material and it can sometimes feel inflammatory, I think it's important to keep our eyes on the prize of encouraging open discourse. After all, we 're in touch with the female parts of ourselves and are sometimes emotionally driven with our conceptual presentations. I have heard Cindy speak about the Sackler show and Judy Chicago's work and my interpretation is that her concern is that not all women/feminist artists want feminism defined as art about their genitalia. She spoke clearly about the problem of a feminist art museum exhibiting a permanent installation of only one kind of feminist art. This can erroneously persuade a public p erception of thinking that this kind of vaginal work was the main issue and what feminist art history was about in the 1970s. Judy's work was an important contribution to the history, but by no means the only meaningful asset to our history during those early days. I hope that many will participate in a continuing dialogue and I know that Cindy wants that too. Nina
Bless you Nina,

I thank for nailing the problem perfectly. No we don't want women to be categorized totally by their genitalia. I do however disagree with you about the worth of Judy Chicago's art which I think is vulgar and demeaning to women artists. The lighting which was done by Moira Reilly was ethereal and enchanting and the stitching and embroidery was beautifully done by the exploited seamstress who were paid nothing for their labors. But the vaginal images on the plates were, for the most part, repulsive and totally kitchy. What a waste of a grand space that could hold really beautiful and truly up lifting art- like Audrey Flack's majestic goddesses or the art world's beauty Hannah Wilke's last show which shows her still recording her presence and creating great art even as she is being photographed in the last stages of cancer. There are many other women artists much more worthy of this space which is now claimed fore ver by a woman who bullied and conned everyone she could to satisfy her monstrous ego.
This is how I see the "Dinner Party," But you have a right to your own opinion. Let's keep the dialogue open.

Love

Cindy Nemser

2007-04-24T13:56:00.001-04:00

On April 20, 2007 I replied to Cristina Biaggi who was asking if another show including goddess imagery was being planned. I thought many of you would like to know about an exhibition we think should be in the works to recover our veteran feminists art and our veteran feminists' art history. I was at an event last week at the Brooklyn Museum where Maura Reilly titillated her audience by saying that the Feminist wing had a show in the works, but she would not say one word about what kind of a show it would be. She told me she regretted not being able to do the exhibition she wanted to do, the one we all wanted to see, but Connie Butler had taken it away from her. Evently, there cannot be two shows about veteran feminists at the same time even though one would be on the East coast and represent many artists who still need to be restored to the public’s sight such as Deborah Remington, Lila Katzen, Lil Picard, Linda Stein, Judith Bernstein, Mary Grigoriadis, and so many more. There is also no more room for a proper documentation of the history of feminism in the arts in the 60's and 70's. Even the activities that went on at the Brooklyn Museum itself at that time are missing. There is no memorabilia of the meeting that the coalition of women artists groups had with Duncan Cameron when they demanded an all women exhibition from him right in his office. There is nothing about all the panels and speak-outs that took place in the auditorium.

Everything at the Feminist Wing is wrong: the canonization of Judy Chicago's vulgar, exploitative Dinner Party is uncalled for. The exhibition "Global Feminisms" that excludes the groundbreakers of the movement is wrong. It attempts to be activist and inclusive and excludes the women artists who made history and who made it possible to have a feminist wing. The curators of that show succumbed to the pressure to cater to the demands of a materialistic centered culture that worships its youth and abhors its elders. They seemed also to feel that they had to show they were hip and made sure to get art that was from all over the globe whether it had originality and genuine quality or was just a rehash of the latest art currents that one can find all over Chelsea and the other “hot” art hot spots. It’s sad to say, but the curators sold out and should be ashamed of themselves.

Dear Cristina Biaggi,

I hope there will be an exhibition counteracting the ill thought out one at the Brooklyn Museum, but so far, I have no specific plans to curate such a show. I will be speaking at Artists Talk on Art on April 27 at the School of Visual Arts. Perhaps at that session people will have suggestions as to how to create the show that should have been at the Museum. Linda Stein, Gloria Orenstein, Audrey Anastasi and myself came up with the name "Continuum: Celebrating the Arc of Feminist Creativity." It would include veteran feminist artists of the 60 and 70's and move on with representatives from each decade up to the present. But where could such a large exhibition we presented? It must be a large venue to make a really great impact.

In the meantime write to the Brooklyn Museum at voice your displeasure. The email address is melissa.messina@brooklynmuseum.org.

Thanks for your support

Cindy Nemser

2007-03-26T09:57:00.000-04:00

Read the review in the New York Sun -

http://www.nysun.com/article/50934

2007-03-25T13:40:00.000-04:00

www.nysun.com/articlw/50934

2007-03-12T11:57:00.000-04:00

TABLA RASA GALLERY
and
THE FEMINIST ART JOURNAL
present
"Women's Work: Homage to Feminist Art"
curated by Cindy Nemser

March 28 - May 13, 2007
Artists Reception: Wednesday, March 28, 2007
5:30 - 8:00 PM

Gallery hours: THURSDAY, FRIDAY & SATURDAY Noon - 5:00 pm
Other weekdays: by appointment
718. 833-9100 718. 768-0305

Tabla Rasa Gallery

224 48 Street

Brooklyn, NY 11220

info@TablaRasaGallery.com
http://www.tablarasagallery.com/

FREE

FOR IMAGES GO TO: http://tablarasa.net/html/women_s_work.html

Renowned pioneer of the Feminist movement, art historian and critic Cindy Nemser returns to the world of contemporary art to curate an all women's exhibition entitled “Women’s Work: Homage to Feminist Art” at Tabla Rasa Gallery, 224 48th Street, Brooklyn, opening on March 28, 2007. Nemser believes a woman doing her art, whether it is overtly political or not, is a feminist action. The show includes 20 artists represented by one work each. For Nemser, feminism is the gateway to humanism, to a place where every race and religion as well as both genders will be evaluated strictly on their merit and prejudice will finally be abolished. That is how she believes society will move forward.

The exhibition features celebrated women artists who emerged in the 70’s. Among the artists included in the exhibition are Eleanor Antin, (who embodied different personas long before Cindy Sherman) and Hannah Wilke, an astonishing beauty, who had the courage to have herself photographed in the last debilitating stages of the cancer that killed her. Other artists in the show are Howardena Pindell, Sylvia Sleigh, Mary Grigoriadis, Judith Bernstein, and Dotty Attie, all of whom were early members of A.I.R., the first women’s gallery. Lil Picard, cult performance artist who also wrote for the legendary East Village Other and never missed an opening, and Sue Coe, who documented the hostile senate hearings that took place when Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment are part of the exhibition. Monumental sculptors Audrey Flack and Lila Katzen, as well as controversial Nancy Grossman, are featured as well as the phenomenal painter Deborah Remington, poetry collaborator Oriole Farb Feshbach and notorious Anita Steckel.

To give the exhibit a richer overlay of meaning, Nemser also invited some younger women such as painter, experimentalist Audrey Anastasi, mixed media artist Orly Cogan, video artist Bec Stupak, and exquisite painter on found objects Irene Hardwicke Oliveri, among others. The exhibition creates a visual dialog between the older women artists of the feminist second wave and the younger women of the emerging third wave.

Ms. Nemser, a brilliant writer and impassioned feminist, was a firebrand of the women artists’ movement from 1969 on. Besides publishing the groundbreaking Feminist Art Journal, her book Art Talk: Conversations with 12 Women Artists, Charles Scribner, 1975, was reprinted in 1995 as Art Talk: Conversations with 15 Women Artists by Harper Collins. It was the first book to be written about women artists since the 1930’s. Considered a classic, it was recently translated into Chinese, and can still be purchased today. Among her long list of credits are feminist pieces on women in Ms, New York Times, Arts Magazine, Artforum, Art in America, Newsday, as well as monographs, journals, newspapers and lectures at prestigious universities, museums, art organizations and women’s galleries all over the country including Yale University, the Maryland Institute of Art, The Smithsonian National Collection, the Brooklyn Museum, Berkeley Museum and the Maryland Institute of Art, the women’s cooperative gallery A.I.R., in New York, ARC and Artemisia in Chicago, the Women’s Building in Los Angeles and the Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota, (W.A.R.M.).

Adjunct events during the show include Cindy Nemser reading from her new book Firebrand: The Autobiography of a Feminist Art Critic ( 3:00 pm, Saturday February 14, 2007) in which she uses personal experience to document the birthing of the women artists’ movement in the late 60’s and 70's as well as a filmed memoir entitled "Lil Picard,"by Silviana Goldsmith (3:00 pm, Saturday, March 31, 2007.) Additional presentations will be scheduled from March 28, 2007 to May 13, 2007.

The gallery is located at 224 48th Street, between 2nd and 3rd Avenues in SPArC (Sunset Park Artists' Community). From Manhattan, "D" train to 36 Street in Brooklyn, cross platform, and take "R" train one stop to 45th Street. Street parking is available.

Tabla Rasa Gallery is free and open to the public Thursday through Saturday, noon until 5 pm, from the opening reception on Wednesday March 28, 2007 until the closing on Sunday, May 13, 2007.

See http://tablarasagallery.com/, or call 718. 833-9100 or 718.768-0305 for additional information.

2007-03-08T12:03:00.000-05:00

The Brooklyn Museum Disrespects Women Artists of a Certain Age

By Cindy Nemser

I know that by creating “Global Feminisms” Linda Nochlin and Maura Reilly meant to aid the feminist art cause by bringing knowledge of young women’s’ art to members of their own generation. However, by only presenting the work done by artists born after 1960, I think they have made a grave mistake. Perhaps they don’t realize it, but they have gone about this all-important inaugural exhibition in an insensitive, offensive and essentially invalid way—in a way that also unfortunately displays a stunning lack of art historical perspective.

To me, and many other women, both young and old, it feels like an insult that Nochlin and Reilly decided that the first exhibition, at the supposedly feminist Elizabeth A. Sackler Wing of the Brooklyn Museum, would bypass all the art done by the women artists of the second wave done in the 60’s and 70’s. It was these women, who created the feminist art revolution here in New York City and further along the east coast. The only woman of that period who is honored at the opening of the new wing is Judy Chicago whose art evolved on the west coast and had little or no influence on women here. In fact many highly esteemed east coast women artists were and still are deeply antagonistic to it.

I don't know how Nochlin and Reilly could have overlooked the fact that Brooklyn, as well as Manhattan, was a hot bed of feminist activity from the start of the 70’s.

I was at the Brooklyn Museum in the fall of 1971, when the organization Women in the Arts, along with other women’s groups like The Women’s Ad Hoc Committee, W.S.A.B.L, “Where We At” and others confronted the then museum director Duncan Cameron, right in his office, demanding more exposure for women artists. He agreed to allow them to have several panels in the museum’s auditorium and a free for all speak-out. One panel even sported the then sexist Barbara Rose who made it clear she despised the feminists, especially those who made “bad art.” During these events the auditorium was filled to capacity. Many of the women, realizing that they had heretofore been deprived of respect and recognition, were demanding that their voices be heard and their art put on display. This event took place before the 1972 Conference at the Corcoran. It wasn’t until 1975 that the Brooklyn Museum grudgingly mounted a small all women’s exhibition called “Works on Paper: Women Artists.”

Irene Moss and I, both Brooklynites, were among the founders of the group Women in the Arts (W.I.A.) which came into being in 1971 and which eventually convinced Mario Amaya, the then director of the New York Cultural Center to offer space at his museum to present the all women-juried-exhibition “Women Choose Women.” This show was the first major display of highly esteemed women artists to be presented in a prestigious American venue. It was a milestone.

In 1972, the Feminist Art Journal was published, from my basement in Park Slope until 1977 and Woman Art another valuable feminist art magazine was also published in Park Slope from 1976 to 1978.

Even more historic feminist art events were conceived in Brooklyn. Plans for “Philadelphia Focuses on Women in the Arts,” a city wide art festival featuring women in the all the arts developed right in my kitchen by the artist activist Diane Burko and myself.

I had met Burko during one of the first three historic panels on women in the arts I had organized with Patricia Sloane for the 1973 artists' sessions of the College Art Association (CA.A) to take place in New York. They were the first artists’ sessions of the C.A.A. ever to deal with the subject of the prejudice against women artists in the art world. During the last session Burko, who was sitting next to me, asked if she could come to see me for guidance as to how to go about putting on an all women exhibition in her city Philadelphia.

I agreed and she came. As we sipped our coffee, I said, “Why stop at one exhibition, why not make the whole city a venue for women artists work?” Diane was thrilled by the idea, so she went home and organized as many prominent women in the arts as she could into a committee to plan “Focus.” I traveled to Philadelphia, at her request, several times to lend my support to the project. The festival came to fruition in April 1974. It contained three major exhibitions: “Women’s Work” at the Civic Center, selected by: Marcia Tucker, Adele Breeskin, Anne D’Honancourt, Lila Katzen and myself. A show called “In Her Own Image” that I curated for the Samuel Fleisher Art Memorial, which was part of the Philadelphia Museum, and an historical exhibition “Women 1500 to 1900” shown at the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts. Many other events such as art exhibits, panels and film festivals took place at smaller venues around the city.

Coming back to the immediate present, I have to say that the truly shocking premise of “Global Feminisms” didn’t really hit me, at first. When I heard about it, I didn’t like the basis of the show at all. But I was mollified because I was told that Connie Butler, then at M.O.C.A. (Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles) had curated a show called "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” that included art of the women who worked from 1960 to 85 (It was hard to find out who was in the show and who was not). I was told that this show would be opening first in March, 2007 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, in California, then it would travel to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, in Washington D.C. and lastly come to P.S. 1 out in Queens in 2008. To be honest, I didn’t think that much about the fact that only young women, who were not there at the beginning of the movement, were to be the subject of the inaugural exhibit of the world’s feminist wing until Anita Steckel, a courageous feminist artist of the second wave, pointed out how ageist and how disrespectful to women of the second wave this show was.

Then it hit me like a thunderbolt! I grasped the fact that right now, during women’s history month, at a time when feminism in the arts is reawakening, like the preverbal sleeping giant, and once more is on the move, there would be no women of the second wave, except Judy Chicago, honored at any major New York Museum!!! How could this be?

The ageist premise of the” Global Feminisms” exhibition became even more heinous to me when I recently received an e-mail outlining the symposium that Nochlin and Reilly had organized for March 31, 2007. I was both astounded and enraged that there would be no women from the second wave except Nochlin at that event. It seemed inconceivable that neither Nochlin nor Reilly had any concerns about giving the attendees some of the museum’s all-important history regarding the issues of gender discrimination. I was further shocked to read that not one of the many activities Nochlin and Reilly planned throughout the length of their exhibition included a member of the group that helped create the second wave feminist art movement. I am furious that the new, feminist wing of this museum named after a supposedly fervent feminist Elizabeth A. Sackler is virtually writing out the feminist art history that occurred only thirty years ago--events that actually took place at the Museum itself!

With their poorly timed exhibition and their insensitive activities programming, especially in the planning of their narrow, thoughtless March 31 symposium, Nochlin and Reilly are losing the invaluable opportunity to allow the older pioneer generation of the New York and Brooklyn contingent of the early women’s movement in the arts to speak to the younger generation and tell them how it was and how it could be again.

Where in their many proceedings are Jacqueline Skiles, the original founder of the New York Women’s Art Center, and Dorothy Gillespie, who later became a co-director of that amazing place where so many excellent and daring art exhibitions, installations, films, plays and happenings took place. Alice Neel showed there. I saw my first lesbian movie there. Why are none of its founders on one of the panels?

Where are Ce Roser, June Blum, Louise Bourgeois, Joyce Weinstein, or any of the other spokeswomen for the energetic Women in the Arts? Where is Lucy Lippard or Brenda Miller, dedicated members of the Women’s Ad Hoc Committee? Where are some of those artist members who helped to create the East West Bag Syndicate that collected a women’s slide registry, which gave women all over the world the chance to see each other’s art.

Where is Silviania Goldsmith, who was one of the first women to organize X to the 12^th Power, the first women’s show that dared to throw the gauntlet in the face of the establishment? Where is Juliet Gordon, Vernita Nemic or any other original members of W.A.R.? Where are the gutsy feminist artists: Audrey Flack, Howardena Pindell, Faith Ringgold, Nancy Azara, Patricia Marnardi and Marjorie Kramer to name only a few? Where is Cynthia Navaretta, publisher of the Women’s Artists Newsletter, or Judy Siegel who made sure to document all the feminist panels and actions in the Newsletter? Where are some of the early members of the A.I.R. gallery and the members of the Soho 20 gallery that soon opened after A.I.R.?

Where is Gloria Orenstein who wrote the first articles on “Women of Surrealism” and Frida Kahlo for the Feminist Art Journal? Where is John Perreault who was always sympathetic to the feminist cause when he was the art critic for The Village Voice and for the Soho Weekly News? And where is the 90-year-old Sylvia Sleigh, a truly innovative feminist painter, who was married to the renowned critic Lawrence Alloway, a writer who supported women whole-heartedly in his weekly column in the Nation? These women and men, unlike the cutesy Guerilla Girls, did not cover their faces or hide behind masks. They were not afraid to be identified and to speak out against the gender prejudice that pervaded all aspects of the powerful New York art establishment.

I could go on and on naming the women and men who are truly equipped to relate to the next generation what it was like in the 70’s when we were picketing M.O.M. A. and the Whitney or holding consciousness raising meetings and panel discussions wherever we could. We were always ready to defy the art establishment and fight for ideas of equality not just for white women, but for all women and men-- African American, Asian, etc. who had been ignored by a bigoted art machine.

But we have lost many of the original leaders of the movement and many of the others who are still around do not have so many days left, so it is imperative to have the remaining women speak now!

I am sad to say it is not only the Brooklyn Museum that has barely noted the contribution of the Veteran Feminist Artists. The two-day symposium at M.O.M.A, and most of the lectures and panels at the College Art Association (C.A.A.) did the same thing. Most of the early movers and shakers of the second wave, especially those from the east coast, were totally overlooked.

It is a harsh thing to have to say, but to me it seems as if the leaders of the “so-called” third wave are composed of people with a decidedly ageist approach when it comes to women artists. These people seem to just be playing into the hands of the wealthy establishment elite who are determined to continue to glorify the art world’s obsession with the young male genius. These supposedly leaders act like limp dish rags in the face of the art world king makers.

As a result of this timid and pandering attitude, the women of the 60’s and the 70’s, here in Brooklyn and New York, and to be fair, all over the country, who created the path for the women of the 80’s, 90’s and 2000’s to obtain entry into the seat of power, are being ignored by of the of all people, so called feminist women art historians and curators. Sadly the women who made it all happen are being shunned by those who should know better. They are preventing us veterans from reaching as many as possible of the new generation. Even more unfortunate,is the fact that most of the “recognized” women of the younger generations do not even realize that it was because of their predecessors that they were able to make it into the big time. However their number of female stars as opposed to men stars is still pitifully few, and if these privileged women don’t watch out, they could easily be obliterated again.

In 1972, I published a paper about how bigoted historians and critics of the 19^th and 20^th century had used stereotypes about women artists in the past, to either denigrate them or write them out of art history altogether. The article was called “Stereotypes and Women Artists” and was published in the Feminist Art Journal and later reprinted in Judy Loeb’s anthology Feminist Collage. It had been commissioned by Art in America, but the editor was afraid to publish it as several contemporary art critics were among the ranks of the sexists I wrote about. It was really the first piece of revisionist art history ever written although it has never been acknowledged as such by the academics.

In contrast to the famous paper published in Art News by Linda Nochlin, who basically laid out the reasons “Why There Have Been No Great Women Artists,” in my research I discovered Nochlin was wrong. There were many who belonged in the company of the great--Artemisa Gentileschi, Vigëe Le Brun, Judith Leyster, Käthe Kollwitz to name only a few. But they had been written out of art history by prejudiced 19^th and 20^th century art historians. I am fearful that the same thing will happen again if we ignore the giants of the second wave and those who worked in the earlier part of the 20^th century.

I am horrified to see gifted older women artists, being passed over because youth and multiculturalism are now more the fashion. Passing over the women of the second wave is a disaster. The younger generation needs to discover its roots. It must build on what the veterans of the 70’s did. Otherwise, like the Women’s Art Coalition of the 90’s, it will only lose its momentum by trying to reinvent the wheel and fade away.

Linda Nochlin and Maura Reilly claim to be avid feminists. Therefore I implore them to rethink the way older women in the arts are being treated both in the Brooklyn Museum and at M.O.M.A. I also believe they should be aware that, at the moment, their ageist bias is hurting and infuriating many women in the arts all over the country.

I do not mean to be unkind. I know that Nochlin and Reilly have achieved much in the course of their careers, but I do hope they will reconsider their programs and invite some of old timers to speak out. Just recently, I attended a panel composed of early members of A.I.R. Hearing those women speak was pure gold. The audience was enchanted, but they were also angry that the Brooklyn Museum is treating these veterans and so many others older New York women so cavalierly. They feel, and rightly so, that the history of the women’s art revolution in New York has not been accurately reported. I feel the same way and hope to supply more of it in my recently completed book Firebrand: the Autobiography of a Feminist Art Critic. However, mine is a personal story told from my own perspective. We need many more perspectives and contributions to put all the pieces together. This, I would think, would be the first task the Feminist Wing of the Museum would take on.

I know I cannot make up for the unfortunate way so many older artists have been slighted, but I am trying in my own small way to redress this situation by guest curating an exhibition at the Tabla Rasa Gallery, in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, that is, for the most part, a tribute to the women of the second wave who besides being courageous were fabulous artists. Among the participants are Deborah Remington, Audrey Flack, Lila Katzen, Hannah Wilke, Sylvia Sleigh, Judy Bernstein, Mary Grigoriadis, Dottie Attie, Nancy Grossman, Howardena Pindell, Anita Steckel and significant others.

www.TablaRasaGallery.com

Author’s credits: Cindy Nemser is an art historian, art and theater critic and novelist. She is the author of Art Talk: Conversations with 12 Women Artists, Scribner, 1975 reprinted by HarperCollins in 1995 and translated into Chinese in 1998. She has also published several other books. She was the publisher/editor of The Feminist Art Journal from 1972-77. She has received an Art Critics Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts and published in The New York Times, Newsday, Ms, Art in America, Artforum, Arts Magazine, American Theatre and many other journals and newspapers. She is currently guest curating an exhibition entitled “Women’s Work: Homage to Feminist Art,” at the Tabla Rasa Gallery and completing her book Firebrand: the Autobiography of a Feminist Art Critic.

2006-10-23T13:11:00.002-04:00

If you are not familiar with my contribution to the women artist’s cause I would like to give you some of my background. I am an art historian and critic. I received an M.A. from the Institute of Fine Arts in 1966, did an internship at the Museum of Modern Art and became a respected art critic writing for Artforum, Art in America, Arts Magazine (I was a contributing editor to Arts from 1972-75), the Art Journal, Art Education, and Studio International. I have also been published in The New York Times, The Village Voice, Ms, Newsday, Opera Monthly, and many other art, feminist, and general and publications. I was the first to write about and interview Chuck Close, Eva Hesse, Vito Acconci and many others and I received an Art Critic’s Fellowship award from the National Endowment on the Arts in 1974. I am a member of PEN American, Drama Desk and Outer Critics and am listed in Who’s Who in American Art and Who’s Who in the American Women as well as other Who’s Who directories. I have lectured and held seminars on the art of both men and women all over the country and also appeared on the radio and on television in cities all over America.

In 1970, I attended a meeting of the organization called W.A.R. (Women Artists in Revolution) who were debating whether to have an all women artists exhibition, which they would call X12:X, because there were twelve women artists in it. Some were fearful they would be stigmatized by showing with only women, but they decided to go ahead despite their reservations. (I reviewed this now legendary show for Arts Magazine.) During the discussion, one of the women asked me if I had ever experienced sexist discrimination during my lifetime. That question caused me to have an experience that the Zen Buddhists refer to as Satori, an epiphany. Immediately I remembered how hard I had to fight to establish a career as an art historian and critic for myself because I was a married woman with a child. One of my professors at the Institute of Fine Arts told me to do volunteer work after I obtained my M.A. Another one said I didn’t need to work as I had a husband to support me. I reacted to their rejection of my abilities by assuming I was not smart enough even to gain their approval even though I had earned excellent grades. I blamed myself when they didn’t accept me as a PhD candidate although they said I could keep taking courses but with no guarantee of future acceptance. Now I realized how my being a married woman and a mother had worked against me and I was outraged. But I also felt as if I had finally woken up and seen the world as it really was. I converted to feminism almost in an instant and became a dedicated advocate for women in the arts.

I wrote one of the first articles about women artists entitled “Forum: Women in Art” which was published in Arts Magazine, in February, 1971 and later published a painstakingly researched article about how art historians and critics in the 19th and 20th century had written women out of art history by ignoring or disparaging them. The piece was called “Stereotypes and Women Artists” and I put it in the in the first issue of the Feminist Art Journal, in April 1972. The article was later published by Journal of Aesthetic Education under the title, “Art Criticism and Women Artists,” vol.7.no.3, July, 197, and then included in Judith Loeb’s anthology Feminist Collage, Teacher’s College, Columbia University, New York, 1979. I felt my research had proven that there were great women artists such as Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Leyster, Elisabeth Vigée LeBrun, Rosa Bonheur, Angelica Kaufmann and so forth. When Linda and Ann Sutherland Harris did their exhibition “Women Artists: 1550—1950, in 1976, I felt I had been vindicated. I also felt allied with Linda Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris because we were fighting for the same cause.

I published/edited The Feminist Art Journal from 1972-77, on a shoestring, right from the basement of my house at 41 Montgomery Place, in Park Slope where I have lived for forty years. The magazine, a 50 page quarterly was first presented as a newspaper and then revamped into a slick two color magazine. I published historical articles, exposes, interviews, art profiles, book and art gallery reviews. The Feminist Art Journal was the first to promote the little known women of Surrealism in an article by Gloria Orenstein. She also wrote the first piece on Frida Kahlo who, at that time, was only known in the United States as the wife of Diego Rivera. The F.A.J. also published Patricia Mainardi’s now famous piece on the glory of women’s quilts. We covered women in all the arts, but the main emphasis was on the visual.

The Feminist Art Journal reached a circulation of 8,000 and had subscribers both in America and in countries all over the world. Many public and college libraries were subscribers. Though the magazine was strictly a labor of love, I paid everyone on our staff and all our contributors. I knew that women were always being called upon to do volunteer work and I vowed the F.A.J. would not perpetuate that unfair practice. My husband, who was the managing editor, and I took only enough salary to cover our business expenses. The production of the magazine was paid for with the money that came from bookstore sales and subscriptions.

I published Art Talk: Conversations with 12 Women Artists, Scribner, 1975. It was the first book to be written about women artists since the 1930’s. HarperCollins reprinted it in 1995, in paperback, as Art Talk: Conversations with 15 women. The three added interviews were also done in the 70’s. It was translated into Chinese and published in Taiwan in 1998 and today it is considered a classic. The book contains interviews with Eva Hesse, Barbara Hepworth, Lee Krasner, Marisol, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, Betye Saar, Isabel Bishop and many other acclaimed women artists. Every artist in the book was originally interviewed on tape and so I own the only existing tape with Eva Hesse who tragically died only a few months after I interviewed her. If you listen to the audio guide at the Jewish Museum, Eva’s voice comes directly from my tape. When Art Talk I was reprinted I organized several panels at Barnes and Noble, on 6th Ave and 20th Street, and invited some of the artists in the book to come and have their say about their experience as women artists. The panelists were Lila Katzen, Audrey Flack, Grace Hartigan and Janet Fish. I also did a series of events at that Barnes and Noble, which included Carolee Schneemann, Howardena Pindell and the photographer Jill Clements.

I have also published two other books, a novel, Eve’s Delight, Pinnacle Books, New York, 1982, and a monograph on the little known, but astonishingly gifted optical artist Ben Cunningham entitled A Life With Color, JPL Art Publishers, Texas, 1989. I became a cultural critic in 1990’s and besides writing about art in Ms and Arts Magazine, I also wrote on theater, dance and opera for Arts and Entertainment, Theater Weekly, Opera Monthly, the Dramatists Guild Quarterly, American Theatre, City Search and many other magazines and newspapers.

In 1974, Diane Burko and I helped to organize a women’s art festival in Philadelphia called “Philadelphia Focuses on Women in the Arts.” The whole city participated with art shows, panels, film festivals and readings. We had a major invitational exhibit called “Women’s Work” at the Philadelphia Civic Center. The curators of the show were Marcia Tucker, Adelyn Breeskin, Anne d’ Harnancourt, Lila Katzen and myself. I also did a show entitled “In Her Own Image” at the Fleisher Memorial Gallery, which is part of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Each woman artist presented an image of a woman. Lee Krasner, Louise Nevelson, Käthe Kollowitz, Eleanor Antin, Faith Ringgold, Elaine De Kooning, Nancy Grossman, Isabel Bishop and Alice Neel Marcia Marcus were among the 45 participants The show was a great success and was written about in the New York Times the Philadelphia Inquire, the Philadelphia Evening News and in many art magazines and journals.

In the 1970’s I also did a great deal of lecturing around the country in schools such as Yale, University of Southern California, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, The University of Iowa, Pratt Institute, University of Wisconsin at Madison, Rhode Island School of Design, and such institutions as the Berkley Museum, the Smithsonian, the Brooklyn Museum, and too many more to mention. I also did participated on panels at Oberlin, AIR Gallery, the Viridian Gallery, Tyler School of art, Temple University in Philadelphia, among others and did seminars at the women artists cooperative galleries such as AIR, Artemisia, and Arc in Chicago, Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota, W.A.R.M. in Minneapolis, and other women’s cooperatives. I was delighted to give a slide talk and book signing at the Feminist Studio Workshop in the Women’s Building in Los Angeles in 1975. In 1977, I deeply honored to be invited to give the commencement speech at the Minneapolis School of Art and Design.

I have told given some of my history to Maura Reilly and she wants to meet and plan some historical projects with me about the inception of feminism in the arts. I was there while it all was happening, and I covered and participated in all the major events: the confrontation with the director Duncan Cameron at the Brooklyn Museum, the picketing of Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney, the Conference of Women in the Visual Arts at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington D.C., April, 1972, in which I participated and which I wrote up for Art in America. I also was a founding member of the organization Women in the Arts, in 1971. That organization convinced Mario Amaya, the then director of the New York Cultural Center, to put on the first major museum women artists museum called “Women Choose Women.” I also organized the first three sessions on women artists for the studio artists division of the College Art Association February, 1973, with panels that included Louise Nevelson, Lee Krasner, Audrey Flack, Marcia Tucker and many other artists, dealers and museum women, and many years later, in 1996 I did a panel at the C.A.A. called “Learning from the 70’s”

During the 1990’s I became a theater and cultural critic. I wrote for the entertainment section of the New York Law Journal, Citysearch, Art and Entertainment (for whom I had the honor to interview Marilyn Horne) Opera Monthly and American Theatre, Dance Pages, among many other publications. I also printed a piece on the plight of women playwrights for the Dramatists Guild Quarterly. My daughter Catherine Nemser and I wrote several plays, one of which “Mom’s the Word” got us into the semi-finals of the prestigious Anna Weissberger Foundation and New Dramatists L. Arnold Weissberger Playwriting Competition. (Pretty good for a first attempt.) We also wrote a play about the struggles of a woman artist to make a success in a sexist art world. Helen Butleroff, the producer of “That’s Life,” and “Pets,” also included us in her musical review “Mamas” that played at Theater in the Park in Queens. Our contribution was a monologue about the guilt experienced by a mother who is torn between being at work and being with her child.

WOMEN’S WORK: HOMAGE TO FEMINIST ART

TABLA RASA GALLERY

At this time I am guest curating an exhibition called “Women’s Work: Homage to Feminist Art,” at the Tabla Rasa at 224 48th Street in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn. Tabla Rasa, which is owned by Audrey and Joseph Anastasi, both gifted artists and ardent feminists. It will open on March 28, 2007. Tabla Rasa, with its white walls and highly polished hardwood floors similar in design to most Manhattan galleries, is a highly professional commercial gallery, showing serious art.

The exhibition will include approximately 25 artists. Each artist will be represented by one work: either a painting, sculpture, drawing or mixed media work. The title refers to feminist concerns, but I am not insisting that the work be overtly gender oriented or political. It can also be representation or abstract. For me a woman doing her art, whether it is political or not, is a feminist action.

Among the women included in the show are Eleanor Antin, who invented new personas for herself before Cindy Sherman, Hannah Wilke, the art world beauty who had the courage to have her disfigured body photographed during her battle with the cancer that killed her, Lila Katzen, Audrey Flack, Howardena Pindell, Dotty Attie, Sylvia Sleigh Mary Grigoriadis, Judith Bernstein, early members of the first women’s gallery, A.I. R., Deborah Remington, Lil Picard, a conceptual artist who also wrote for the East Village Other, Alice Neel, who painted me and my husband Chuck Nemser in the nude, and Nancy Grossman among other veteran feminist artists. who have come into their own at this time, but some of whom have still not been significantly recognized for the gigantic influence they have had on art all over the world. To give the exhibit a richer overlay of meaning, I am also inviting some comparatively younger women such as Sue Coe, Audrey Anastasi, Orly Cogan, Rosa Loy, and Irene Hardwicke Olivieri among others. These are women who I think have either been influenced or inspired by the Artists of the 60’s and 70’s.

Though I have the last word as curator of “Women’s Work,” I value the input from both of the Anastasis and, of course, from my husband Chuck Nemser who was the unsung managing editor of the Feminist Art Journal from its inception. In fact, I think the happy collaboration that we have formed with Audrey and Joseph is a paradigm of what Betty Friedan meant by the next step that the women’s movement needed to needed to make the women ‘s movement bring about amazing world change. It is an answer to her call for women and men to finally work as equal partners so that eventually there would be no need for women to segregate themselves to get their achievements seen and appreciated. Though I am a totally committed advocate of women’s right to equality, to me feminism is the gateway to humanism, to a place where every race and religion as well as both genders will be evaluated strictly on their merit and prejudice will finally be abolished. Idealist? Well that’s how we move forward.

2006-10-23T12:38:00.000-04:00

not just business acquaintance

2006-10-15T16:45:00.000-04:00

I am an art historian and critic and I have been a dedicated supporter of women’s art since 1970. I published and edited the Feminist Art Journal from 1972-77. The magazine covered women in all the arts, but the main emphasis was on the visual. The Journal reached a circulation of 8,000 and was subscribed to both here in America and in countries all over the world.

As I mentioned I also published Art Talk: Conversations with 12 Women Artists. , It was the first book to be written about women artists since the 1930’s. It is considered a classic and was recently translated into Chinese. I have also published two other books, one a novel, and I have contributed to The New York Times, The Village Voice, Ms, Art in America, Artforum, Arts Magazine, and many other publications. I was the first to write about Chuck Close, Eva Hesse, Vito Acconci, Gordon Matta-Clarke and other conceptual and body artists. I received an Art Critic’s Fellowship award of the National Endowment on the Arts. I have lectured and held seminars on the art of both men and women all over the country and also appeared on the radio and television.

In 1974, I curated an exhibition at the Fleisher Memorial Gallery, which was part of the Philadelphia Museum of Art called “In Her Own Image. The show was a great success even written about in the New York Times. There is a chapter about my contributions to twentieth century art in a book by Judy K. Collischan Van Wagner entitled Women Shaping Art: Profiles of Power, Praeger Publishers, New York, 1984. Other women critics and dealers included in the book are Grace Glueck, Dore Aston, Lucy Lippard, Lleana Sonnabend, Paula Cooper, and many more.

2006-02-16T11:16:00.000-05:00

CINDY NEMSER'S FORUM

I cannot understand why the New York Times, has printed so few comments, aside from a full-paged obituary on the death of Betty Friedan. Where are the homages, well thought out evaluations, and remembrances from her friends and fellow feminists? Friedan ‘s Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, jump-started a revolution that changed western society, as we know it. It was clarion call that brought many women into battle against sexism and Friedan went on to Found N.O.W. and other important organizations.

True there was a full-page obituary giving her personal history and accomplishments, but also included was an uncalled-for statement as to how some younger women find her irrelevant. After that the Times (February 12, 2006) offered only a brief excerpt from an article in The Guardian by Germaine Greer. I was dismayed that in this snippet, which was entitled, “On Friedan, a Feminist Critique, she wrote, “Betty was not one to realize that she was being lifted by an existing wave; she thought she was the wave that had actually created the Zeitgeist that was ready and hungry for her.” To me, Greer’s mean spirited attempt to whittle down Friedan’s achievement is to downgrade the woman on whose back she rode in her own writings.

I was a wife, mother and struggling an art critic when I read The Feminist Mystique, and I was thrilled to learn that I had not made the wrong choice in seeking some of my satisfaction in the workplace even though many of my contemporaries thought I was not living up to my society-ordained duties. Up to then I felt guilty. After I read Friedan’s book I felt vindicated. Betty Friedan was instrumental in liberating both housewives and professional women

2006-02-12T10:16:00.000-05:00

I'd like to tell you a story about how I renewed a friendship that had been on hiatus for thirty years.

Last summer, I finally submitted, after putting it off for 13 years, to enduring a long dreaded paint job of my entire four-storied Limestone townhouse. After it was over, the gods of discarding unused items possessed me, and I went through file cabins, closets, and boxes. Then I went to my Rolodex, prepared to purge it of every telephone number I hadn't called in the last 13 years. But after I had eliminated several numbers, I got stopped in my tracks.
I had turned over the card that bore the name Rose Goldstein, my best friend from the time we were sophomores at Midwood High School in Brooklyn, in 1952, through the years we spent in college, married, and became the mothers of young children.
I met Rose in gym class where we sat next to each other. She was pretty, petite, and had hazel eyes and a mouth always ready to erupt into contagious laughter. And she had the most beautiful long dark-blonde hair that she wore in lustrous pageboy. From the beginning of our whispered conversation, I was drawn to her and wanted her for my best friend. I was an only-child and Rose was the caring, supportive sister I had always longed for.
Though she had three much younger siblings, she felt the same about me. So we jumped at every chance to get together--in classes, in the cafeteria, and in the halls. We walked home side by side, and never stopped talking, confiding to each other all our inner feelings about boys (Rose and I agreed that would never go past necking), other classmates, and feelings of insecurity. We shared a similar sense of humor and laughed frequently about the wry and ridiculous wherever we found them. She was my anchor in our 1000 student graduating class. Our close friendship made us feel about good about ourselves even if wewhenn't part of the inevitable "in-crowd." As soon as we got home, we were on the telephone again for hours. Rose's mother always commented, "You've just seen each other. How can you find so much to talk about?"
If one of us met a boy, we would always ask him to get a date for the other. It was Rose's boyfriend who introduced me to my future husband Chuck. At 17, he was very handsome: tall, broad-shouldered, with cobalt blue eyes, and big hands and feet. Next to him I felt tiny and womanly. I was smitten. But, after a few dates, Chuck stopped calling. I was disappointed and could never get him out of mind. During the rest of my high school days, I never met another boy I liked. But my friendship with Rose more than made up for it. In her company, I was always happy.
When we graduated, in 1954, I went away to Syracuse University, where I knew nobody. I missed Rose so much, that I cried every night for the first two weeks. In my dorm there was no one I could get close to. At Thanksgiving we were reunited, and when Rose came through my front door, she had Chuck right behind her. She had met in him in Brooklyn College night school and brought him along because she knew I was always thinking about him. This time Chuck immediately wanted to go steady and gave me his ID bracelet. I was thrilled, but I was too far away, so I transferred to Brooklyn College in my sophomore year.
Rose and I were as devoted as ever though I couldn't see as much of her as in high school as she had to work during the day. However, we saw each other on the weekends and doubled dated when she met Phil, a likable animated young man, who she decided to marry. She was my maid of honor and I was her matron of honor.
When I started graduate school, I couldn't wait to share how enthused I was about the teachings of Emerson and Thoreau whose avocation of non-conformity helped me change careers. As I tried to explain my take on transcendentalism, I don't know if Rose got as ecstatic as I did, but she listened attentively and made her own observations. We always understood each other. We had a similar value system. We were soul mates. When she and Phil moved to upstate New York, we visited often, and when we each had a daughter, we were delighted that they played together happily.
But when Rose moved to Connecticut and became a real estate agent, and I became an art critic, something went wrong. She no longer wanted to visit us in Park Slope. She told me, "I can't stand being in Brooklyn. "Her invitations were no longer forthcoming. Though I was also engrossed in my fascinating and demanding career, I was deeply hurt that she .was moving away from me and I didn't know why. What had I done to hurt her? I was angry with her, but I never found the courage to ask. Over the years I continued to mourn her absence form my life.
But Rose was my oldest friend, so when I received a notice from Midwood that our class was celebrating its 25th year reunion, I overcame my fear of rejection and called Rose to see if she would attend. When she answered the phone, her voice was strained and her greeting tepid. Discouraged, but not ready to give up, I asked about her daughters Laura and Stacy. Her voice quivered when she said, "Laura's in California and Stacy is a problem child, and right now she's living with another family." I was shocked, as I knew Rose to be such a basically caring, sensitive person. She didn't want to say more, so we said goodbye. Bruised again, I gave up and stopped calling and I never heard from her. When our 50th reunion came around, I decided there was no point in contacting her again.
But now as I looked at her name in my Rolodex, feelings of tenderness and yearning engulfed me. I couldn't bear to throw her card away. She was one of the people in my life I deeply loved so I called once more. I got her answering machine. Haltingly, I left a message. Two days passed and no response. Does she dislike me so much she can't bear to hear my voice again I wondered.?
Then on the third day, the call came.
"Hi Cindy." It was the soft warm peach of a voice I remembered from my high school days.
"Rose?"
"I'm sorry I couldn't call sooner, but I was out of town."
"I thought you couldn't bear to speak to me."
"I'd never feel that way about you."
At that moment all my anger, hurt and fear dissolved.
We were on the telephone for two and a half hours reminiscing about high school, laughing about how she had gone out with my terrible cousin Sam who came to her door with a stocking pulled over his head; and her mother had said, "My daughter gets all the bargains." We commiserated about how both of us had endured awful blind dates, and fought off fresh boys who wanted to do that. We giggled about how neither of us could understand intermediate algebra, and when we told our instructor about our mutual problem and said we were trying to help each other, she rolled her eyes and said, "the lame leading the blind."
We tried to catch up with all the things that had happened to us over the years: the maturing of our children, our successes, and our disappointments. She told how she had "adopted" a Tibetan family who lived with her for three years, and I told her how I had left the art scene and a written several novels and a lot of theater criticism. To me our conversation was pure nectar.
We both agreed we wanted more time to be together so I said I would come to her. Chuck and I drove up to Rose and Phil's rural Connecticut home situated in the woods. As parked our car in their driveway, I was scared. She and I were both sixty-eight. What would she look like? How would I look to her?
Then when I rang the bell, the door opened and Rose and I fell into each other's arms, laughing and tearing up at the same time. Later I looked at her intently, taking in the different ways the years had changed her. There were some wrinkles, and now her lovely pageboy was replaced by a thick parfait of natural ringlets that she colored a bright blonde, but she was still slender and diminutive; so tiny that my husband had no trouble lifting her high in the air, as he loved to do when we were all teenagers. I wondered how Chuck and I looked to her and Phil who now sported an impressive beard that hid his previous boyish face. But Ididn'tt ask. The magic was still there. Our bond had never broken. We took up as if we had never parted trying to pack into too few hours the events of our lifetime.
From then on, we have visited each other in both our homes. She, who vowed, in the past that she would never come to Brooklyn, has come and met my daughter, my son-in-law and my adorable little grandson. We have also spent many hours on the telephone never at a loss for conversation.
When Rose and I tried to sort out why we had relinquished our friendship, neither of us could pinpoint the exact reasons.
"You were terrible in the 70's. All you could talk about was being an art critic and doing EST."
"I probably was awful," I said ruefully. "But you said you were too busy on the weekends with showing houses."
You're right."
Immediately, we realized the both of us, at that disjuncture point, had been under terrible pressure battling to stay afloat amid all the demands of our careers and family problems. We saw that our multiple responsibilities had pulled us apart. But now that those harrowing days were behind us, we understood that neither of us was to blame. There had been a 35 years hiatus, but now was the right time for us to resume our friendship.
One of one of the most joyful moments of our delayed reunion came when Rose invited us to a party for her recently married, no longer a "problem child" daughter, who was only a baby when Rose and I had parted. Chuck and I were standing in the anteroom of the lovely Japanese museum they had selected for the celebration when Stacy came in. We joined the welcoming circle that had formed around her and when it was our turn to introduce ourselves, I said "We're Cindy and Chuck."
With no moment of hesitation, she threw her arms around both of us and said,
"I finally get to meet you! I've been hearing about you all my life."

2006-01-11T15:50:00.001-05:00

Let me introduce myself. I'm Cindy Nemser, art critic, theatre critic, novelist, humorist journalist, and ardent feminist I am the author of Three books: Art Talk: Conversations with 15 Women Artists, Scribner, 1975, reprinted in 1995 by HarperCollins, Ben Cunningham, A Life with Color, 1989 and a novel Eve's Delight, Pinnacle Books, 1982. I have written articles for all the art journals as well as short stories. I was also the publisher/editor of The Feminist Art Journal from 1972 to 1977. Art Talk was the first book about women artists since the 30's and the FAJ was the first magazine dedicated to championing women in all the arts.

I have written a memoir about my experiences in the New York art world of the 70's and about the birth of the feminist art movement all over the country. At another time, I will share some of the memoir with you.

Today, however the most important issue feminists in all echelons of society have to face is the threat of the with the election of Alito to the Supreme Court which may bring about the dismantling of a woman's right to choose.

In this time of right wing backlash, the so-called liberal New York Times, on January 10th, published a column by John Tierney, promoting Judge Alito's proposal that the law would require that women must tell their husbands that they intend to have an abortion. Women who fear physical abuse from their spouses are exempted.

Why should women, who should have complete control of their own bodies, have to notify anyone? Perhaps some women might not have to endure beatings, but what about the verbal abuse they might have to encounter? Husbands may heap guilt and shame on their wives, tell family and friends, and intimate them to go through an unwanted pregnancy. Tierney, calling himself pro-choice, advocates that if "either parent thinks its wrong to end the pregnancy, then the pregnancy must proceed. "

Then to muddy the waters he brings in the proposals of Frances Goldscheider, who thinks women should be forced into "financial abortion" which would coerce women to terminate the pregnancy if the man didn't want to support his offspring for eighteen years. She claims this is just as women have exclusive control over some forms of contraception like the pill. Goldschieder worries that women would lie about taking the pill to trick men into marrying them and paying child support. Has Goldscheider ever heard of condoms? She actually compares the campaign against "dead beat" dads to the punishment meted out to "wayward" women who had children out of wedlock. This assertion is laughable as women before Roe vs Wade often died trying to stop these pregnancies, and many today live destitute with their children, with no support from the men who impregnated them. Dead beat men, be they husbands, ex-husbands or lovers, slough off their responsibilities, make themselves scarce, and suffer no public scorn.

I think if a man wants to take his pleasure, he is equally responsible to support a child as his partner is, and considering the fact that most men make more money than women, due to sexism in the work place, he should contribute the larger amount.

Tierny shows more sense than Goldscheider, who calls her argument egalitarian, when he grudgingly acknowledges that "there is one big physical inequality between the sexes in this regard; it's the woman who must either have the abortion or go thorough a pregnancy." For those reasons alone, women should not have to notify anyone about their choice to abort.

Considering the seriousness of this issue, all women must contact their congress people and senators that they are against the acceptance of Alito. Letters to the Times and other newspapers would be a good idea too.