Introduction: Feminist Art and Social Movements Beyond NY/LA

Abstract

Introduction:Feminist Art and Social Movements Beyond NY/LA Michelle Moravec (bio) Imagine a far-flung network of moles, each separately burrowing under a cultural landscape that spans from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to the Whitney Museum in New York. The moles may not be entirely aware of it, but after several thousand of them individually put in a decade or so of subterranean overtime, it appears that together they quite literally made an imposing mountain range out of vigorously displaced earth. Never again would anyone dare to regard their peaks as insignificant patch of molehills. Carrie Rickey, "Writing (and Righting) Wrongs: Feminist Art Publications" The vivid image with which Carrie Rickey introduces her survey of feminist art publications captures the sense of subterranean energy and collaborative achievement that characterized the feminist art movement of the 1970s. At the same time, however, Rickey's metaphor belies the geographic bias of histories of that movement. A more realistic map of the molehills would be far-flung and reveal that many other routes existed beside the obvious one between New York and Los Angeles. This special issue seeks alternative readings of this map by examining sites of feminist art ranging from the Midwest of the United States to the Middle East. I initially conceived of this special issue in the summer of 2009 when I was a Getty Scholar working on an exhibition about the Los Angeles Woman's Building, reviewed in this issue by Jennie Klein. The conversations I had with Klein, and the other scholars, Vivian Green Fryd, Alexandra Juhasz, and Jenni Sorkin, spurred me to consider the consequences of the regional biases in histories of the feminist art movement. [End Page xi] In 2006 and 2007 twin events, the creation of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum and the mounting of WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, created the sense that the 1970s feminist art movement had finally found its place in the art historical record, but significant gaps still existed. Most accounts continued to rely on the same few groups in two locations, New York and Los Angeles. Furthermore, as a historian who studies feminist artists as part of activism for women's liberation in the 1970s, I feared that the social movement aspect of feminist art was being lost "in a movement that is increasingly being talked about and curated in monolithic ways."1 I began to envision a special issue dedicated to feminist art as a movement "beyond NY/LA." As soon as I conceived of this special issue, Frontiers occurred to me as the perfect venue for it. Since its inception Frontiers has occupied a unique niche in the women's studies community, juxtaposing traditional scholarship alongside articles by activists, as well as women's poetry and art. I would like to thank the editors of Frontiers, Susan E. Gray and Gayle Gullett, the art editor, Hilary Harp, and the graduate assistant, Stephanie Schreiner, for their assistance as we collaborated on this special issue. Initially I sought submissions that dealt with the broad range of artists, activities, and art forms that fall under the umbrella term feminist art movement. I hoped to include groups with strong ties to the women's liberation movement, such as the Chicago Women's Liberation Union Graphics Collective or the short-lived Redstockings Artists, as well as groups and individuals connected to contemporaneous movements, such as the black arts movement or Chicano and Chicana muralists. I wondered if any case studies existed of the ways that the big events in New York or Los Angeles, or the widely circulated writings by feminist artists in those cities, led to organizing in other locations. While not all my envisioned topics are covered in the articles published in this special issue, the contributions included do a great deal to move the focus "beyond NY/LA." In "Frontiers in Feminist Art History," Jill Fields situates these articles within the larger historiographical question: has recent attention to the feminist art movement changed "standard narratives of modern and contemporary art history"? (2) My essay "Toward a History of Feminism, Art, and Social Movements in the United States...