The women artists' cooperative space as a site for social change: Artemisia Gallery, Chicago (1973-1979).

• Date: 22 March 2007
• Author: Gardner-Huggett, Joanna
• Published date: 22 March 2007
• Author: Gardner-Huggett, Joanna

FEMINIST CRITIC LAURA COTTINGHAM'S ASSESSMENT OF WOMEN ARTISTS' COOPERATIVES provides two key reasons why the history of these spaces is marginalized and their activist agendas have been historically undervalued. Cottingham (2000:31) commented:

The extensive alternative exhibition network that feminists constructed provided them with a sense of community and critical exchange, places to show, and audiences, but it couldn't provide any significant influx of money. Nor did it function as a springboard into the commercial art structure, as most art professionals did not view or place value on art that was presented in cooperative and temporary venues. First, Cottingham's conclusions emphasize the notion that a cooperative's value is based in part on its ability to provide public exposure for their artists and an eventual entry into the commercial art market, sustaining modernism's individualist lens that diminishes collaborative and activist acts that also demand commercial success to establish critical credibility. (2) Second, Cottingham's position places the questions of community and critical exchange between artists on the margins of any historical consideration and, more important, overshadows and dilutes the activist agendas established by many of these separatist cooperatives in the 1970s. As T.V. Reed (2005: xvi) argued, the history of cultural movements or groups, such as the women artists' cooperative, face erasure because it is difficult to quantify the results of their efforts in comparison to other types of activism in which voting patterns, money raised, and legislation passed can be traced. What is often overlooked and will be examined in this essay is that the memberships of these spaces attempted to arm women with the tools necessary to attack from within the institutional structures that marginalized them in the first place.

This article will reclaim the voice of these activists; it specifically explores a series of programming and exhibitions implemented by Artemisia Gallery in Chicago from 1973 to 1979, which prepared women artists to enter the professional workforce equipped with feminist pedagogy to promote social justice for women in the art world. Each event was sponsored by the Artemisia Fund, which was founded after the gallery was incorporated in 1973, to foster a national educational dialogue regarding the history of women artists, as well as the social, economic, and political concerns they faced (Poe, 1979). "Economic Structures of the Art World" (1976), "Feminist Art Workers" (1976), and "Feminist Art Methodology" (1976) were workshops opened for enrollment to artists outside Artemisia and run by noted feminist art activists and theorists, such as Nancy Angelo, Candace Compton, Cheri Gaulke, Ruth Iskin, Johnnie Johnson, Laurel Klick, Ellen Lanyon, and Arlene Raven. They taught participants how to apply feminist agendas to their own careers and to assert change where they taught, exhibited, and sold their work. Lastly, "Both Sides Now: An International Exhibition Integrating Feminism and Leftist Politics" (1979), curated by the noted feminist critic Lucy Lippard, engendered a dialogue regarding emerging shifts in feminist discourse and its relationship to political action. Overall, this assessment of Artemisia's activist agendas and demands for social justice will serve as a case study and call for a thorough reexamination and theorizing of collaborative activist art in general. Reasserting Artemisia's history is also important because many young women are unaware of the struggles undertaken to make female artists visible in the academy and the art market today. As Amelia Jones (1999: 18) observed, feminism among art students is "at the same time both naturalized into popular culture and invisible...."

Founding and Philosophy of Artemisia Gallery and the Artemisia Fund

Historically, the terms "woman" and "artist" were irreconcilable; when combined, they evoked the image of a woman engaging in a hobby in a domestic space, rather than in professional or public practice. Beginning in the late 1960s, various feminist art activist groups across the country organized demonstrations against mainstream art institutions. For instance, in 1970 in New York City, Ad Hoc Women Artists protested the Whitney Annual's limited inclusion of women artists and artists of color. The pressure exerted succeeded in raising the number of women represented in the following Annual from five percent to 22% (Broude and Garrard, 1994: 305). However, it did not alter the fact that women rarely found mentors in art school, the academy, or in museums, nor did they have access to the skills needed to attain commercial representation, grants to support their art, or to attract curators who would add them to museum collections. As a result, women artists across the country began to advocate for the foundation of collectives in which visibility and feminist art education could be established, leading to the eruption of women artists' cooperatives along the East Coast, throughout the Midwest, and in California.

Artemisia was founded in summer 1973 after two large meetings of women artists. (3) Stimulated by the work of the West-East Bag (W.E.B.)--a group formed to create an international network of women artists that included the first slide registry for women artists in the United States--women in Chicago realized that they needed greater exposure. Joy Poe (cited in Pieszak and MacLeod, 1973: 3), a founding member of Artemisia, notes that at the First Annual Midwest Conference of Women Artists, the artist Harmony Hammond showed a video about A.I.R. (Artists in Residence), a women's cooperative in New York City that formed a year earlier. Then a graduate student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Poe visited A.I.R. that May and concluded that the same could be done in Chicago (Poe, 1979). After the initial summer meetings, a subsequent meeting of 40 women selected five core members (Joy Poe, Barbara Grad, Margaret Harper Wharton, Emily Pinkowski, and Phyllis MacDonald) and they later chose 15 more members. Taking their name from the 17th-century Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1597 to c. 1651), "whose best work had been credited to her father," these women were determined to make their own names known to the art world of Chicago and beyond (Holbert, 1983). Like many feminist organizations of the early 1970s, they rejected the hierarchical structure of patriarchal governance and distributed authority among all the members, implemented a rotating leadership, made all decisions a participatory process, conceptualized power as empowerment, rather than domination, and argued that the process was as valuable as the outcome (Bordt, 1977: 11).

Attitudes toward feminism among Artemisia's members varied considerably. As Pieszak and MacLeod (1973: 3) noted, some openly embraced radical feminism, while others were vague on the issues. Joy Poe revealed the point of agreement, however: "Some of us, like myself, are ardent feminists. Many are not. But we all wanted to avoid the isolation that women artists in Chicago have faced" (in Koch, 1974: 22). To counter their invisibility, they accepted a mode of cultural feminism defined by Linda Alcoff (1988: 408) as an "ideology of a female nature or female essence reappropriated by feminists in an effort to revalidate undervalued female attributes," in this case in women's art. Alcoff added that this position necessitates "maintaining a healthy environment--free of masculinist values ... for the female principle" (Ibid.). The benefits of instituting a separatist space, as noted by Cottingham in the quote cited at the beginning of her essay and by Alcoff (1988: 421), were community and self-affirmation, but it would always pose a dilemma as well. Because Artemisia's philosophy, and women artists' cooperatives more generally, were influenced by the construct of universal woman, in the eyes of its feminist critics a separatist gallery marginalized other elements of oppression, such as race, class, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, etc.

Although the essentialist ideology embraced by Artemisia Gallery posed problems, operating under the umbrella of "women's interests" permitted the Fund to develop a wide range of educational programming that was not available in mainstream art institutions. As Joy Poe wrote in 1977, "every program touched on a different phase of the woman artist's role--how we are perceived in our past and present society as women and as artists." The Artemisia Fund began by inviting visiting artists, critics, and curators, and in its second year expanded its mission to national and international concerns, particularly emphasizing the history of women in non-European cultures through a series of lectures. Whitney Halstead and Marilyn Houlberg, art historians from the School of the Art Institute, for example, spoke on Navajo and Pueblo women artists and African body art. The Fund augmented their educational resources in 1975 by establishing a video library, and their slide library had grown to over 800 images that included the works of contemporary and historical women artists. A speakers bureau was also formed, offering lectures such as "How to Form a Cooperative Gallery." By 1977 the Fund grew so successful that it applied for grants to establish The Artemisia School of Art and aimed to develop a three-year accredited art degree (Poe, 1977). Its seven-member board (Ester Benjamin, Suzanne Craig...