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L to R. Sheila de Bretteville, and Arlene Raven.

Carol Zeitz

THE FEMINIST STUDIO WORKSHOP is an educational institution whose purpose is to build a feminist community in which all people can work cooperatively to establish control of their lives in mutually responsible ways.
THE FEMINIST STUDIO WORKSHOP PROGRAM  is an expression of the purpose of the Feminist Studio Workshop.  The Feminist Studio Workshop Program is an intensive two-year educational experience which expands women's ability to express themselves individually and collectively and to communicate their experience through art.
In the Feminist Studio Workshop art is a means of raising consciousness, inviting dialogue, and transforming culture.
A collective of women in visual, environmental and language related fields provides a feminist educational process through which women move from a situation of mutual oppression to a situation of mutual support.
THE WOMAN'S BUILDING  is an expression of the purpose of the Feminist Studio Workshop.  The Woman's Building is a public center for women's culture.

.......Statement of Purpose of the
FSW by the Core Faculty, July 1975.

In 1973, while teaching at Cal Arts in the Feminist Art Program, Sheila de Bretteville, designer, Judy Chicago, Painter, and Arlene Raven, art historian, joined together to work out the initial concepts which have since developed into something called the "Feminist Studio Workshop."

In the beginning, there was no capital. Each of the three women contributed $100.00 toward the publication of the brochure, and each of 15 or so prospective students contributed $50.00 as a tuition deposit for the following Year's program. It was an "idea whose time had come," and things began to happen from there.

Womanspace, a collective gallery for women's art, joined with the feminist Studio Workshop (FSW) to look for a space in which to house their respective activities, and several other women's groups agreed to become tenants in what was still a hypothetical place.

The California Institute for the Arts still owned the facility at 743 Grandview Avenue which had once housed the Chouinard Art Institute, and which had been empty long enough to be I need of renovation and repair. On the basis of a $400.00 deposit toward the monthly rent of $850.00, and with an agreement to exchange 6-months' free rent for the necessary renovation. Cal Arts signed a lease with the Feminist Studio Workshop and the "Woman's Building" was founded. In November, 1973, the doors of the building were opened to the public for the first time.

The "Woman's Building" is an idea, and a place, with a history. The first structure with that name was designed for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago by Sophia Hayden (the first woman graduate in architecture from MIT.). It housed international exhibits of women's art and culture, and after the Exposition closed the Building, and with it, many of its exhibits, were destroyed.

The Los Angeles Women's Building spent its first two years in the N. Grandview facility. During that time, the Building was entirely renovated, and it was transformed into an actively functioning center and expression of women's culture: "past, present and future."

When Cal Arts sold its home this past summer, The Woman's Building, with the FSW, many of its original tenants, and some new ones, moved to a three-story, red-brick, yet-to-be converted warehouse space at 1727 N. Spring Street that is in that nameless industrial area that is downtown Los Angeles...somewhere.

In mid-August, I drove down to take a look. North of Chinatown and Olvera Street, down the railroad tracks to the "very, very, very end of North Spring," past the railroad yard where empty freight trains stood, their doors shoved open, lined up for the night. I stopped the car, just across the street from the concrete south bank of the Los Angeles River.

It was dusk on a Tuesday evening. The light was dim and beginning to go grey. One or two cars passed by, going south over the bridge that crosses the river. And it was still - an urban kind of stillness in which there is a sense of rest, of rejuvenation, and of respite for work.

The doors of the Building were locked tight, the windows closed. There were no women with pink briefcases unloading carloads of photographic equipment: no groups of women meeting to talk on the sidewalk. The place was calm as it will probably never be calm again.

Last July, I spoke with Sheila de Brettville and Arlene Raven, who together are still responsible for the functioning and for the leadership of all the activities that take place in the Woman's Building. (Judy Chicago, the Feminist artist whose energy and drive were also responsible for the actualization of the FSW, and for the Feminist Art Program at Cal Arts, and for Womanspace, withdrew from the Building last year. She is now working in her own studio in Santa Monica.

Sheila and Arlene are now actively embracing an entirely new set of problems: How do you transplant a basically white, middle-class, totally female institution into the middle of a basically black, Chicano, Chinese and male working-class neighborhood without damage either to the institution or to the environment?

How do you establish a working and mutually fulfilling relationship with that community without losing your Feminist reality? How do you avoid destructive isolation?

According to the philosophy which is shared by these two powerful women, you do that by turning a potentially disruptive, troublesome situation, into an opportunity for positive expansion and flexibility. By reaching out, and by creating paths by which the community can reach in, the institution retains its flexible boundaries, becomes an asset and an addition to the community, and the community to it. "That," says Sheila, "takes time and research and communication." And Arlene: "The move is perfect for us, the place is perfect, just as it is."

That sense of enthusiasm, and of positivity, which is sophisticated and articulate, permeated our interview.

Both Sheila and Arlene are themselves transplanted from the East Coast: Sheila from New York and Arlene from Baltimore, Maryland. Although New York is generally considered to be the focus of Feminist political activism, both women feel strongly that it is Los Angeles which has become the hub of