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building walls, etc."

That was all Arlene, speaking.

And Sheila: "There are some damn good reasons for that. One of the things is that to the extent that you stay in any way in touch with it, you know that you will not be validated in your profession for those activities. So you have to expend a fair amount of energy taking the authority that you have put into your profession and moving it to your peers, to the woman who is checking out your groceries at the supermarket, to your self, so that you will not get punished for making your choices, so you will not have to give in to that punishment.

"That hurts. It is a painful act. That's why you need, we all need a support group: we need the help of other people whom we respect, of people whose opinion of ourselves and of our work is high enough so that we can really feel and experience their support, and so that when we don't get it for any particular project or statement, we are not left totally invalidated, rejected, alone and vulnerable.

"One of the goals has to do with acting, well, like an organizer in everything that you do: that while you are making an act which will be seen as an individual stroke for you, you are always aware of your context and of your responsibility to effect and to formulate that context.

"It's a real change in focus. It's not the position of the old sense of art."

The community that is called the Woman's Building is made up of several separate, but intertwined sections. There is the FSW itself which has students and a Core Faculty, tuition and regular meeting hours; there is a fluid roster of independent tenants like the Sisterhood Bookstore and a Feminist travel agent. There is a Summer Art Program which has a six-week session; and a Extension Program with evening classes for women in the general Los Angeles community.

The Woman's Switchborad is housed in the Building, which functions as a terminal and information source for women's activities throughout Los Angeles. And there are conferences, lectures, workshops, gallery shows and performances, many of which are open to the general public, both male and female.

"But the Woman's Building is not an 'umbrella' as we once thought it was. The FSW Program is one expression of the purpose of the FSW; the Woman's Building is another; the Extension Program another in ever-widening concentric circles."

Arlene was speaking to the 30 or so members of the Summer Art Program who were present at one of the regular Monday night workshops that are part of the program.

"As women we have been validated for being weak. The process of the FSW goes into the heart of the fragmentation, into the chaos which is part of a feeling of victimization. From there, we move to naming, to begin to create and to identify with SYMBOLS and images of those feelings, and out of that comes the beginning of the process of art itself.

"Creating art has to do with telling the truth, with having the ability and the capacity to experience symbols in all their aspects--in their negativity, in their positivity, or in their neutrality. That relationship is very much as threatened by alienation as are our relationships to other people, to our society.

"But a feeling like alienation is learned. It does not come full blown out of one's soul. It's a way of looking at ourselves in the world which is historical and peculiar to our time.

"Where the general art scene is committed to expressions of alienation right now, and we are all very aware and conditioned by that one stereotyped image, what we are doing is to create another mode of working, of feeling, and of being."

In the design world, according to Sheila, one is judged by the ubiquitous phrase, "highly successful." In that system, there is absolutely no credence given to the person or to any reflection of that person in the work that he or she does.

"You do your work. You have ego needs. You manifest them in concrete or in paint. But you do not talk about them or show them in any way for what they are. There is no place for that kind of sharing, for that kind of honesty or vulnerability.

"But since it is, in fact, impossible to keep yourself out of what you do, you find ways to manipulate your work so that those feelings are altered and are not visible for that they really are."

In the design program, Sheila has developed some exercises which have enabled her students to deal with aspect of themselves, which they have kept hidden. "Each woman is asked to bring in some physical object which she feels represents one aspect of herself--not her totality--just one aspect. In the process of sharing that object, and its meaning for herself, a woman has the opportunity to rediscover and to reaffirm what many of us have lost--that sense that the physical world does have the power to elicit responses from us, and that we do have an expressive relationship with it.

"For example, one woman brought in to class a dinky little wrench that her family had given to her. She was a big, capable woman who really knew how to fix cars. For her, that wrench became a symbol that her family knew very little at all about her, and were invalidating her for what they did know.

"What we are doing, then, is first to elicit and then to build on a new sense of self. Basically, we work in a collective setting so that as the process of awareness takes place for each woman, she can share it with colleagues: she can experience and note the universal as well as the individual and the unique in her expression, and she can move toward creating real acts of communication which are truly 'art.'

"It is a joyous feeling to break through and to create an act which transforms something which has been degrading and narrow into something very real and positive and beautiful. It is even more joyous to know that that has been communicated and shared."

That act of communication is, in a most literal sense, an act of love. It is perhaps the only meaningful act of love that there is. An artist, then becomes no