Viewing page 25 of 110

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

WOMANSPACE: LOS ANGELES

BACKGROUND

On a random sample day, a count of works on display in the Los Angeles County Museum (the major art institution on the West Coast) revealed less than 1% of the work on exhibition to be by women. This information is cited as a minute part of the evidence in Los Angeles to show that the work of women artists is largely overlooked.

Unlike their sisters in other parts of the country, they have not stormed the doors of the museums of humiliated and embarrassed those in power. Instead they are serving as an exemplary creative force in the country to indicate what can be done when one feels discriminated against and one wants to be effective.

The women artists of Los Angeles have:

1. Organized the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists

2. Formed inumerable [[innumerable]] counsciousness [[consciousness]] raising groups for women artists alone

3. Provided the city with the first Feminist Art Program in the nation - at the California Institute of the Arts

4. Held the first inter-city convention of women artists - THE WESTERN CONFERENCE OF WOMEN ARTISTS (Feb. 1972) - a veritable Seneca Falls in the field (at Cal Arts)

5. Provided the talent for the second major contemporary all woman artist's show in the country - called VISIBLE-INVISIBLE, organized by Dextra Frankel - opening at the Long Beach Museum on March 25, 1972. (The first was organized by Lucy Lippart at the Larry Aldridge Museum in Ridgefield, Conn., in 1971.)

6. Provided the first collective art exhibition based on woman's subject matter alone, called WOMANHOUSE. This project was accomplished by the artists in the Feminist Art Program with their artist-teachers, Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. It gained the attention of thousands of visitors who attended the exhibition and thousands more who watched it in a televised version and who read about it in local and national magazines and newspapers.

Besides meeting, teaching, talking, and persuading museum people, collectors, students, husbands, brothers, sisters, these women with little or no previous experience, have talked on the radio, held news conferences, written proposals, delivered speeches, influenced museum curators to look at the work of women artists seriously (which some of them did), have moved around the country talking about