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296 The Los Angeles Woman's Building encouraged the creation of three more who had chosen appropriate spaces and rents. The commitment of these groups made the acquisition of the building possible despite the absence of any initial capital from the Feminist Studio Workshop. The possibility of a larger feminist and physical context for our workshop, the growth of the women's artists' movement, as well as the growing number of women's groups offering services to the public effectively changed the prospective use of the building from a focus on individual artists to use by a larger community.3 Physical Environment of the Grandview Site The goals of the Woman's Building had been to provide an environment that would allow the potential mixing of users in different spaces, foster communications between various women's groups and their constituencies, and provide a sense of the abundance and vitality of women's collective work. The grand opening in November 1973 brought together 4,000 people; each group had attracted its own constituency who intermingled in the courtyard and on the stairways, and squeezed through corridors to see what was going on elsewhere in the building. The Woman's Building had effectively brought together members of the art community, the feminist community, and old students who had used the building during its Chouinard life. Friends, family, associates, and acquaintances of all who participated, as well as those who had heard about it through the media, were effectively brought together in a way that only the sharing of physical space can accomplish. A review in the Los Angeles Times (May 3, 1974) announced "contemporary art continues lively in the cheerful, active ambience of the Woman's Building... exhibitions are squirreled into every corner." The building gave breadth to our image and ambition, extending and often overextending our energies. The physical design of the first Los Angeles Woman's Building tended to encourage all possibilities, as well as to reinforce our difficulties. The building's space was organized into two stories of discreet units entered off a hallway that lined a courtyard. The spaces with windows and doors onto the courtyard Sheila Levrant de Bretteville 297 allowed users to know of other activities, and opened the possibility of mixing. On the other hand, features of the building encouraged privatization and the isolation of groups from one another. The entrance corridor hid the existence of the shared space - the courtyard - further limiting the understanding of the overall organization of space, and contributing to the diminution of the sense of a series of parts contributing to a larger whole. We have formed the Woman's Building by joining together with other groups of women performing services in diverse parts of Los Angeles. Within each of these smaller groups, decisionmaking and the taking of responsibility for work was equalized. We wanted to see ourselves as a collective of organized women trying not to repeat the alienating hierarchical organizational structures of the various institutions within which we had spent our working lives. Looking for a nonhierarchical large-group model, we chose the town-meeting format for the airing of ideas, goals, and grievances. It was our hope that this large-group context could accommodate the need for program development and enactment and that the equal sharing of joint work could be decided and dispensed in this way. Although the legal responsibility for the building was that of the Feminist Studio Workshop Inc., upon the appropriation of the Chouinard building we created a tenants union named the Board of Lady Managers, after the governing body of the 1893 Woman's Building. However, it was clear from early on that the amount of participation in decisionmaking varied greatly. The groups in the building generally planned activities that took place only within their own space. Most residents had difficulty realizing that "The Woman's Building" was its participant group and that there was no one else to take care of the social, economic, and physical context. In the first year at the Woman's Building feelings of trust and an awareness of the potential of our community were created. Cleaning the building, readying the walls for exhibitions, concerts, performances, and autograph parties built a participating public who became progressively more accustomed to coming to the Woman's Building. In particular, the Feminist Studio Workshop women who grew in pride and strength seeing projects
