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Provided an opportunity for the women to confront their fears, frustrations, and discouragement about being able to work through a large scale project. This experience of determination, struggle, and ability to carry a group project through with the mutual support of members of the group was also a valuable prelude to the kind of struggle that they would have to address in the remaining part of the year in doing their art work. The women also got beyond the limitations of a great deal of personal handicaps through this experience. One woman, for example, to a great extent overcame the weak, helpless image of herself -- which she had developed as a result of many childhood illnesses -- by participating on a high level in the building activity. Later on, she was able to express much of that material in her art work.

The most important aspect of the experience of the group project -- which is difficult to recreate in words -- is the transformation of the physical activity of the group project into an act of building a community. The sense of pride and collaboration; the sense of pushing beyond one's own limits; the experience of the power of the group as a whole; the kind of sisterhood that developed among women working on the same wall or, women wearing painters masks and covered with dust scraping the same ceiling while sitting on the same scaffolding -- all these are just a few examples of the kind of sharing of responsibility and effort among women, of exhilaration mixed with exhaustion which cannot be adaquately described in words.

In addition to completing the physical space, the F.S.W. women were doing CR, making their art, and receiving critiques on their work. By the time of the public opening of the new Building, they had completed work for an exhibition, installed it in the gallery,