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[[image, building exterior]]

The Woman's Building, Los Angeles

Programme is the Lesbian Art Project (LAP), a series of eight weekly workshops exploring lesbian consciousness, relationships, creativity, education and history, in art and literature.

I attended the second Lesbian workshop called 'Feminist/Lesbian Dialogue' which consisted of 'exercises and group processes allowing lesbians and non-lesbians to share their similarities, differences, fears and curiosities.'[[footnote 15]] There were three exercises in the afternoon workshop. In the first, personal definitions of what it is like to be 'queer' were aired. Lesbians described their feelings as they constrained to reveal or hide their sexual differences in casual encounters with local people or even strangers in the street. Everyone in the workshops contributed to the second exercises: a circle of women sat on the floor, one began spinning a fantasy which was passed from one woman to another. In the third session, feelings of affection, love and respect expressed, silently or verbally, with or without physical gestures were exchanged. The three activities described form part of the group's preparations for the collective writing of a play in the winter/spring of 1978-79.

The Lesbian Art Project encapsulates, better than any other current programme at the Woman's Building, some of the ideals on which the Building was founded and on which it continues to act. [[footnote 16]] In the words of Sheila de Bretteville, one of its three founders, the Woman's Building aims 'first to elicit and then to build on a new sense of self...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 art truly "art".' [[footnote 17]] In the comfort of their self-created LAP lesbians heighten their individual and their collective awareness. Lesbian fighting in the war of everyday relationships between women and men is of great significance for all. The nature of lesbians' sexuality does not allow them to be sucked away from their commitment to self-determination on the undertow of male sexual power. They act on the feminist creed, make the personal revelation the political communication, and feed their newly-won awareness into the mainstream thinking of the Woman's Building.

The Building is a mecca for feminists around the country. Through visits to the building, and the national distribution of their quarterly journal Chrysalis, the ideas it generates reach the rest of the country. This is one of the most important of alternative spaces in the United States; with slight and intermittent outside funding, it is constantly on the brink of financial disaster.

Radical observers of the American cultural scene tend to dismiss all alternative spaces as bourgeois art-reformism. To discount them altogether is, I think, a mistake. People in the four alternative spaces discussed above, the photography workshop for bag ladies in New York, the Studio Watts Workshop, Self Help Graphics and the Woman's Building in Los Angeles, all use art as an active tool to increase self-worth, and imbue it with a social dimension.

These transformations may in many cases be only fleeting, and slight in degree; further development is inhibited by lack of a greater political consciousness. But even given this lack, one should recognize the real accomplishments of these truly alternative spaces, in the domain of collective and socially organized art-making rather than profit or prestige-oriented work; in the lowering of barriers between the professional and non-professional or the maker and consumer of art; and in the overcoming of traditional artistic solipsism. 

FOOTNOTES

1. Lawrence Alloway, 10 Downtown 10 Years, New York, 1978, p.4.
2. I do not discuss those organizations which deal with artists' writings or mural painting; the subjects are too large for attention here.
3. Alloway, p.3.
4. The Bowery and the 1st Street cooperative galleries were established in 1969, 112 Greene Street followed later.
5. The Gallery Guide, New York's monthly publication of exhibition schedules, carries two maps of the major SoHo area which demonstrate the commercial take-over; one map shows the location of alternative and commercial spaces; while the other indicates where restaurants, bars and boutiques can be found.
6. Mail address, 59 Wooster.
7. The Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, the New Artsspace, Los Angeles, 1976, p.97.
8. The Institute was founded following A. Heiss's work with artists' workspaces in St. Katharine's Dock, London.
9. A. Heiss, 'Placing the Artist,' The New Artsspace, p.11.
10. There are many other alternative spaces in Los Angeles which have grown up to serve the needs not met by LAICA; I can only mention some of the more dedicated and enterprising ones here. Although neither Some Serious Business (SSB, at 73 Market, Venice, founded 1976) nor Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE, at 240 South Broadway, begun 1978) can be considered art organizations in the LAICA sense - if only because they entertain truly experimental art market rather than the wider community. On the other hand, feminist alternative arts organizations, for example, Mother Art (1974), Double X (1975) and the Feminist Art Workers (1976), who grew out of the Woman's Building, involve the non-professional in the art-making process.
11. The catalogues of commercial art galleries and alternative spaces increasingly show the same artists' names.
12. There are a few New York feminist-run alternative spaces which integrate social practice and art for white middle-class women. I would have liked to have discussed them, particularly the feminist arts and politics collective, Heresies, which publishes the journal of the same name. However, I found more of the points I wanted to make about the feminist contribution in the Woman's Building, Los Angeles.
13. It is interesting to note in this context the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (an exhibition gallery and artists' studio for Blacks) conceived by the Junior Council of the Museum of Modern Art, and originally funded by, among others, the Rockefellers and the Astors. The impetus for its creation came from the Black uprisings in the mid-60s for which the museum was to act as a cultural damper. 
14. Watts Stationhouse News, No. 1, 1978, n.p.
15. Syllabus of the Woman's Building Extension Program, Winter Term, 1978.
16. The emphasis here placed on the Lesbian Art Project should not be taken as an indication that I found the Building to be dominated by lesbians, as some claim. It is however true that this reputation has inhibited certain heterosexual women with families from close association with the Woman's Building. 
17. Sheila de Bretteville, 'A Woman's Place Revealed,' NuWorld, Fall, 1975, p.35.

Transcription Notes:
Not sure how to/if we need to transcribe footnote number notations! I put in double brackets for searching.