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art, too vulnerable and private (and by implication "minor") for public display, often seemed to touch the core of women's experience, women's art, but most of us were afraid at that time to send these tender sprouts into the dog-eat-dog world of "high" art. Only the subsequent establishment of women's galleries, women's shows, women's courses, paved the way for eventual exposure.
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Women's shows function, hopefully, as educational devices for the institutions exhibiting them.1 A similar function is served by independent shows, by the establishment of women's co-op galleries like AIR, [[strikethrough]] and [[/strikethrough]] Soho 20, and the Women's Interarts Center in New York, Hera in Rhode Island, Artemesia and ARC in Chicago, those in the Los Angeles Women's Building; and by organizations like the Women's Art Registry, a slide collection founded in response to the constant comment that "there are no women working in kenetics, or light, or conceptual art, or even sculpture;" 2 and by organizations like WEB (West East Bag), an international network of women artists' groups 3. These and others like them are beginning to indicate the tip of the iceberg (or volcano) that is women's art and are providing ways for women outside the major art centers to keep in touch with each other.

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Whenever there is a women's show, or a Black artists show, or any similarly 'segregated' event, objections are raised on the basis that art is art and has no sex, no color. That's all very well, but artists do, and there has been considerable discrimination against artists of a certain sex and a certain color. A woman's show is no more arbitrary a manner of bringing together a group of artworks than a show of Czechoslovakian Art Since 1945 or Artists Under 35.