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working in kinetics, or light, or conceptual art, etc.'); like WEB (West East Bag), an international network of women artists**; like the artists' consciousness-raising groups all over the world; like Women's Centers and Women's co-op galleries; these are beginning to indicate the tip of the iceberg that is women's art and, at the same time, are beginning to provide ways for women who have followed husbands and families outside of the major art centers to keep in touch with each other.

I joined the women's movement in 1970 when a group of artists got together to picket and perform guerilla actions at the Whitney Museum, whose staff was visiting few women's studios and including fewer in the Annual Exhibitions. (We were successful in raising the percentage that year from 4 1/2 to 22% and to around 25% the next two years; the other New York museums are worse than the Whitney.) I became involved for endless reasons, but the most public one is the fact that as a working critic for five years, I had been guilty of the same lack of seriousness towards women's work as the museums and galleries. Although I had once been an artist's wife, and had had my own infuriating experiences in that role. I continued to go to men's studios and either disregard or patronize the women artists who served coffee and worked in a corner of her husband's space, or in the bedroom or kitchen. I was, I think, unconsciously responding to her sense of inferiority as well as my own (my 'reputation' supposedly depended on male support, etc.). And I was swallowing that ridiculous statement that all women are part-time artists, whether they are self-supporting, or married, or mothers.

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Now, three years later, a lot has changed, but there is still an immense amount of changing yet to be done. One no longer hears, and expects to hear as a matter of course, comments from dealers like 'I can't have a woman in the gallery, they're too difficult', or 'We already have a woman', or 'Collectors won't buy women's work', or 'I liked her photographs but she was so pretty I didn't go to the studio; it might have been for the wrong reasons'. Nor does the art press dare use the term 'feminine' in a value-judgemental context, something that once caused many women to be literally afraid of using delicate line, sewn materials, household imagery, or pastel colors (especially pink!). Today the greatest compliment a woman artist can receive is no longer 'you paint like a man'.

The work in this magazine and that in any women's show or similar collection demonstrates a range of styles and ideas that make it impossible to pin down what a 'feminine art' would be. Yet there is no question that female experience, social and biological, is different from that of the male. And if art comes from inside, as it must, then the art must be different too. This question and all its ramifications are one of the most fascinating results of being exposed to so much more art by women. Is a female sensibility best expressed by a certain kind of fragmentation or by strong centrality? By a sensuous surface or by a subtle color sense? By circles, ovals, boxes, or by straited and threadlike patterns? The imagery, the subject matter, even the intentions responsible for use of these elements and related ones in video, film, dance, remain superficial clues to a much more profound differentiation. I, for one, am convinced this differentiation exists, but for every time I can be specific about it there are endless times in which it remains just out of reach. Perhaps it is impossible to pin it down or draw any but the most personal conclusions until women's place in society is indeed equalized and women's work can be studied outside of the confines of oppressive conditioning. There will always be some men who work the same way (art is an androgynous profession); there will always be plenty of women who don't. It should go without saying that every woman need not and will not work according to the conclusions of any such study. Nevertheless, generalizations are made in every field, especially art, and often profitably. It seems most important that our eyes and spirits be attuned to the glimpses we are afforded of women's sensibility.

[[strikethrough]]**The WEB contact in London is Roselee Goldberg, c/o the Royal College of Art Gallery.[[/strikethrough]]