CalArts students at Klubnikin Packing Co., downtown Los Angeles, in Maps, 1973. Happening in Los Angeles, CA. Courtesy of Suzanne Lacy. Photo: Susan Mogul.

In this interview Suzanne Lacy offers a thorough discussion of the development of feminism in California and the California art world in the early 1970s. She describes her introduction to Judy Chicago and her subsequent involvement in the Feminist Art Program at Fresno State and later at CalArts. She describes the development of her own performance-based work and discusses the influence of other artists such as Faith Wilding and Allan Kaprow.

SUZANNE LACY: I discovered feminism in ’69. I then applied to graduate school at Fresno State and—

MOIRA ROTH: Why did you single out Fresno State?

SL: I think I had a boyfriend going there. [laughs] Some real profound reason. Fresno had a fairly decent grad program in psychology, and I got right in. At that point, feminist organizing was beginning in psychology. I went to the founding meeting of the Women’s Psychology Associates at an American Psychological Association annual conference in Washington, D.C. I met a lot of women psychologists who were just starting to ask questions about Freud’s attitudes toward women, etc. In graduate school, I taught a course in feminist psychology, which was very new then, for my graduate peers, and rabble-roused as much as I could every time Freud came up in a class, and I was known as “that angry woman.” 
At Fresno, I ran into Faith Wilding, who was there as a graduate in English literature. Her husband was a teacher. She was probably the only other person at Fresno that knew anything about feminism. We proceeded one day to stick up signs all over campus saying, “Feminist meeting tonight.” There must have been over thirty or forty women who showed up. Faith and I sat there dumbfounded and looked at each other and said, “What do we do now?” We did what has become, I think, a kind of strategy. We began talking about sex.

Read the full interview here.

Tina Takemoto. Looking for Jiro, 2011; film; 5:45. Production still by Maxwell Leung. Courtesy of the Artist.

Rodriguez introduces the resources as follows:

In the fall of 2009 while I was still on the faculty of Rutgers University, New Brunswick, my good friend and colleague, Prof. Zaire Dinzey Flores, successfully applied for funds to form a women of color faculty group to, “enhance the experience of women of color in academia and open institutional spaces supportive of women of color to… carve out a lasting intellectual space for women of color at Rutgers.” The first year of the project, we committed ourselves to community building. It was important for us to simply be able to break bread with one another and have a safe space to commiserate about our shared experiences of racism and sexism from the aggressive hostility of conservative white students to the subtle, patronizing treatment by our “color-blind,” “progressive” white colleagues. The project continues to live on and has grown in many ways.

While some of the resources here may be dated, I thought it would be important to post the references we used to make the argument for getting our project funded. The Women of Color Scholars Initiative at Rutgers’ website also offers some good resources as well. 

See the full list here.

Teach 4 Amerika, 2011; poster. Courtesy of the Bruce High Quality Foundation and Creative Time, New York.

On April 27, the pranksterish collaborative the Bruce High Quality Foundation (BHQF) arrived at my alma mater, the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), in a limousine painted to resemble a yellow school bus for their tenth stop on a five-week, eleven-city tour across the United States. At each destination of Teach 4 Amerika, which is sponsored by the New York–based nonprofit public-art program Creative Time, BHQF has challenged art students to reconsider the terms, methods, and purpose of their educations. They posit that the proliferation of BFA and MFA degree programs in this country—over 900 at last count—has led neither to a corresponding increase in contemporary art’s reception in the broader culture nor to an expanded market in which more artists can sustain themselves by sales of their work. Instead, according to BHQF, it supports a self-perpetuating, peripheral industry around art and contributes to the increasing professionalization of the contemporary art world.

All these conditions—the glut of academic programs, artists’ narrowing access to the art market as their numbers rapidly increase, the progressive isolation of contemporary art within a sphere of similarly educated participants—have been pressing topics of conversation for several years and urgent ones since the 2008 economic collapse. They’ve also been the impetus for the rise of alternative pedagogical models by which artists self-direct their research and curricula. So the precept behind Teach 4 Amerika—that aspiring artists should eschew formalized art education in favor of such alternative models in order to reclaim their artistic agency—has much traction and would have resonated more strongly in the rally if it hadn’t been grounded in the outmoded premise of the artist as an autodidactic bohemian.

Read the full article here.

Karolina Melnica. Celujacy (Excellent), n.d.; performance documentation.

If you are currently attending or working in an academic arts institution, look around. What is the ratio of women to men in the student body? What proportion of the faculty is female? How many female faculty members are tenured? How many department chairs or deans are women? At many institutions, there is a visible disproportion between the number of women who are students versus the number who make it to ranked, tenured faculty or senior administration. This conspicuous lack of women in positions of power is the impetus for the groundbreaking 2015 study “Little Chance to Advance? An Inquiry into the Presence of Women at Art Academies in Poland,” published by the Katarzyna Kozyra Foundation.

Though the data portion of the study concentrates on Poland, it would be easy to extrapolate the majority of the philosophical findings to art departments, colleges, and universities around the world. “Little Chance to Advance” illustrates the cultural, psychological, and environmental factors that operate on individual and systemic levels to disenfranchise women, both within and beyond the academy. Currently, across the nine Polish visual art academies, women constitute 77 percent of the student body, but only 34 percent of assistant professors, 25 percent of associate professors, and 17 percent of full professors. In essence, the higher the level in the visual arts academy, the more women disappear. Are they opting out? If not, at which points in their trajectory are they being pushed out of the system?

Read the full article here.

Karolina Melnica. Celujacy (Excellent), n.d.; performance documentation.

Though the data portion of the study concentrates on Poland, it would be easy to extrapolate the majority of the philosophical findings to art departments, colleges, and universities around the world. “Little Chance to Advance” illustrates the cultural, psychological, and environmental factors that operate on individual and systemic levels to disenfranchise women, both within and beyond the academy. Currently, across the nine Polish visual art academies, women constitute 77 percent of the student body, but only 34 percent of assistant professors, 25 percent of associate professors, and 17 percent of full professors. In essence, the higher the level in the visual arts academy, the more women disappear. Are they opting out? If not, at which points in their trajectory are they being pushed out of the system?

Using data obtained from the academies and the Central Statistical Office of Poland, anonymous questionnaires, and in-depth interviews, “Little Chance to Advance” found that the gaps can’t be explained by a single factor. Students of both genders self-report similar aspirations and priorities, including the willingness to forego a family for the sake of their career; in fact, women are less eager than men to take care of their families after completing their studies. Equally significant, though divergent, were the responses to questions regarding employment strategies: Women put their faith mainly in experience, credentials, and hard work, while men placed more emphasis on social influences such as networking, family background, and even “having a romantic affair with someone important.”[1] The Literature Review and Results sections of the study discuss social capital and the ways in which power is transferred along gendered networks. In 2016, this isn’t surprising information—examinations of male networks of power and the “old boys’ club” have been available for quite a while—but the study rightly asserts that “social capital might be of even greater importance in the art world due to its vague criteria of evaluation and close relations with protégés” and “The importance of networking increases in dysfunctional institutions which offer few transparent paths of promotion.”[2]

The report takes a bleak turn at the discussion of psychological factors that regulate and shape the way that women move through the academy. It’s often assumed that women desire to perform traditional family roles and will willingly accept related career sacrifices, even though the data shows otherwise; thus, professors don’t promote women because they assume they will abandon their artistic practices (the study calls this “preventative discrimination”). In one interview, a professor said, “After their second, third year, women become less active as artists and start transitioning into the realm of motherhood, womanhood, the family. If I see a female student in her fourth year and she comes to classes with a small dog or a pet, I know she will be pregnant very soon.” In turn, this preventative discrimination can result in a lack of both institutional and informal rewards for good work, such as merit scholarships and introductions to a larger network. Further, women also report bullying and sexual harassment as impediments to their continued interest and advancement. To be clear, the problem is not simply that men are barring access to women; women also participate in sexism. The study shows that male students receive references from male professors at a rate of 27 percent, compared to 18 percent for female students—but there is a similar disparity for female professors, who provided references to 22 percent of male students, and only 13 percent of their female students.

Karolina Melnica. Celujacy (Excellent), n.d.; performance documentation.

“Little Chance to Advance” makes a significant contribution to the growing body of literature on women’s status within the arts. Though no other lateral region-specific studies have been done on the advancement of women in art academies, related investigations have been done to quantify and assess the status and representation of women artists. For example, the Brainstormers 2005 report analyzed seven top-ranking art schools on the East Coast and found that although MFA programs comprised an average of 60 percent women, the rosters of Chelsea galleries that these programs supposedly fed included an average of only 33 percent women. Michol Hebron’s ongoing Gallery Tally project also makes gender and commercial representation visible by presenting artist-made posters that show the gender makeup of represented artists at galleries around the world. In the UK, a-n’s 2006 “Making a Living as an Artist” report found that the mean annual pay for women in the arts is £19,344, compared to £23,492 for men [3]; a-n plans to publish a new comprehensive study this spring. Additionally, this conversation is not limited to the arts—other disciplines are also examining gender bias in academia.

There’s a lot to learn from “Little Chance to Advance.” The report points to the serious work that needs to be done both within the halls of academe and beyond, and the statistical and ethnographic data it contains provides a much-needed framework for change. Some issues, like networking and confidence building, may be readily addressed; others, such as the absence of role models and the very real influence of a patriarchal culture in contemporary Poland, will involve a more long-term effort to transform. Still, the study has the potential to have far-reaching effects. Some day, art academies may at last be able to offer the assurance of professional success to all their students equally, regardless of their gender.

[1] All quotes from the study can be found in “Little Chance to Advance? An Inquiry into the Presence of Women at Art Academies in Poland,” Katarzyna Kozyra Foundation, 2015, accessed online at http://katarzynakozyrafoundation.pl/en/projects/research on April 6, 2016.

[2] See also Zdenka Šadl, “‘We Women Are No Good at It’: Networking in Academia,” Czech Sociological Review, 2009, vol. 45, no. 6: 1,239–1,263. Accessed online at http://sreview.soc.cas.cz/uploads/325216c2e7609c1e783d709eaae64d3fe5410b7b_SadlSC2009-6.pdf on April 6, 2016.

[3] Sadly, the original study is now behind a membership paywall, so this data comes from “Women in the Arts: Some Questions,” accessed at http://www.theguardian.com/culture-professionals-network/culture-professionals-blog/2012/mar/05/women-in-the-arts-introduction on April 6, 2016.

Berkeley has lately been abuzz with social practice of a politically conscious nature that befits the People’s Republic. The Berkeley Art Museum is presenting David Wilson’s The Possible, an exhibition as creative platform that includes numerous artist collaborators and participatory activities for the public. Concurrent with that exhibition, UC Berkeley’s Center for South Asia Studies presented the conference “Collecting South Asia, Archiving South Asia” at the Berkeley Art Museum on February 18. One of the day’s speakers on contemporary art, Dr. Atreyee Gupta of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, presented a paper on Ghari/Ghar Pe/At Home, a social practice exhibition in Dharavi, Mumbai, in 2012. She attests that the exhibition reached a level of engagement with the disadvantaged women who were invited to participate that few such art projects have thus far managed to satisfy. At Berkeley Art Center, Weston Teruya has curated Feature, a selection of work by BAC members that includes Pallavi Sharma’s politically and socially activated work. Sharma’s performance for Feature addressed violence and servitude in the domestic sphere, touching on themes relevant to the installation in Dharavi and emerging from a similar school of thought and practice as David Wilson.

The Possible Workshop, February 9, 2014. Photo: Peter Cavagnaro. Courtesy of Berkeley Art Museum.

Such projects raise questions: Should art serve the public good? Does it have a reason to exist beyond the artist’s need for expression? Social Practice as an extension of performance art seems to indicate that many artists believe this is so. Public engagement complicates the idea of art for art’s sake because it functions to expand art dialogues and institutions structurally, opening points of entry for the individual perspectives of participants who do not necessarily consider art to otherwise be a priority in their lives.

This effect was palpable at the Berkeley Art Museum, where The Possible felt charged with vitality even though it was nearing the end of the day. One large gallery is occupied by production studios for print, textile, and ceramic arts, where visitors can observe or participate in making objects for display. The energy of people making and cleaning turns the Brutalist museum into a village, with spaces for contemplation and for action. Quiet spaces include a library outfitted with archival treasures from the museum’s collections and contemporary mail art from notable Bay Area artists, and a large crocheted rug by Fritz Haeg that is at once a site under construction, a space of production, and a public commons. Active spaces include the “Kids Club,” with art projects for youth, and the aforementioned working artisans’ studios. In contrast to the Department of Art Practice across the street (whose staff are well represented in The Possible’s list of participants), these facilities in the museum are available to a wide public. Still, the sense of a community art school is strong, indicating that the Berkeley Art Museum recognizes that it has a responsibility as a public institution to play a socially engaged role in education through art and culture. This is a significant shift away from the traditional collecting and archiving priorities of museums on the whole.

The Possible, installation view, 2014. Photo: Peter Cavagnaro. Courtesy of Berkeley Art Museum.

As the Berkeley Art Museum tries to be more active and responsive to its community, the organizers of Ghari/Ghar Pe/At Home tried to do the same for the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum in the large Mumbai ghetto called Dharavi. The project was organized by an NGO, SNEHA, with local contemporary artists, who worked with poor women in the district for a full year to develop both activist and artistic strategies to address their needs. Each participant is given credit as artist of her own contributions, rather than the project being attributed to a lead artist. One collection of objects included a stove, which had special significance as a metaphorical space to address the abuse and intimidation that many women felt inside their homes. For inspiration, the artists were shown examples of foundational works of installation art such as Womanhouse, as well as contemporary Indian art, which they did at times try to emulate. However, since the forms of such art originate in the vernacular semiotics of the home and the Indian street, their appearance here is only natural. The objects interweave different women’s histories—some joyful, many marked by cruelty—in a collective self-portrait of the struggling and neglected neighborhood. The needs of a community like Dharavi, which lacks basic services and infrastructure, are vastly different from those of Berkeley. Even so, the stories of domestic violence that emerged from Ghari/Ghar Pe/At Home are relevant to any community.

The Possible, installation view, 2014. Photo: Peter Cavagnaro. Courtesy of Berkeley Art Museum.

Pallavi Sharma’s performance at Berkeley Art Center demonstrated precisely how relevant stories of domestic violence and sexual assault can be in a local context, and how social-practice artists can create spaces of shared understanding around charged topics such as this. Sharma constructed a large sculpture made of three apron-like skirts, each with its own opening. She put on the sculpture one skirt at a time, allowing the remaining two to sit empty in potential occupancy by members of her audience. Sharma did not narrate her own story; instead, she performed symbolic acts of vulnerability and generosity. Rolling balls of dough, she powdered them not in white flour but in red kumkum, a pigment used in Hindu religious observance. Each was rolled into a perfectly red roti. This labor-intensive staple bread, now stained, suggested the high expectations placed on women in traditional homes. Simultaneously, the staining and folding of dough was an apt metaphor for violence’s perpetuation across generations when it is manifested in the home. Sharma invited audience members to join her, and one young woman did, expressing her alarm at a recent incident of sexual assault alleged against a former UC Berkeley Graduate Student Instructor. The student, whose experiences differ dramatically from the upbringing even of an educated, middle-class Indian such as Sharma, could experience the commonality and compassion around this issue that Sharma’s work facilitated.

Heartwarming, for sure—but as Justin Charles Hoover pointed out in a panel following Sharma’s performance (in which I also took part), performance art is not best served by artists who wish to use it as therapy. The value of social practice as a form does not derive from the broad strokes of real-world issues that it so often engages but in its capacity to foreground the perspectives of individuals, including and beyond the artist, in a way that feels democratic and constructive. As such, a project like The Possible holds enormous potential for meaningful and broad audience engagement, even if its aesthetics and form are associated with a smaller niche community of artists and artisans with specific demographics. Art institutions can provide an important platform to amplify diverse and marginalized voices through these kinds of exhibition formats, offering a necessary public outlet for dialogue through art that is less contentious and territorial than the spaces of contemporary political life.

“Collecting South Asia, Archiving South Asia” was presented by UC Berkeley’s Center for South Asia Studies at the Berkeley Art Museum on February 18. The Possible is on view at the Berkeley Art Museum through May 25. Feature is on view at the Berkeley Art Center through March 2.

#Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.

What advice would you have for artists who are separated from the university realm to keep themselves sharp (in terms of criticism and general growth)? Have you found specific groups or events that have helped keep you on track beyond academic circles?

Good for you for wanting to stay sharp! The instantaneous peer network and programming that a school provides helps to keep you on your toes, and once school is over it’s hard to maintain that momentum outside of an institutional setting. Groups and events do different things, so you’ll definitely want both in your life: a group will keep you connected and supported, and events will keep you informed and thinking. For groups, the network you’ve already established is a good start: with any luck, you still have the contact information for some of your old classmates. Why not email them to suggest a get-together? I recommend keeping it short and informal at first if you haven’t seen them in a while—maybe just a one-beer meetup at a bar or even an email list—because too much pressure to commit will drive shyer folks away. When you settle in with some like-minded people you could start a crit group or a reading club, go to openings together, or even just host a few fun, gossipy dinner parties.

First, find a group of people who share your interests.

If that’s no good (you hated everyone, you moved to another state, etc.) and you don’t already have a circle of art friends, you can make one by going to the events in your area and meeting other artists and curators. It will take time and effort, but it can be done. Start by listing the institutional networks that are available to you. If there’s an art school or a university art program in your area, they probably have a lecture series. Ditto for the local art museum and the galleries. Don’t forget to do an internet search for medium-specific groups like Dorkbot, and if you don’t know the name of a particular group try googling search terms in your field (I tried “painters art group Seattle” and got a great list of links to follow). Go to their websites and put yourself on their mailing lists, and then go to every lecture and opening you can possibly muster the energy for, where you will simultaneously look at a lot of art and see the same people over and over again. Put some energy into it, and within three months you’ll be a familiar face to a lot of people and have a good handle on your local art scene. If you feel extra stuck right now, consider taking a class. Most institutions offer noncredit classes where you can get in some studio time and meet other artists. And good luck! Build yourself a network of thoughtful, hard-working people and make sure to get out of the studio regularly to look at art, and you’ll never have to worry about staying on track.

Go to museums, galleries, lectures, and medium-specific group meetings.

I have a strange question involving an incident I witnessed two years ago when I moved to a new city. Some friends set up a welcome dinner for me at a trendy restaurant. Upon entering the bathroom I came upon a woman in her late-30s, sobbing hysterically. She begged me to help her and revealed that her husband was cheating on her and she was absolutely going to do something desperate if I didn’t help her at that moment. I called a cab and helped her outside and waited until she was picked up. I never knew her name, but I do have a remarkable memory for faces. Fast forward, two years: I am a recent grad of an MFA program and I’ve had a close relationship with my adviser all along. I knew he was married and had children, but it wasn’t until our MFA show that I met his family. Imagine my shock when I saw that his wife was that drunk lady I had helped. My real issue lies in my relationship with my adviser. He has helped me greatly and until this revelation, I would have continued our communications, which are still frequent. This information has severely altered my impression of him, and I’m just not sure how to proceed. Any advice?

Can you trust this man, or not? I’ll accept your avowal that the weeping restaurant inebriate and the advisor’s wife are truly the same woman, but before you un-friend this man on Facebook and delete his name from your phone, let’s look at another possibility. How do you know she was telling the truth? She may be bipolar, delusional, or simply mistaken. She may be a pathological liar, desperately needy for attention from strangers. Let’s remember that the world is full of broken people who say and do aberrant things—just look at reality TV.  Perhaps the only way to know the veracity of this story would be to ask him, which you are not going to do. My rule is that you can only inquire about a person’s sex life if you are currently sleeping with him or her; and if you are now sleeping with your ex-advisor, you’ve asked me the wrong question. But I digress.

If you haven’t seen Hitchcock’s masterpiece about an affair, revenge, and redemption, you really should. Also, it was his only film made for 3D! Keep an eye out for staging that specifically creates depth.

Even if you do have all your facts straight (same woman, definitely an affair), the matter of another person’s extracurricular nookie is really none of your business. I understand why you’re in a muddle and why your view of this man is shaken. Of necessity, when you are in school you must put your faith in your relationship with your advisors. After all, these men and women are charged with nothing less than overseeing the personal, intellectual and artistic growth of the students that they work with. You probably looked up to this man for some good reasons: he is wise and has been generous with his time and energy. He helped you focus on your work to make it better, and if you’re still in touch it means that you had a good personality match. While you may not have articulated it to yourself, you probably assumed that because his professional behavior was congenial, all his actions were above reproach. And now you’re also in the unsteady transition period from graduate school to real life, one in which very good mentors slowly develop into friends. Your trust in this person has been altered by the revelation that he is, or at least was, weak and unreliable to an important person in his family. The higher your former regard for this man, the more profound your disappointment is now.

Yet his marital iniquity doesn’t have anything to do with his ability to act as a friend and mentor. Yes, the moral transgression of adultery is ugly and wounding, but it doesn’t mean that he is completely evil. If you have other, undivulged, reasons for cutting this person out of your life, then do so. But consider that a person who has been kind to you but who has issues in other parts of his life may need a little compassion. A marriage is a complicated and private alliance and this incident with his wife occurred two years ago. If they are still together, then perhaps she has forgiven him and he has become a better husband. Why should you condemn what his own wife would absolve? An advisor-advisee relationship that evolves into a true friendship is a rare thing. If he hasn’t done anything vexatious to you personally, then don’t throw your advisor out with his dirty bathwater.

HELP DESK is sponsored in part by the generosity of KQED arts in San Francisco.