Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

200 Alan W. Moore
In Hollywood, California, the Womanhouse exhibition project
(1972) was an inXuential example of collaborative work and a deWning
moment for feminist art. This transformation of a suburban house achieved
underground fame as a collective exposition of the plight of American
women enslaved by male expectations and entombed by housework. The
Womanhouse project was a work by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro with
their students in a feminist art program. Judy Chicago’s subsequent major
projects, the Dinner Party and the Birth Project, were both made in collaboration
with other artists and craftswomen, elevating traditional anonymous
female cultural production, china painting and needlework, to the status of
high art.
The feminist art movement, like its political counterpart, was
advanced through its own network of independent journals, 22 like the Feminist
Art Journal. The most adamantly collective of these was Heresies, founded
in 1977 by a “mother collective” of activist artists and critics. Each issue was
edited by an autonomous editorial group. Through 1993, a parade of volumes
dealt with key issues for radical artists, including housework, working
collectively, violence against women, and lesbian art. Today the collective
Guerrilla Girls builds on this tradition of feminist agitation within the art
world. The group debuted in 1985 with a street poster campaign documenting
continued inequities in the exhibition of male and female artists. In
recent years the Guerrilla Girls have published popular books revealing the
structural sexism of western art history.
FIGURE 7.4. The Guerrilla Girls marching in costume for a pro-choice demonstration in
Washington, D.C., 1992. The Girls urged right-to-lifers—and the Catholic Church—to repent their
sinful, modern ideas. Photograph courtesy of the Guerrilla Girls.