[Music] thank you I've got no secrets kicking up from behind we keep no secrets we play right in time Your Time Is Gonna Come I think I hear it now in the late 1960s a few women artists formed a coalition and named it War women artists and revolution [Music] [Music] Your Time Is Gonna Come and you have to ask yourself why it was necessary for them to do this in the first place the books that you read in those days were written in a way that denigrated women artists if they even mentioned them as an undergraduate at Harvard University I don't think there was a single woman artist whose work was ever discussed in any one of my classes [Music] when you're a woman it's hard to tell that you're being censored when you're not in a museum to begin with an artist Frida Kayla yeah freedom can anyone name three women artists I need two more women artists yes a female this film is peppered with images that for years you were prevented from seeing because there was no access to them [Music] this film is the remains of an insistent history that refuses to wait any longer to be told [Music] 1968 [Music] one year after the Summer of Love America was still in Vietnam while at home the Black Panthers civil rights and Free Speech movements were only part of the subterranean agitations [Music] another Revolution was in progress [Music] there was a moral fervor to gather the fractured displaced and Scattered remnants of the conditions of obscurity I was a freshly radicalized graduate student at Berkeley during the Free Speech movement I came from Cleveland and was expected to return but after Berkeley there was no turning back I felt an urgency to capture that moment to hold on to that experience I wasn't about to trust my own memory which was fragile even then so with a borrowed camera I shot people that came through my living room right here on this very sofa 35 years ago one of the earliest feminist demonstrations was staged at the 1968 Miss America contest which was a symbol for women who measured up or didn't measure up to artificial standards new Miss America stands five feet seven with 125 pounds and measures 36 24 and a half 36. police arrested a young woman Inside the Atlantic City convention hall police said the woman was spraying a foul smelling Vapor about 20 yards from the end of the runway [Music] and it was at that precarious moment in history that art and politics fused and then transfused into the blocked cultural arteries of the time it was a week-long protest of art events against the Vietnam War used a formation from my ward piece and we snaked through the streets of Soho with black armbands [Music] politics of 1970 must Clearly say to All American people that the walls between the races and the walls between the classes must come Crashing Down Judy cohengarowitz was inspired by the Black Panthers when she changed her last name to Chicago so we adapted the forms of the Black Panther before we developed they're almost no it's absolutely true when I didn't feel like I had a name you know and I wanted to make some statement some kind of symbolic statement about the fact that I was taking control of my own destiny I was fighting it out pretty much alone and isolated I shot wherever and whenever I could this clip of Judy Chicago was shot in a bathroom at Hayward State where we were able to get good sound uh let's see if I can think back that far Lynn now we're going back into the end of the 60s okay there were almost no women artists who are visible at all we all thought we were alone friends said to me if anybody can tell you you know what galleries you can go to or what you can do with this stuff go to Leo castilli so like a fool and I went to the Uptown Gallery but of course he didn't see me Ivan karp saw me and I was wearing high-heeled boots at the time and so I was you know really kind of tall and Ivan is small and there were these sculpture stands all around the place and he didn't have me put my big tablet 24x36 on this he had me put on the floor so every time I turned a page it was like I was genuflecting to this guy you know I felt humiliated and then he said he said where'd you bring these to me for I learned to you know look into a lot of facets of the real world and what it meant to be a woman artist in this society and in the art world and as it was it was pretty tough women aspiring to success in a male-dominated art world as we know must work much harder at it and will be defined a second rate for the most part it was sort of a built-in attitude within the institutions that it was acceptable normal and preferable to have all white male shows so coming up against that both as a black person and as a woman was very daunting because it had to do with basic attitudes [Music] people I was meeting didn't realize that I was recording and that they were creating much of what would become part of the feminist art movement but we all felt something transformative was occurring and that we were part of it one voice and then another became a chorus syncopated into a movement [Music] came a revolution [Music] these works are relics of resistance and very different from the work that was being exhibited in museums and galleries or was taught about in art schools in universities [Music] minimalism was the prevailing tendency at that time the whole ethos of minimalist art was to arrive at an Ever purer notion of what an object could be a step forth from the University trying to figure out how trained as a minimalist painter I was going to make my work relevant to people I loved and cared about and there was that incredible disjunction at that point between content and the notion of making art in other words art was contentless it was free and devoid of politics and that was a higher form when you have a culture in a state of grave agitation where people are Marching by the hundreds of thousands in the streets and the leading artistic activity of the day is mute because of the way that that art is construed as an intellectual Pursuit the growing tensions between minimal and feminist art are expressed in this performance where one artist represents minimal art and the other feminist art as they wrestle for Domination to the background drone of minimal art rhetoric [Music] domination of the art world art had reached an impasse that American culture was already breaking through there had to be an invention of a new kind of art and that's exactly when feminism starts in the art world [Music] launched this week the clean out major enemy sanctuaries on the Cambodian Vietnam border the National Guard is called out to restore order at Kent State in Ohio wartsman Harris by Rock throwing and name-calling fire into a group of students really spurred me to the state happened to Nixon invaded Cambodia I got a sense of the immediacy of these issues in my life that made me feel as though the work I had done up to that up to that point was just not adequate to express my current concerns and so I felt the need to move out into the world and also the need to be more concrete and confrontational in my interactions with people through my work in protests to the invasion of Cambodia the artist Robert Morris closest Exhibition at the Whitney Robert rauschenberg and Carl Audrey withdrew their work from the Venice biennao and together they opened a bien Island Exile in New York City but the artists in this exhibition were only white men this show came include wait a minute well we just got mad and we said we're mad we're not taking it anymore they contacted the organizers and threatened to demonstrate if they didn't integrate the exhibition and that was the first day and that was done by a group called Watsonville women's shoes that group was actually just me and my daughter Michelle Wallace yeah those were the days where two people could raise a lot of hell and and make everybody think we were 35 000 people you know what I mean [Music] between May and September 1970 simultaneously and spontaneously other creative actions for integration surfaced throughout the country we had already picketed the corporate Gallery it's biennial for having an all-nailed exhibition right at the time when people were beginning to have a discussion about this and we organized that at my house and the and the conference used one of my bedrooms headquarters it was a sculpture annual and people said though there are no women who make sculpture the usual facility business we did a big demonstration around the Whitney annual we picked it every Saturday we had women's slides projected on the outside of the Whitney at the opening we faked a press release that was went out to all the media on Whitney stationery saying that the Whitney was so pleased to be the first Museum to acknowledge that women artists have been neglected and have 50 women and 50 non-whites those slides were projected on the outside of the museum artists placed eggs inside the exhibition space painted her eggs black and wrote 50 on them we realized that little changes make big changes I eventually wrote the song stand up for what you want to do stand up there's no one telling you how to stand up stand up when people put you down Stand Up and Dance above the ground you've got to stand up you've got to stand up disposable objects Society Consumer Reports exposing the truth is like nudity so stand up you've got to stand up the Los Angeles County Museum was planning an art and Technology show and the red flag was the cover of the catalog but the grid with 50 heads of men on it we went to the museum and counted the works on the walls we embarrassed them and they felt they had to negotiate what was an IRA well it was the first women's cooperative it was very hard to find a show of women's work in SoHo we rented the ground floor Loft on Worcester Street I think it was 97 Worcester Street and we gutted the inside and we built with our own hands the gallery Judy Chicago began the very first feminist art program at Fresno State College in 1970. this is powerful and dialectical sex some people read all three books we didn't study men at all figuring that everybody had studied men plenty and so we were all into remedial education learning our own history our own Heritage how to meet a gallery how to present yourself to the world you know all of these things that men artists do we found pictures we photographed them we made slide libraries we would meet every week and we would choose a subject and then what we tried to do was make art out of it I remember asking my students how many of them had been raped and being just totally shocked when like a quarter or half of them raised their hands it was all discovery about what our true experiences had been I was really scared you know I had no idea what I was getting myself into but I was impelled to do it there was as we went along a lot of hostility and kind of jealousy I think that began to develop about that program we were sitting on the platform talking about these ideas and this man came up from the audience started threatening me some man jumped up on stage and slugged her I discovered that it was easier to get access to the subject matter through performance most women knew how to act out even if they didn't have any experience performing they were experienced at performing roles in society will you help me do the dishes as much as mine but you don't have a we all learned how to make art from our own point of view as women in that year and then we went to Cal Arts my husband Paul brought was the dean of Cal Arts he proposed that Judy be made a member of his faculty I was already a member Mimi Shapiro and Judy Chicago had organized this big conference it was a weekend at Cal Arts and during that conference they invited women from all over the country to come and show slides and talk about their work and that's all we did for three days it was very simple Lynn what we found out was that our slides were moved out all over the country they were copy it was like an underground railroad [Music] the women in America were just waiting to be released when I saw those slides after Decades of having felt that to be an artist is to be a man it was like orveo had lifted [Music] women were able to enter the art structure through performance performance art is the strange amorphous area that attracts hybrids from every discipline it remains this peculiar place that people can be extremely experimental [Music] we started the whole Consciousness raising concept on the idea of the grape Theory one person tells another person another person tells a third person and pretty soon you've got a group and you can start talking to each other and there's a wholeness about that I remember being in this Consciousness raising group and looking around them they're all white women and I was really fascinated by the fact that all of these women were had made the determinations that I was in the process of making choosing to to focus on their work choosing perhaps not to be wives in the traditional sense by facing up to the way the micro politics of power within the family have shaped women and their responses I think I was very scared by the anger all of them were expressing and the rage and I was very recently married and I was very feeling very conflictual about you know how one had somebody angry about men naturally as a result I had to leave my husband as so many of us did everyone's opinion counted equally that was both wonderful and a total nightmare and sometimes it just simply ground to a halt but when it didn't grind to a halt then you could sometimes get a kind of combustion kind of of nitroglycerin effect that shot off all kinds of new directions and ideas in really productive ways what we found was a whole different way to talk about work and I discovered very quickly it wasn't the way the boys talked about art that we talked about things like content how much of the feminist movement period was about giving us permission to let us be who we think we are that's simple as I stopped doing the dishes making the three meals a day the laundry and the house cleaning and so on the process of personal Liberation for me resulted in the breakup of my marriage so that was my first introduction to feminism and there was a second stage of that in which after right after a few days after I left my marriage I was raped and that experience was highly politicizing for me and I became very strongly connected to the fact that I wanted all of my energy my professional energies my personal energies my political energies to be integrated in the struggle for women's liberation in America the statistics are that every two minutes a woman is raped like Arlene early in my life I became part of that statistic and thereafter cautiously sidestepped the associated landmines of depreciated dignity and self-worth through Consciousness raising King some of the early feminist literature like the politics of housework and philosophical slogans like the personal is the political Bowl all these gestures and utensils actually are a sign for a certain kind of utilitarian Domesticity other meanings escape and you see a kind of uh Madness and anger contained but explosive with each letter there's a certain kind of confrontationalism which I discovered quickly that many men found frightening overlays of personal history led to internal conflicts of breaking with traditional roles elsewhere so we got married this day out of my work so in general I just felt that it was fashion so I was like the best mother you could possibly be the best house I never seemed to have more than 20 women in a business at a time for myself painting just faded away there was an enormous collection of very exciting people who were passing all of this inspiration on down to their students and when I got to Cal Arts I it was like Jesus it's pretty squeaky clean and it struck me as a kind of a intellectualized version of minimalism the women's program had been very influential this messiness was feminine it was hysterical it was really looked down upon around this time you also have role playing and gender swapping [Music] I was interested what would my male self naturally as I've told you I'm vain so I wanted to be the most handsomest male self and you know in my tape I discovered I was the king with my small face but a king has to have a kingdom so I went out into the world and conversed with my people citizens of Solana Beach I considered for a long time whether or not to include my own work in this film but I decided not to continue the legacy of omission so here I am [Music] [Music] from 1973 to 1979 nearly a decade I lived as a fictional person Roberta had a driver's license saw a psychiatrist and had better credit than I did the fragments of her life emerged like the fragments of this film to eventually show a portrait of what it was like to experience alienation rejection and loneliness Roberta put ads and newspapers to meet roommates and as she met them she became part of their reality just as they became part of her fiction she was a fractured identity a virtual person captured in a time frame waiting for her history to congeal Roberta was by own flipped Effigy she was a mirror of culture so we made art in which we created identities even fictional histories which were better than none at all the personal became the political and the very personal became art we were juggling identities living encrypted lives covertly as artists beneath the surface of visibility race became the subject in the content of art that was produced [Music] for example it's our problem if you feel that I'm making an unnecessary fuss about my racial identity if you don't see why I have to announce it this way well if you feel that my letting people know I'm not white is making an unnecessary fuss you must feel that the right and proper course of action for me to take is to pass for white this was in the 40s so it was during segregation I was one of the few black children in kindergarten if not the only one in this particular one in Philadelphia they had potty time and I remember one of the white teachers believed that whites and black should not use the same bathroom and so what she did was tie me to the cot with sheets I remember vividly I remember lying me on I said I'm not going to peel myself I'll have a little kid and I talk about this experience which is always a shock because people can't believe this happened but it did and I told stories about experiences my mother had an experiences I had with racism but I play both parts you ungrateful little after all we've done for you you know we don't believe in your symbols you must use our symbols they're they're not valid unless we validate them and he really must be paranoid I've never had an experience like that but then of course I'm I'm free white and 21. people were offended by it we're very angry about it I first showed the tape at air and the dialectics of isolation exhibition that onamendiata curated a political Exile from Cuba the feminist artist Anna mendieta met and buried the minimal artist Carl Andre calarts in 1972 I showed photographs of myself dressing as a man trying to look like a woman photographs using makeup to beautify and then to deform my face and then Judy said whoa what do you what do you think of the work that you see appear and there were flowers and breasts all over the walls and I thought it was hideous so I said it looks prescriptive to me and then she said Dodge so um I started crying I completely lost it and just you know I couldn't believe that a feminist could act like this and to this day I'm glad for giving tree to Chicago for making me cry and finally they have study groups they have Consciousness raising groups they read Theory they read Mild they read Mark they read linen it's like you say how do I make change and we tell you and you say oh I don't want to do all that that won't make change and we say to you those of us who are effectively making change are not ignorant those people who have ever made change in the history of the human race were not ignorant and nobody who's ignorant will ever make change unfortunately because of some moves that Judy made like locking the door of the program this exacerbated the hostility that is one of the reasons women are not able to translate their aspirations into reality because they are embedded in remaining ignorant and it pisses me off [Music] 21 students in the feminist art program at Kell Arts under the supervision of Judy Chicago Miriam Shapiro created woman house which transformed a vacant Hollywood home into a feminist artwork [Music] first year that I was teaching with Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro I found it to be difficult because they were not speaking to each other [Music] woman house had already happened that was kind of the finale of the excitement being able to actually address women's educational needs within an institution that supposedly was committed to that that was wonderful and thrilling but of course it didn't work so we decided to leave and had an idea to do a brochure in which we would be standing inside of trash cans throwing away old art history and old art and pulling out to get them into star history and art and went to our friend Sheila de brentfield to see if she would assist us with the brochure and she thought that was just the worst ideas he'd ever heard it's at the core of what your design sense is is political well listen Lynn I love that you see it's political I see it as very political the independence of having your own institution is a really heady experience you don't have to ask permission from anyone you just do it and I like very much having an idea checking without and just going ahead with it if it's not right we'll adjust it later Judy Chicago Arlene Raven and Sheila debrethfill left Cal arts and formed the feminist Studio workshop and they held the first classes in Sheila's living room eventually they founded their own building we found the building but had a tremendous amount of dignity and presence except it was like nobody else was there because it was like warehouses it wasn't Chic and right over the bridge is Lincoln high switch Judy Bakker said you know all these are two gangs they're gonna conceive all these women and fight with us and I don't think so I have a good relationship to Taking Chances [Music] [Applause] [Music] you know foreign the equal rights amendment was passed in the House of Representatives and there was a buoyancy about new possibilities [Music] I was able to travel and to lecture at different schools and see what was happening like in Minneapolis and Chicago and Atlanta was able to go to the women's building so some of us were doing cross-pollination [Music] we were all so excited to begin this endeavor together that anything that was a barrier or an impediment or a glitch was just in a barrier impediment of a glitch for you to solve and we did it's hard this will make me very emotional it just hurts to not have money when you want things so bad and I it makes a fight but who doesn't have money the sense of sense of limitation that that economics makes is so powerful and in a way I think we we used it wrong then we saw that as you know the dominant culture not letting us have what we have instead of the identification with people who don't have I think there wasn't enough identification with that and it made it made it peculiar to be so you know so so lacking in funds and so unable to get them and um and so able unable to do some of the things we wanted to do that that's just hard [Music] [Applause] [Music] Consciousness surfaced from the inside out [Music] trauma's dissolved through the pores of the skin and the body became the body politic it's a long tradition [Music] it literally was the looking back [Music] Martha Rossler for instance she's measured ruthlessly but it made you think of how women are measured ruthlessly in the mid thigh girls 19 inches it is about constraints [Music] the ability to challenge cultural presumptions was in itself a Triumph there was some Works idea that suddenly pulled it all together and it felt right I put up all these naked pictures of me 148 or something I looked at that and I was shaking and I said oh my God they're not going to take me seriously I'm so [ __ ] obviously a woman and I remember going outside and taking a walk and saying well you know [ __ ] them you know that's me and I meant yet I'll stressed the temporal nature and Frailty of the female body I think that that was not only an art expression but that was a political expression of how she felt about violence and the vulnerability of women's bodies violence is embedded in much of this art like the blood-filled corpses of animated as Earthworks or her tears for unknown Horrors still to come the rumor went around almost immediately that I was going to be in this room naked which I was but guys could come in and I would make love with every one of them and this is exactly contrary to the meaning of the piece or what I was going to do the women got very upset about it but they thought that I guess I was completely a victim but there have been other women who've done performance pieces such as Yoko Ono and Marina Abramovich in which they really were victims Because by the rules of their peace they could not interact or protect themselves in the performance cut piece Yoko Ono sat motionless on a stage after inviting the audience to cut away her clothing self-inflicted wounds and exposed vulnerability reflect a culture of rage and aggression the women's movement gave me permission to start moving into my experiences as a woman and it was a series of gestures that went and that act of covering that part of the body touching oneself there as far as I knew no one had ever done that before and in fact the friend of mine the dancer said when she saw that she gasped instead of the female body being the enemy of an artist or the Muse for an artist suddenly it really became not just the stuff of work but the tool of work the real struggle with my work was to potentially introduce or penetrate my culture with different meanings of the female body and the female attributes of that body but it was the body in conjunction and as an extension of my materials as a painter so the body itself was subjected to the materials that I as a painter was using in the constructions it was painted it was greased it was oiled it was chalked it was covered in ropes it was collage they all said it was like a kind of pornography and if I wanted to paint I should paint it was in a matter of leap to think that women could represent sexuality on the screen without somehow being either condemned by it without its being career suicide without being laughed at or without being attacked by other women because that wasn't any nicer media was challenged tactics included revising projected idealized images [Music] thank you or scrutinizing and rupturing the forms of media transmission or claiming the copyright itself to the mediated image forward slowly forward no this way [Applause] forward okay stop that's good now just lower your let your whole body settle down I like that that's good okay now uh you want just a straight uh profile in full face yeah I got an idea what we can do the cleanest tape on this machine now and then take a photograph of what I'm doing okay that's where we are you know what I mean media big platform for articulating private battlefields my video diaries were a way to finally hear myself there were things that happened that you weren't supposed to talk about when I was small there would be these episodes of batterings and I would go up to my attic and Retreat into other people that had a voice since I had lost my own my art was his own of safety and survival part of the reason that the feminist art movement Could Happen was that there were feminist writing about art they created three fictional critics their names were Herbert good Prudence Juris and gay abandon and these fictional critics wrote about my work the Articles got published in prestigious journals and I took the published articles into Galleries and that's how I got my first exhibition there were women starting magazines magazines were self-published Chrysalis on the west coast heresies on the east coast and many others throughout the country [Music] the first meeting of the group that was to become heresies was actually in this law we literally took it out to the bookstores ourselves we did distribution we did mailing [Music] was lesbian art and artists and in editing that issue one of the things that came up right away was how little there was out there it was very hard getting women to in a way you know in a sense almost come out as artists not always come out as lesbians but to come out as artists because the lesbian separatist Community was anti-art it was bourgeois [Music] my sense of the feminist movement then was that women were kind of storming the art world we were trying it all out and we were giving birth to it pardon inventing it it was excitement it was empowering it was a lot of [ __ ] work it was such an explosive time where all of this was really getting sorted out there wasn't an ideology yet there wasn't a prescriptive way of doing things and half the intoxication was that we were there helping to figure it out I started Franklin Furnace after moving to New York 1974 because my work had been marginalized so I thought to start an institution that would show marginalized work feminism in the 70s was an exercise in trying to do something that you knew full well was probably not going to work but you had to do it anyway are you going to go nuts we started the women's building and after a year I left that because I had become strengthened in my own sense of what I wanted to do and be as an artist three years after leaving Judy completed the dinner party there's 39 place settings at the table 13 on each side each of the place settings represents a woman of achievement from Western Civilization over 400 people came from all over the United States from as far away as Australia to work on the project in 1979 when the dinner party opened in San Francisco when it premiered it wasn't just the dinner party in the museum you got to see a glimpse of what it would actually mean to have a feminist Society the museum was full of poetry readings performances discourse excitement [Music] [Laughter] between women and men liberated motherhood yes not having to have babies [Music] I have a chance to work to bring other women um to Yale and to enhance a feminist Presence at Yale and to be the kind of person I am here there I felt the need to have a more total commitment to women and to work for more long-range goals and I also was beginning at the time to put out to the public the work that I had been doing a lesbian artists and to re-publicize myself as a lesbian Judy was having success in museums but others were taking the lessons of political activism directly to streets these windows be serious to deal with a shop at Bonwood teller I began a very long period of time of straddling to lives the feminist information and life that supported my growth as a woman and my community life which was within the Latino Community as I worked intently in the neighborhoods and they never really met concept of the mural was to bring a group of Youth together from different neighborhoods who'd had trouble with the police and have them try to accomplish something together that was greater than any one of them individually and so we attempted to paint the longest mural in the world but the idea was that we would paint the history of California and put particular emphasis on the part of history that had been left out in history books these kids are known for not getting along with each other so we didn't know what was going to happen it was an experiment and we think it worked Suzanne Lacy was trying to figure out how the media could come to the services of putting information to the public about rape the media surround at that point in time was all fear showing women how to retreat to hide the barricade defend around this manipulation of information on Slaughter basically sexual Slaughter of women and we wanted to interrupt that flow in the media with another image I am here for the 380 women in October 18th and November 29th [Music] I think that I really have learned and I'm gaining more confidence in is the potential of artists as Image Makers to really make a change in society in terms of the images that they project of women and that's as just as important as a political organization and the things that they make we were sitting over coffee in Venice looking at the newspaper and just said this is it we've had enough we have enough women around us we have other options we're going to organize and do something to show The Women of LA that they don't need to be afraid suddenly it was 1980. [Music] and it was as if time was sliding backwards rewinding history in the process the feminist Studio Workshop closed and the first cases of AIDS were reported the era was defeated in the Senate the planet's rage and disappear were background white noise to our own private apocalypse a subculture that was no longer content with remaining a footnote sought to become an implicit part of the cultural narrative in 1984 the Museum of Modern Art opened an exhibition called an international survey of painting and sculpture and in this exhibition there were 169 artists very few were women or people of color and we realized that we had so much more to go so the women's caucus for art called a demonstration in front of the museum I remember that Frida Kahlo and I the gorilla girl Frida Kahlo and I katakowitz went to this demonstration so we're walking around on a picket line and nobody paid any attention to it we had this idea to do a kind of political art that didn't just point to something and complain and say this is wrong we had an idea to try to twist issues around and use facts and humor and change people's minds about the issues this particular member misspelled gorilla as gorilla and so that was where the idea of the Mask came forward and here we are [Music] perfection [Music] [Music] other girls artists and critics Museum people writers were part of the fact that women were not being shown so we targeted them and we named names and that was an extraordinary thing not just generalized but specific names we gave report cards how many people in this Gallery are women we fingered one group after another we went after artists themselves successful male artists they've got to speak up about this we travel in the dark of night in the mid us and it could be everybody it could be the person next to you could be a gorilla girl so it's not clear who is and isn't and hopefully it will stay that way at the mid someone had to do it and we were the ones we made them through the posters accountable for how many women were in galleries how many women were in exhibitions how much money women were making and we did it through humor so that all of us could laugh the feminists of the 70s had been Earnest and breastfeeding and and it just didn't work you know the broad burning didn't actually affect social change it was so difficult to be female in the 60s and 70s to do feminist work was just the most profound leap of Courage I think the influence of the feminist movement on the art world and on culture was the most profound thing that happened in the last half of the 20th century if the collectors were really smart about it they would purchase females artwork because it's totally undervalued yeah it's a huge investment and remember that one poster we did where we named I don't know like 150 women artists that you could purchase for one male artist yeah and and I thought that was a good post that was a great post they're mostly business people I just surprised they haven't caught on to that yet tenants in the art world that we believed were in Violet proved to be just the prejudices of the people in power but the existing power structure was shifting the Whitney and contacted me I was the first woman they had hired except for Margaret McKellar the registrar the first woman since Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and certainly the first woman in any in a curatorial position came to the 60s had read you know all the writings of Bobby seal you know I was supposed to you know make a change and go into the belly of the Beast make an impact I want to change the power structures that create inequities in the first place curatorial work was where you really want to be in museums because you affect the collection which stands there's an interesting feminist story in this because in those days David Salinger was the president and he interviewed both me and James Monty and he asked questions that are illegal nowadays he wanted to know if I had a boyfriend if I intended to get married if what I thought about a family um really amazing stuff how old I was and at some point I just stopped him and I said oh okay let me tell you why you don't want a hire a woman you know first no man will ever be able to work for me secondly we know that women can't do budgets and third once a month I'll go crazy and nobody will be able to get near me and he actually laughed they hired us both but they hired me at two thousand dollars less a year which at that time was considerable so I went in to see my director and I said this is what's happening and you've got to change it and he said well you know the budget the budget the budget and I said the New York Times the New York Post The Daily News still got changed I feel like I'm in the witness protection program concealing my identity because I don't want to be whacked by the art Mafia do you think that the art Mafia really would punish someone if they found out that they were the ones who were putting out these statistics yes well I think actually any subversive voice is in danger of being punished I think that's true anywhere I remember when Susan stanberg interviewed me when the peace opened the San Francisco Museum and she said well Judy what are you going to do when the controversy starts and I go controversy what controversy I mean five thousand people came to the opening people were giving me necklaces and flowers and you know I mean it was just this incredible festive Gala celebration of women's achievement and you know my achievement and or achievement and I thought you know fantastic we really are in a moment in history where women can enter the culture we can be ourselves we can in fact bring our point of view into the world ha ha ha nobody was prepared for the ferocity of the assault on the dinner party not anybody associated with the dinner party and not me Museum after Museum backed out of exhibiting the dinner party on the floor of Congress people were speaking against this work of art that most of them had never seen her face till it bled you get a letter of reproach and now we have this pornographic art I mean three-dimensional ceramic art of 39 women's vaginal area their genitalia served up on plates that requires a whole room in order to display weird sexual art I'm a poet and I do have trouble with this because it's not art it is not art it's pornography pornographic or military weapons that look like phallic symbols capable of doing nothing but destroying human life on this planet you want to talk about pornography you want to talk about deadly art we deal with pornography every single day that's not the issue they're not going to display a mobile MX missile or a B-2 bomber they're going to feature a work that has 39 elaborate place settings depicting female vaginas I came to this body against the backdrop of the civil rights movement and people said challenge come here so that you can speak out look at this garbage art is a precious expression of the First Amendment to the Constitution for Congress to spend an hour and 27 minutes discussing the dinner party I mean when are they running the country 123 members voting in the negative and one member voting present the amendment is agreed to all men discuss the future of the dinner party not one woman spoke up man determined and decided that the dinner party was not going to enter history did I get fired I'm no idea and give me a straight answer either but I suspect it was maybe because I was more than just competent you know it doesn't matter it doesn't matter because although it was extremely painful because I was there eight for eight years and I loved the institution loved it it was hard that was hard but I got over it just got over it because I'm a refugee from the Nazis and because I came here and was adopted by this country and became naturalized a country which I had you know such admiration for here's a land that was really one of the only countries in the world where you could totally totally freely express yourself in every way and to see this kind of things being eroded and nibbled at and that these forces are really and truly trying to destroy that is to me just immensely frightening the kinds of systemic battle lines that were drawn were really clear at the time of Anna mendieta's death [Music] Anna mendieta felt her death from a 34th floor window her husband the minimalist sculptor Carl Andre was charged with second-degree murder some of the best known feminist art critics and feminist artists wouldn't come to her defense [Music] they were too connected to Carl Andre from the early days of minimalism to be willing to go against that male establishment that immediately closed ranks around him all of the male artists that put up the money for his very expensive defense attorney rauschenberg all the rest of them even the gorilla girls were so split by differences that they weren't even able to put out a [ __ ] poster in her defense that was a sad moment for what's happened Andre was acquitted there was a lot of activism both in the art world and certainly in the culture around the Anita Hill Clarence Thomas hearings and out of that grew the women's Action Coalition when there were protests going on around the downtown Guggenheim when that opened in New York with one woman artist represented when the Guggenheim opened its first exhibition in SoHo that included only one woman artist and Carl Andre outraged whack protesters stormed the museum and in a symbolic gesture placed photographs of mendieta over Andre's sculpture [Applause] yourself alive Marsha Tucker organized the bad girls exhibition in New York others followed in Los Angeles and London I was seeing a lot of work that was really funny and was about somehow subverting some of the the methods or some of the attitudes that created sexism she people hated that show it was amazing I have on my website I have a endless Scroll of all my bad reviews humor is the single most subversive weapon we have the reactions to the exhibition I organized at the UCLA Hammer Museum in 1996 which was called sexual politics Colin Judy Chicago's dinner party and feminist art history were deeply disturbing and upsetting a certain Coalition of Los Angeles art critics wrote These incredibly hostile reviews it also incited negativity on the part of older feminists living primarily in New York external frustrations mounted and triggered internal animosity when women were isolated from the rest of society and marginalized on account of being feminism this infighting started to take place I think it was Miriam Shapiro but it may have been Judy too I don't know started speaking very badly about I think it was Barbara Kruger or one of the more famous ones and I remember getting up and objecting publicly the damage that's inherent within an artwork they call it inherent Vice I think that these conflicts are a kind of inherent Vice that you all have no matter what because the playing field itself has never been level look at what Loa esteem carolie schneem and her Hannah Wilke were held by a lot of women artists like oh you shouldn't do that you shouldn't make a spectacle of yourself like that lot of us who survived those fights bloodied but you know relatively unscarred are kind of like the old CIA and KGB agents that get together for reunions who else knows what we're fighting over who else is interested in these issues that have really been consigned to a sort of historic scrap pile that people don't seem all that concerned about anymore the feminist art movement was always incredibly heterogeneous and richly conflicted and that's what made it the most important political movement in the art world the Contemporary period my students react against feminism and feminist art and they take up the worst of 1950s behavior of women I mean I I'm I go back to 19 in the 1950s and think of how we were raised and I see young girls mimicking that I do it's horrifying that term has become kind of a red herring that now gets brought out by Major institutions to kind of oh well now we've done our feminist show and we can move on I don't think feminism successfully changed the structures through which art is made sold displayed and written about I think for complex and maybe in some ways obvious reasons I think a lot of women just wanted to be included I think there's a fear within my generation that identifying with feminism is a limitation and not a foundation what really was limiting was the access to information about the values and philosophy that was implicit in this movement ideas introduced in the 70s were Amplified by younger artists of the 80s Cindy Sherman Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer were among the most important figures in the art world of the 80s and it's not an accident that they were there speaking truth to power wow you had these guys flinging broken dishes on their canvases some young artists experienced a transgenerational haunting as if a legacy was passed down to them in secret I made this pamphlet that's a challenge and a promise girl if you make a movie I prom and send it to me I promise I'll send you back your movie with nine other movies made by nine other women Shore was my professor and she looked at my work and she said to me have you ever heard of Anna mendieta or Hannah Wilkie or Carolee schnaaman and I hadn't and I went straight to the library and I couldn't find one thing on those women I had to ask myself why when I went to the library was there nothing there and so Mira ended up bringing me her catalogs and clippings from home and I looked at this work and I thought I'm making the work of the 70s to the kitchen I remember watching that dish I just been completely blown away by the critique the art I'm doing currently is very related to the feminist movement in terms of how I consider the body [Music] history is fragile it clings to the most obvious evidence that remains [Music] this film is patched together like a quilt from people I could access events that I heard about and it represents only a nano cell in the DNA of an international experience most of which is not included I know how much is left out of this film what questions are asked in determining histories perhaps more importantly what questions aren't asked some of the things that you're asking are the things that got left out the connection to the late 60s movements I think it's left out one of the things the film does is to open up a set of problems that the 1970s raised without solving them and I think that's one of the important parts of feminist practice is not to shut down the questions time is an active ingredient in the composition of any history [Music] one of the vestiges of Freedom that we all have as human beings is to choose our attitudes despite adversity [Music] to choose to refresh and rescript every circumstance into sustained and creative opportunities [Music] and the cusp of every potential disaster there was a reinvention and an absolute resolve to preserve an enduring future I began to shoot this film 40 years ago I've been waiting all this time for the right ending [Music] Marcia how long did it take you to accomplish your dream of opening the new Museum well over I mean over a weekend basically I mean no I I got fired in December um I packed up my stuff and I left just before New Year's weekend and I rented this little space in the Fine Arts building and then I opened the space open for business the day after New Year's I took the model for the museum from Consciousness raising groups Community groups I learned a lot from feminism over the weekend between December 1976 and January 1977 as she modestly says Marcia Tucker created the new Museum a still thriving exhibition space for contemporary art in New York foreign order one of the great successes was having the Hollywood women's political committee impress upon the Senate of the United States that even though the House of Representatives had decided to actually put forth a bill keeping the dinner party from being shown in Washington DC when this very powerful group of women let it be known to the Senators who they had supported for years that this was not to happen died right then and there in the Senate there was an incredible moment a moment that probably people will never really know about but nonetheless was proof to us how political it sometimes had to be in 1992 the women's Action Coalition was formed to mobilize and do activist Works around cultural issues and issues of parity within the art world so it was this kind of Full Circle moment of activism in 2006 Connie Butler organized an exhibition that opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles the exhibition has a title it's called whack art and the feminist Revolution many of the artists said you know it's going to be career suicide I'm not sure that the art world can absorb this much art by women this much really strong powerful socio-political art by women [Music] what's important about the wax show is that it's the beginning of rectification of a completely falsified history of that era which tried to reduce contain and fragment the production of women how do you feel about having this in the museum I thought I'd never see it here in my whole life these are my horns I grow them periodically for special events it's incredible it's an irreducible transformation of our history you know I'm thrilled I actually in confession I didn't think something you Norm with the exhibition would come of it which is one of the exciting things I intend to come back to this show probably another 10 times before I leave the country because so many hours of video and you know there's just always something else that needs to be looked at a little bit more when artists are battling for space in the cultural memory Omission or even worse eradication becomes a kind of murder I have been overwhelmed by the reaction to it the whack exhibition traveled to several cities and spawned hundreds of satellite exhibitions and reunions the Sackler Center for feminist art opened at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the feminist art project opened at Rutgers University [Music] this is what the timeline of this film looks like I realized that the timeline for this film is in fact my own timeline publishing articles about myself resulted in an exhibition and in 1975 I actually sold some work when the buyer learned that I was female he returned the work saying buying women artists was a bad investment I sold nothing for the next 17 years work accumulated and was stored under beds or in closets to preserve it I offered to donate these pieces plus 50 others to a local Museum they rejected it they said it wasn't art and that I didn't know my place and if I didn't take it back in three days they would destroy it 35 years later that work was appraised for nine thousand times the original sale price and it was that sale along with some enlightened philanthropists that enabled the completion of this film I trust that each successive generation will recreate itself women of the 70s worked very hard for something that I'm benefiting from that I feel like I have support that I'm part of a dialogue we still have the capacity to respond to our own context in making art that Relentless communication on a visual level is very powerful things have changed a lot I think we still have a lot of work to do a legacy is a gift to the Future the permanent manifestation of women's Community is very important to me I believe it but this last year in my career was the best at the age of 81. so if we suffer and make it into art sometimes that makes sense out of suffering and the pain becomes a work that possibly also gets us out of our own tragedy every woman's Fame every woman's success is all of our success we come together in this Garden for a day Your Time Is Gonna Come I think I hear it [Music] all of the hundreds of hours I've collected for this film will be accessible online there are no outtakes [Music] and on the raw War site future Generations will be able to add their stories to this evolving history [Music] your time [Music] [Music] thank you foreign [Music] [Music] thank you thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] you know a consult with other persons who changed a woman and then so we do too anyone can all you have to do is try spread your arms to reach the sky and you'll know the reason why anyone can fly [Music] ing