Lucid Gestures Digital Catalog by Vanessa Thill

LUCID GESTURES

An Exhibition of Barnard Alumnae

October 24 to November 17, 2014 McCagg Gallery, Diana Center 4th Floor Barnard College, New York Curated by Vanessa Thill and Eunice Yooni Kim for Barnard Collegeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 125th Anniversary

Contents

Vanessa Thill............. Introduction...............................................5 Kate Ryan................. Waikiki Screen............................................10 Eunice Kim................ Measures of Success.......................................11 Sarah Charlesworth........ Work, from Objects of Desire 4.5..........................14 Ashton Cooper............. The Problem of the Overlooked Female Artist: An Argument For Enlivening a Stale Model of Discussion....16 Frances Brent............. Now This Cowboy Is Very Sad...............................21 Mierle Laderman Ukeles.... Washing, Tracks, Maintenance: Outside.....................24 Chloe Wyma................ From Maintenance to Precarity: Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Christina Kelly, Sara Grace Powell........................28 Sara Grace Powell......... Untitled (Pure)...........................................32 Lizzy De Vita............. Untitled (Redheads).......................................34 Chris Kraus............... Excerpt from I Love Dick..................................37 Ali Rosa-Salas............ Look to Listen............................................40 Christina Kelly........... Excerpt from A Field Guide to Office Plants................42 Melanie Kress............. “Stop institutionalizing my life.”........................52 Concrete Utopia........... Excerpt from i am not a good enough feminist..............54 Julia Caston “Some people major in my day job.”: Musings on the Role of the Day Job in the Life of the Artist.............59 Anna Liang................ The Real World............................................62 Andrea Metz............... Fabricating Self-Representation...........................64 Marina Zurkow............. Mesocosm (Wink, Texas)....................................66 Ada Potter................ Ice Field #2..............................................74 Eunice Kim................ Conversation with Valerie Smith...........................78 Annabel Daou.............. for sale..................................................83 Erica Baum................ Day for Night.............................................88 Irma......................................................89 Lara Saget................ i can.....................................................90 Eunice Kim................ Conversation with Susan Bee...............................93 Annabel Daou.............. which side are you on?....................................98 Vanessa Thill............. Conversation with Carol Kino.............................101 Dahlia Elsayed............ Start of the Pre-Season..................................106 Margaret Lee.............. The World Is Not Your Oyster (Lemons and Lime Table).....109 Julia Wolkoff............. One Margaret Lee’s “The World Is Not Your Oyster”........110 Emily Weiner.............. You and I Are Disappearing...............................112 Louise McCagg............. Thousands of Years.......................................114 Daryl Seitchik............ WWW......................................................116 Natalie Bell.............. Untitled.................................................122 Biographies..............................................124. Acknowledgements.........................................135

Introduction Vanessa Thill Bobbing in the sand with its concrete buoys, a floating rectangle appeared in my dream. It was Kate Ryan’s Waikiki Screen, entirely grey, like an old war photograph, pitching tent or sailing out to sea. A past and future screen on a beach, with thin cables tethered to heavy chunks—the frame could swivel and square up with our frame: the edges of the photograph. Ryan has pulled back and to the side, giving us a view of the structure, becoming a metaphor for itself and how it exists. Ryan’s frame reminds me that no architecture is weightless, no being survives without networks of support. I am a graduate of 2013, and I’ve spent the past year trying to transition to a different system, perplexed at the idea of integrating creative production into a working life. At first I thought it would be easy. I got a great job working in a brand new gallery and I decided to rent a dedicated studio space. But while doing PR for commercial exhibitions and without anywhere to show my own work, I soon realized I wanted to create non-commercial exhibition opportunities for myself and other young artists. So I did a series of shows in a now defunct multi-purpose arts space and helped with a few pop-up shows. In May, the gallery closed, and my old friend and classmate Eunice Kim and I thought of investigating what other alumnae were doing in the arts, and how they got to the various impressive professional levels they had achieved. We began thinking more abstractly about methodology, the study of how things occur. Scientific models have been useful for shaping our discussions, partly as a way to distance ourselves from overly rhetorical art speak. The idea of the case study became a motivating concept for this exhibition because a language of concrete examples reveals human concerns and can indicate features of a larger landscape. I pictured zooming in and then stepping back, knowing that this project itself, bringing together disparate elements, is one small example in a multitude of even more heterogeneous practices. In an arena of such tremendous scale, focus is not just essential but practical. What we landed on in this experiment is an investigation of paradigms—models that we use to navigate expanses of the unknown and unknowable, ways to make sense of large impersonal forces. Science historian Thomas Kuhn initiated this meaning of paradigm when he referred to “universally recognized scientific achievements that, for a time, provide model problems and solutions for a community of practitioners.” His ideas caused controversy by asserting that the notion of scientific truth fluctuates and is defined by consensus rather than by pure objectivity. A paradigm literally refers to a set of exemplary scientific experiments, leading to Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 10. 1

the formation of shared preconceptions. These models of knowledge condition the future collection of evidence. In scientific as in cultural fields, evidence accumulates to create historical narratives structured by growing layers of presumptions. Paradigms become problematic when they are regarded as absolutes. The belief in women’s inferiority, for instance, is a false representation of reality on which much of the world’s organization is based. As female cultural producers, we may bump up against worldviews that obstruct us. For “well-integrated” members of a discipline or society, its paradigms are so convincing as to be considered crisp truth, obscuring any alternative imageries. But as was the case for the geocentric model, paradigms shift. A drastic perceptual change occurs when an alternative suddenly becomes visible. The world requires a major paradigm shift in its treatment of women, in the workplace, streets, home, creative spaces, media, and global humanitarian efforts. Feminism is often about doubt. It is the struggle to overcome persistent doubt in women’s abilities. I’m still trying to figure out where and how this fight is being waged. It is not a given that women are audible and credible in societies around the world, and this has devastating effects for women’s internal belief in themselves. Women are fighting on two fronts, as Rebecca Solnit writes in her essay “Men Explain Things to Me,” when they are “told that they are not reliable witnesses to their own lives, that the truth is not their property.”1 But they are the only reliable witnesses to their own lives, and truth is no one’s property. Our lives are our case studies, and our activities—our work—will be our research. After all, meaning is built up from the ground until it becomes bigger than the eye can see. We found an impetus in Chris Kraus’ lucid writing style of incisive observations drawn from her lived experience. “‘I want to own everything that happens to me now,’ I told you. ‘Because if the only material we have to work with in America is our own lives, shouldn’t we be making case studies?’”3 You’ll find an excerpt from Kraus’ book, I Love Dick. Kraus overturns the padded-room parameters of the personal. As Eileen Myles writes in her introduction, “I Love Dick boldly suggests that Chris Kraus’ unswervingly attempted and felt female life is a total work” and she went on living.4 The artworks in this exhibition can be seen as case studies in shifting paradigms. They are not simply the beautiful products of imaginative minds. These works challenge us. They challenge certainty about positionality and linear narrative, faith in signage and commodity, seeming coherence of photographic images and fixity of landscape, and the “appropriate” realms of women. Through their very existence, they provide examples of thoughtful creative work produced despite various odds. The goal of this project is recognition: of contingencies and contexts, of diverse experiences, and of women’s real accomplishments through hard work, starting from the common ground we have as artists and writers, and as Barnard graduates. Once you see that something can be done, suddenly everything opens up. As curator Chus Martinez writes, “the futuring of the self need[s] strategies and certain aesthetics, as well as ways to represent these, to make them visible.”5 This is where art becomes instrumental for instantiating the future, stroke by stroke.

Rebecca Solnit. “Men Explain Things to Me.” 2012. Chris Kraus, I Love Dick (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006), 155. 4 Eileen Myles, “What About Chris?” in I Love Dick (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006), 15. 5 Chus Martinez, “What is Art?” in Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating, ed. Jens Hoffman (Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2013), 49. 2 3

This exhibition is the product of many types of work. It may be long hours in the studio with a pencil or brush, a computer or camera. It may be physical scrubbing, in the case of Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Sara Grace Powell, creative research disguised as office work in the case of Christina Kelly, or devotion to an image like Lizzy DeVita’s redheads. A great deal of work was done on the part of writers who contributed thoughtful new texts for this volume. This show is organized with attention to the way that an insistence on specificity also sets into motion a dramatization of macro-level paradigms. Ryan’s photograph, for me an emblem of the show, indicates the fragility of the monolith and its hidden networks of support. The artists’ widely varying approaches to topics and materials have in common the determination to create and to interrogate their forms. Louise McCagg’s piece, Thousands of Years, maps different elements across a gridded field punctuated by gaps, lines of text, photo fragments and shrunken cast figures. There was no art department when she attended Barnard, but that did not stop her from learning heavy duty metal casting and sculpture fabrication. A strong-willed approach to materials and production techniques is also characteristic of Lara Saget’s sculpture. Her whitewashed train circles a bare track, lacking any markers of location or progress. The perpetual orbit of the train riffs on the ambivalence of hand production and technological progress, forming a smallscale metaphor of paradoxical perseverance. The loop is also central to Emily Weiner’s paintings. Her paintings of a couples’ gravestone and the wreath she wore at her sister’s wedding were created nearly a year apart, yet their composition is resolutely similar, creating a cyclical history that is both personal and allegorical. Erica Baum also challenges linear narrative in her Naked Eye series that looks in toward the spines of partially open books. It becomes apparent that the binding of a book is itself a paradigm, and the idea that the spine can hold together a multiplicity of knowledge in a singular order is exploded by Baum’s piercing view. Books and maps are often presumed to present data in a true and unmediated form. The way modern subjects navigate space is itself a kind of reading, a movement that has a rhythm. This is a primary concern of Dahlia Elsayed, poet and painter who plotted lyrical moments of her day across imagined continents in Start of the Pre-Season, with language that is simultaneously abstract and unerringly specific. Annabel Daou’s accumulation of language occurred over a fixed period of two days, during which she inscribed every imaginable thing that could be for sale. The first item on the block in this epic poem of commodities is “women,” setting a provocative tone for the maelstrom of things for sale that follow. Her other piece in this exhibition is another language-based experiment in which she asked people on the street “which side are you on?” The resulting audio records poignant moments of identification in downtown Manhattan during Occupy, amidst spatial-political upheaval. The question seems to presuppose a stark dichotomy yet the host of different answers reveals infinite positions. In her diptych called Work, Sarah Charlesworth also constructs a binary in order to break it. Formally resembling a photographic positive and negative, magic sits opposite of manual labor, emblemized by magazine clippings. Charlesworth’s artistic labor in creating the piece reflects the third type of work, itself becoming a commodity as an art object. Margaret Lee’s warped furniture collaboration with Michele Abeles derides phony home décor marketed to women. The World is Not Your Oyster (Lemons and Lime Table) falls in between sculpture and image, real and fake, hand-crafted and digitally manipulated. Ubiquitously kitschy fake fruit are realistically hand-rendered in plaster, disobediently domestic as they prop up a slanting tabletop that buckles under the image’s impossible weight. Beyond her studio practice, Lee directs the gallery, 47 Canal, which speaks to her ability to 7

skillfully maneuver different roles. Christina Kelly reflects on working life and the creative process in her self-reflexive Field Guide to Office Plants, a book that tells the story of a woman working in an office who becomes intrigued by the Sansevieria plant. Interwoven with the narrative are Kelly’s historical findings in the form of drawings and notes, research she worked on at her own office job. Another study of work and its societal ramifications comes in the form of Anna Liang’s audio diptych. Liang’s recorded fragments of herself performing superficial and stereotypically female conversation mimic the exaggerated style of a reality TV show. In contrast, male voices candidly expound on their opinions of privilege as Liang listens quietly. The layers of learned social behaviors heard here raise questions of class and aspirations for recognition, bringing the discussion of human concerns to a wider scope. Interrogating creative labor has proved important to many of the artists and writers in the exhibition. Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ performance series from 1973 may be familiar to Barnard alumnae from art history lectures: she mopped the steps of the Wadsworth Atheneum, scrubbed the floors, dusted the vitrines, locked and unlocked doors. On view in the gallery is a never-before exhibited image from Washing, Tracks, Maintenance: Outside, in which her husband and child can be seen in the background. Her performance of banal maintenance activities boldly demonstrates the structural connection between the public and private. She writes, “I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother. (Random order). I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also, (up to now separately) I ‘do’ Art. Now, I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art.”6 Sara Grace Powell’s video documents a performance inspired by Ukeles’ washing of the museum, taking this gesture directly to painting’s rarefied surface. Grounded by a highly skeptical approach to humanism, Powell set out to investigate the absurdity of purity in art through this performance of relentless scrubbing. Her installation makes use of the same canvas she was unable to keep eternally clean. The temporal heft of Lizzy DeVita’s drawings of a mysterious redheaded girl becomes apparent when they gather on the wall, bound together in space, their slight variations indicating the artist’s hours and hours of labor. Indeed this work is equally a performance and a series of drawings, the production of this image en masse maps the artist’s activities across time through dozens of not-quite-identical copies. Marina Zurkow takes experiential focus to an expanded field. Her temporal-spatial delimitation is one year in Wink, Texas, where an ever-growing sinkhole in the oilfields is depicted as a digitally simulated ecosystem. Mysterious grey steam rises from the water and HazMat-suited figures crawl around the rocks in this ever-recombining animated enclosure, a fast-forwarding apocalyptic world. Ada Potter’s Ice Field derives from a creative commons image of an iceberg, the quintessential symbol of anxiety. Here, environmental anxiety of rapid degradation is coupled with apprehension of the uncontrollable high-speed circulation of imagery. She confronts the viewer with interdiction by fragmenting the image. Her personal investment in this representation is made opaque—all that the viewer sees are intimate sections that halt symbolic meaning and necessitate a slower gaze. The texts contained in this catalog, with the exception of the Kraus excerpt and the interview between Melanie Kress and Joan Snitzer, were all generated specifically for

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, “Maintenance Art Manifesto,” 1969.

this show. It should come as no surprise that Barnard alumnae are strong writers, whether or not they pursue studio art, many are engaged in art writing and curating. We asked 10 writers to use first person perspective in their essays, and to think about paradigms or accepted notions that they confront in their lives, and what networks give them agency. Many of the writers used personal narratives to critically examine their own relationships to institutions of power. Without knowing it, the writers hit on very similar themes; taken as a whole, a strong argument is made, urging us to reconsider our notions of creative work and its implications for identity categories and corporeal lives. Chloe Wyma, Melanie Kress, Andrea Metz, and Julia Caston suggest contingencies and redefinitions of creative labor in their own lives and in social structures around them that produce value. Ashton Cooper critiques the way women artists are described in the media and urges the recognition of material realities that produce and reproduce inequality. Insightful observations about motherhood, working life, feminism, creative projects, and new definitions of success are peppered throughout this publication from many different points of view. We asked these artists and writers to confront their own structures and to consider their work as vastly important for each other as a community of practitioners. As Germaine Greer has said, “confrontation is political awareness.”7 My goal for this exhibition, and for all exhibitions I produce, is to create a meaningful encounter between individuals. I have been astounded by the talents and accomplishments of the women involved in this exhibition. It is all the more promising that their works and their ways of working— the specificities of their lives and practices—differ dramatically. So many inspiring examples demonstrate what I should have suspected all along: that there is no singular way to do things, that conviction and hard work give rise to possibilities in countless configurations.

Germaine Greer, The Madwoman’s Underclothes (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990), 28. 9

Kate Ryan Waikiki Screen, 2008 Photograph, 11 x 14 in Courtesy of the artist 10

Measures of Success Eunice Yooni Kim What would it mean to consider our work as case studies? By asking the artists and writers to be their own subject for their contributions to this show, we were asking them to consider the different variables (education, location, network, identity, etc.) that made their current practice possible. What did they consider a success or failure? What factors in their lives served as an operational bias, changing the potential of their entire body of work? The scientific method became a useful framework for understanding the phenomena in question, the lives and work of Barnard alumnae. My time at Barnard required that I familiarize myself with the scientific method. The Nine Ways of Knowing is the school’s flexible set of requirements for undergraduate coursework. Science is a Way of Knowing, and I retained the tenets of its method: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Research Hypothesis Method Observations Results and Discussion

Below, I lay out a bare understanding of the works in relation to one another and to the scientific method. Research Identify a problem or phenomena with specific attention to human concerns. In my interview with Valerie Smith, I learned that a core principle in her curatorial practice is a deep analysis of the exhibition site’s history. This attention to genealogy is operative in Christina Kelly’s A Field Guide to Office Plants. She chooses the Sansevieria, an office plant, and explores its multiple histories across time and space. In early October, Kelly and I went to the Barnard Greenhouse for advice on her installation. The greenhouse keeper had thought that the plant, native to Congo, was from the Caribbean due to its abundance in Puerto Rico. Kelly’s thorough research on the Sansevieria had not yielded its account as an invasive species. This new information will undoubtedly open up further avenues of investigation for Kelly; the discovery of histories is endless. Hypothesis A question that seeks a solution to the researched problem, often an if-then statement, a proposed explanation of a phenomenon. For example: If women have fewer opportunities for recognition, then they must rely upon other women to promote each other in a mutually beneficial manner. In Lara Saget’s i can, the toy train’s indefinite loop poses the question of progress. 11

It is an interesting metaphor for achievement: working tirelessly, but going nowhere. I see Saget’s work as related to Ashton Cooper’s essay on journalistic representations of women and to Susan Bee’s stance on art world discrimination. Both concepts reflect on the history of women who were and are “overlooked” despite longstanding and continuous production of work. Like the train, these women are often imagined to silently persevere in their practice without any destination in sight. However, this imagined model of work is not unique to the art world. Anna Liang’s The Real World is an audio diptych that has masculine and feminine approaches to success. In the masculine audio piece, a male voice declares that there is no meritocracy; he gives us the long-view on the struggle to be recognized by rejecting the premise that one can succeed through determination. In the female counterpart, we hear the sound-bites of a woman who is striving for class ascension through corporate cues, such as the purchase of a Chanel handbag. It is understood that these two narratives exist in the same sphere, but one forecloses the possibility of the other’s success. Another form of hypothesis in the show is the inquiry which reveals the conditions and environment of the question. Annabel Daou’s sound piece asks, “Which side are you on?,” a question perhaps rhetorical due to its ambiguity. Daou asked random people on the street to contribute to her piece, her studio only several blocks from Occupy Wall Street at its peak. The political answers she received reveal the spatial and temporal boundaries of the work. Method What is your practice, in the studio or in the workplace? Do you have any guiding principles? Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Sara Grace Powell and Lizzy De Vita set specific parameters and strenuously work through them. The impact on the human body is clear in Ukeles’ and Powell’s work as they clean their respective sites. De Vita’s Redheads are colorpencil drawings that she worked on for months, revealing a willed relentlessness. While indexical vigor is not apparent in Sarah Charlesworth’s Work, the diptych alludes to the difficult reality of creating. The juxtaposition of the word “ABRACADABRA” with a pile of tools suggests that an object does not magically appear, but requires production. Results and Observations What have been the reactions to your work? Give a detailed account of your subject and organize the information. In Marina Zurkow’s Mesocosm (Wink, Texas), she creates a digital simulation of an ecosystem that introduces new variables over the span of a year. She sets the parameters, steps away, and lets the viewer observe. Erica Baum’s photography similarly portrays the limits of her subject and works within “the constraints of the books as originally constructed.”1 Ada Potter used a photo of an iceberg in the creative commons, and has rendered the image in a variety of ways. She uses different printing methods, sculpture and fragments, forcing the viewer into an intimate relationship with something that is shared, yet unrelatable, and is the subject of a public dialogue on global warming. For these three artists, observation is the functioning mechanism. They implore the viewer to acknowledge the limiting conditions of a subject and to carefully watch what is revealed within those boundaries. Dahlia Elsayed’s Start of the Pre-Season uses markers that make her map legible, despite its unknown context. The red dots resemble the symbols on Google Maps that indicate 1

Cecilia Alemani, “Dog Ear Poems,” Mousse Magazine, February 2010, accessed October 1, 2014.

destination. Louise McCagg’s work also uses a form with which we are familiar: the grid. Whether it is an art historical understanding, or one that is derived from data analysis through spreadsheets, maps and grids have been ways to plot information in relation to others and decipher complex relationships. Conclusion Identify similarities in the data. Think about the factors that affect the results. What are the measures of success and failure? Emily Weiner’s practice recognizes the continuity of form and information, as seen in her paintings. She first painted the stone wreath, and later, painted the crown of flowers from her sister’s wedding. Upon realizing the similarity in form, she added another floral circle above the stone wreath to deliberately connect the two paintings. Making sense of our work is the same type of analysis that occurs when we are trying to make sense of data. Kate Ryan’s photograph offers us a form that, though sturdily built, is not apparently useful. There are special efforts to stabilize the frame on a sandy foundation. It is ready to serve a purpose, but the dwindled number of people on the beach indicates that the event has come and gone. Margaret Lee’s The World Is Not Your Oyster (Lemons and Lime Table) also plays with measures of success and failure, occupying the role of a side table. Its form is recognizable as a functional object, but expectations are collapsed when the viewer tries to apply utilitarian logic. Results may not support the hypothesis, like an object’s function may not correspond with its form. They may, however, lead to questions for further research and possibilities. Lucid Gestures as a Case Study It is critical to understand this show not as an exercise in demonstrating essential experience, but as charting common experience with Barnard as the limiting parameter. Each of the works, by artists and writers, were plotted on my kitchen wall and across Excel spreadsheets. Vanessa and I shifted our focus on variables, trying to make sense of all the work, as one often does when analyzing the results from an experiment. Lucid Gestures was born from a search for models of success and role models. Our research rendered an expansive network of Barnard alumnae and we set out to bridge conversations among generations. I have noticed that showcasing one’s peers is a tendency among Barnard women. 47 Canal, Margaret Lee’s project-space-turned-gallery, is similar to Melanie Kress’ Concrete Utopia. Lee and Kress started their projects to give their peers an opportunity to show their work. Susan Bee’s publication of M/E/A/N/I/N/G created a space for new dialogue about feminism and painting; this is similar to Emily Weiner’s artistrun-space Soloway and Julia Caston’s Art Lending Library in Minneapolis, where she is fostering an appreciation for art in her community. I knew in the beginning stages of Lucid Gestures that “success” would be a fraught term. We actively sought narratives that would counter the mythos of professional achievement which professes that success can be attained through tried and true means, or luck. We wanted to have discussions about human concerns in career trajectories. Many contributors have proven through their practice and other projects that there is no singular goal. Within a project, there are many energies involved: administration, a studio practice, institutional support, a community of like-minded people, the financial means to support one’s self, and established forums or space to showcase work. While some of these efforts of creative labor go unnoticed by the public, all of them demand observation and the constant recalibration of our measures of success. verso: Sarah Charlesworth, Work from Objects of Desire 4.5, 1988, Cibachrome print with lacquered wood frame, 42 x 62 in, Courtesy of Sarah Charlesworth estate and Maccarone gallery

The Problem of the Overlooked Female Artist: An Argument For Enlivening a Stale Model of Discussion Ashton Cooper Very recently I was told that a certain art magazine editor, who had edited the feminist critique out of a review I had written, “can only take so much feminism.” At the time, I was infuriated that someone who is hypothetically tasked with shaping the way art is discussed, would take such an explicit and condescending stance against gender equality. With art world professionals like him hoping that feminism would just go away, it feels necessary to be supportive of any museum exhibitions, gallery shows, market successes, or media attention given to women artists. However, even when it seems like we might be getting it right (4 out of 7 Tate solo exhibitions will go to women in 2015! The Hole devotes a show to “Future Feminism!” Tracey Emin’s My Bed sells for $4.3 million!), something is still amiss. As my first professional experience has been as a writer and editor for a company that owns two art magazines and an art-centric website, I can attest to the fact that art journalism is in no way immune from conventions that ostensibly champion women artists, but in fact perpetuate problematic narratives about them—tropes so prevalent, even I have found myself operating within them. In particular, I’m thinking of the widespread myth of the “overlooked,” “forgotten,” and/or “rediscovered” female artist. Of course, much of my mindset as regards women’s places in art history I owe to my time at Barnard—and specifically, to two experiences that irrevocably shaped the way I understand the discipline’s inherent power structures. The first was at the beginning of my sophomore year, nine months in as the Columbia Daily Spectator’s Art Editor, when I did an interview with the Guerrilla Girls.1 In my conversation with founding member Frida Kahlo (the Girls take pseudonymous names for anonymity), she taught me that the art world is not, nor has it ever been, a meritocracy. It seems rudimentary now, but realizing that the best artists do not simply rise to the top based on the high quality of their work—without any consideration, say, of their genitalia—was crucial to developing my critical stance toward art. The second was Rosalyn Deutsche’s “Feminism and Postmodernism,” a class that showed me the connection between images and the maintenance of sexual difference—how masculinism suppresses otherness and elevates the concept of the heroic alienated (or, “Genius Male”) artist, and how feminist artists have tried to produce different kinds of images as a challenge to Phallocentrism. I haven’t used the word seminal since. Yet, the myth of meritocracy is still widely perpetuated in writing and discussions

Ashton Cooper, “Guerrilla Girls speak on social injustice, radical art,” Columbia Daily Spectator, September 22, 2010, accessed August 15, 2014. 1

about art. When it comes to the everyday written materials we consume about artists (here I am thinking about my daily glut of press releases, artist profiles, articles, and promotional materials), again and again the social and political forces that marginalize women artists are ignored. To illustrate the fable of the Overlooked Female Artist, here is a small sampling of headlines from the past year: From The Guardian: “Marlow Moss: forgotten art maverick;”2 From The Independent: “The woman in black: Mira Schendel is finally bursting on to the British art scene;”3 From The Huffington Post: “10 Drawings By Female Artists Whom History Has Underestimated;”4 From The Wall Street Journal on Maria Lassnig: “Retrospective Is Part of Late-Career Resurgence for 94-Year-Old;”5 From W: “Ahead of her Time: Artist Sarah Charlesworth is experiencing something of a revival.”6 And the trend isn’t exclusive to artists. From The Daily Beast on a writer: “The Rediscovered Genius of Muriel Spark.”7 Whether on the occasion of a late career exhibition or a bump in sales, again and again I have seen an eerily similar story structure parroted: At long last, senior (or deceased) female artist gets the recognition she has deserved all along. Overlooked by the establishment for her entire life, she never stopped prodigiously toiling in obscurity and is finally being given her due. At first these recognitions might seem laudable, even a continuation of the efforts of the Women’s Movement to dig into history and pull out disregarded women who have achieved remarkable things. But after reading several of these stories, a troubling pattern starts to emerge: this type of article does not truly advocate for women artists, but rather belatedly elevates women or minorities to the canon, instead of questioning canonicity itself. Similar to Hollywood’s Strong Female Character (who, for all her kickass prowess, is not actually all that empowering—see: The Matrix’s Trinity), these at-long-last-glorified women artists are being vaunted as emblems of inclusion and steps toward gender equality, when, in fact, the stories that are being told about them are keeping our understanding Charles Darwent, “Marlow Moss: forgotten art maverick,” The Guardian, August 25, 2014, accessed August 15, 2014. 3 Holly Williams, “The woman in black: Mira Schendel is finally bursting on to the British art scene,” The Independent, August 31, 2013, accessed August 15, 2014. 4 Priscilla Frank, “10 Drawings By Female Artists Whom History Has Underestimated,” The Huffington Post, February 15, 2014, accessed August 15, 2014. 5 Mary M. Lane, “MoMA PS1 Shows ‘Body Awareness’ Artist Maria Lassnig: Retrospective Is Part of Late-Career Resurgence for 94-Year-Old,” The Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2014, accessed August 15, 2014. 6 Nancy MacDonnell, “Ahead of her Time,” W Magazine, April 28, 2014, accessed August 15, 2014. 7 Lucy Scholes, “The Rediscovered Genius of Muriel Spark,” The Daily Beast, July 29, 2014, accessed August 15, 2014. 2

of women artists firmly grounded in a safe and schematic narrative.8 Removing all blame from the (white, male) writers of history, these articles justify the delay of recognition as a matter of taste: their work just didn’t “catch on.” Take these excerpts from a Wall Street Journal profile of Louise Bourgeois from May of this year: She met American art critic Robert Goldwater in 1938. They married and moved to New York and had three sons. She continued her art studies and befriended Abstract Expressionists like Willem de Kooning and Barnett Newman. Like them, she was interested in making psychically charged art, but her sculptures didn’t catch on as quickly. After her husband died in 1973, […] she coped, as ever, by making art into the night. In 1980, Mr. Gorovoy said he was working in a gallery when he convinced her to let him exhibit some of her drawings. The show proved a hit and he became her assistant. Two years later, the Museum of Modern Art gave her a retrospective that amounted to her debut on the international art scene. She was 71.9 The rhetoric surrounding these “rediscovered” artists excludes too much about the specifics of their lives and the sociopolitical contexts that have perpetuated their exclusion—not simply from notoriety, but also from market success and a place in art education. Instead of acknowledging these forces, we often say women artists were too unorthodox for their times. “She refused to court trends in the art world, and weathered decades of rejection from the Establishment,” reads an August 2014 Telegraph obituary of Maria Lassnig.10 “Ultimately, she would be rewarded for sticking to her guns.” Moreover, all too often the stories of women’s lives are forced into the age-old paradigm of the Genius Male Artist. When the mainstream art industry (here I am thinking of the MoMAs, Gagosians, and Tates of the world) finally does bestow its interest upon the Overlooked Female Artist, it forces her to fit into a tired story. The “genius” artist has toiled away for years until she is finally found or discovered by the boys’ club. Unsurprisingly, there is often no discussion of the forces of exclusion faced by the female artist. Here’s another familiar story from a March 2014 Guardian article on Phyllida Barlow: She’s taught everyone from Martin Creed to Rachel Whiteread, but it’s only now, at 70, that Barlow is getting her dues as an artist. Barlow, who turns 70 this week, has spent her adult life making sculpture, enjoying her greatest success by far over the last 10 years. She went on to the Slade until 1966, and then began teaching, and having children;

There are several great articles on the subject. I would suggest reading Sophia McDougall’s “I hate Strong Female Characters,” Tasha Robinson’s “We’re losing all our Strong Female Characters to Trinity Syndrome,” Carina Chocano’s “Tough, Cold, Terse, Taciturn and Prone to Not Saying Goodbye When They Hang Up the Phone,” and Mallory Ortberg’s “A Day In the Life of an Empowered Female Heroine” as a primer. 9 Kelly Crow, “An Early Peek Inside Louise Bourgeois’s Townhouse,” The Wall Street Journal, May 29, 2014, accessed August 15, 2014. 10 “Maria Lassnig: ‘Blokes are advised to bring a helmet,’” The Telegraph, August 31, 2014, accessed August 15, 2014. 8

she and Peake have five in all. […] In those days, she was working in total isolation. Since she started being represented by the gallery Hauser & Wirth a few years ago, her work has been sold. […] Barlow has weathered the fallow times, to be celebrated as one of the country’s greatest sculptors, her career built on resilience, curiosity and commitment.11 Not only does this narrative ignore that women were frequently raising children during their professional prime (hence a reason for “working in total isolation”), but it also fails to take into account that an artist must have some level of economic security in order to work in obscurity for years. Even an exclusionary narrative manages to only admit mostly white, upper- and middle-class women. When it comes to perpetuating these stories, the official line put out by institutions and the articles written by the media go hand in hand. In just one example of a great many, here’s MoMA on their upcoming Sturtevant retrospective: As a woman making versions of the work of better-known male artists, she has passed almost unnoticed through the hierarchies of mid-century modernism and postmodernism, at once absent from these histories while nevertheless articulating their structures. This exhibition is the first comprehensive survey in America of Sturtevant’s 50-year career, and the only institutional presentation of her work organized in the United States since her solo show at the Everson Museum of Art in 1973.12 What infuriates me most about this press release is that MoMA at once shirks any culpability for allowing such an artist to pass “almost unnoticed” at the same time that the museum pats itself on the back for having the insight to give her a long overdue exhibition. Nor does MoMA address how an avant-garde-hungry market has seeped into museum programming and forced institutions to go back and find some women to glorify. A quick perusal of the materials for the Tate’s 2015 programming, which was praised by the Art Newspaper for putting “women artists first and foremost,”13 shows the same pitfalls. According to museum materials, Barbara Hepworth’s retrospective will emphasize her “overlooked prominence in the international art world”14 and an Agnes Martin exhibition will “cover the full breadth of Martin’s practice, reasserting her position as a key figure in the traditionally male-dominated fields of 1950s and 1960s abstraction.”15 My intention here is not to call out museums or simplistic writing, but to point out the ways in which institutions and publications — both major and minor — are guilty of perpetuating a schematic and damaging narrative about the lives of women artists. These paradigms of understanding are stale caricatures of these artists’ lives. Part of the issue is the way that art journalism works. A hook must quickly be established Kira Cochrane, “Phyllida Barlow: ‘Just going to art school doesn’t make you famous,’” The Guardian, March 30, 2014, accessed August 15, 2014. 12 “Sturtevant: Double Trouble.” Museum of Modern Art, accessed August 15, 2014, http://www.moma. org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1497. 13 Gareth Harris, “Tate will put women artists first and foremost,” The Art Newspaper, July 31, 2014, accessed August 15, 2014. 14 “Barbara Hepworth.” The Tate, accessed August 15, 2014, http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/ tate-britain/exhibition/barbara-hepworth. 15 “Agnes Martin.” The Tate, accessed August 15, 2014. http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/ exhibition/agnes-martin. 11

to make a story seem timely, and often with women artists, the supposed “breakthrough” moment is the easiest one to reach for. One of the major consequences of this discovery narrative, however, is that it essentializes an artist’s practice and oversimplifies her achievements. We don’t look at the ways that an artist’s work changed over time or the ways in which she influenced her better-known peers. Major early milestones like exhibitions or acquisitions are left out of the story in order to foreground the triumphal moment of recognition, which leads to a monolithic understanding of what women’s artmaking looks like. Did you know that Judy Chicago was part of the landmark minimalism show “Primary Structures” before she made The Dinner Party? That, before her MoMA retrospective, Isa Genzken was in the 1982 Venice Biennale? That Sarah Charlesworth was in the 1985 Whitney Biennial before she was included in the 2014 edition? It takes decades to become an overnight success. It is essential that we complicate these stories. Writers, along with collectors, dealers, and curators, are all part of an ecosystem that is constantly forming and unforming art history. So instead of focusing on the moment when these women were finally “found”—and by extension, on the institution that was gracious enough to do so—I propose we talk more about that period where she was toiling away in obscurity. What was she doing then? Where was she showing? Who was she in community with? How did her practice change? What forces of exclusion did she face? Instead of the tired story where a masculinist force deigns to discover, find, or recognize female artists, what if we tried to also understand the material realities of these women’s lives? Ultimately, we would not be so dependent on the recognition of the art world’s skewed mainstream if we used these histories as case studies to define different kinds of success.

I’d like to thank Allie Rickard, Julia Halperin, Vanessa Thill, and Anneliese Cooper, whose witty and insightful edits shaped and sharpened this essay.

Now This Cowboy Is Very Sad Frances Brent When I was pregnant with my third child, a friend of mine, a writer, asked how I felt about going back to the deep freeze for another ten years. I wish I could say I had a good answer but it was too complicated. My privileged education and even the texts I used in the classroom took for granted the assumption underlying that snarky question, that one could either take care of a family or pursue a writing life. As a lecturer in English, I dutifully taught Orwell’s essays. Every time I came to “Why I Write,” I wanted to take a scissors to his unapologetic description of the special rights of artists: The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class.1 I hated the dichotomy he presented; his designation of the writer as a self-centered egoist was self-mocking but it got my goat. Like Mierle Ladereman Ukeles I had become a mother out of love and choice and then found myself bewildered by the detour—the tedious, repetitive, exhausting, unpaid, and stigmatized work. Ukeles called it “maintenance work” and adapted it brilliantly to “Maintenance Art.” In my mind I thought of it as “facilitating”; washing, dusting, and organizing made it possible for other things to happen for other people. On good days, I was a “facilitator” of play. But play has always interested me. Because it’s children’s work, it’s also the bedrock of art. When I look back to my own childhood, I think with gratitude to that long continuum of play that held everything together that was off-balance. As a facilitator of my children’s play, I was a witness to the transformative power of their imagination. Sometimes, as a witness, I provided the opportunity for them to become aware of what they were making—when they put on plays, for instance. Sometimes I was simply in the background. Occasionally, I took the liberty of documenting what I thought of as the “found objects” of their play or their art and I would type out what they were saying or collect what they made. If I was an eavesdropper, I was also a preservationist. As with all documents, ownership is complicated. I’ll present the following document as a sample. These are the exact words of my son, three-and-a-half years old, talking to his plastic toys. I’ve only added line-breaks.

George Orwell, “Why I Write,” 1946. 21

Now this cowboy is very sad. “I’m not really sad,” Just the cowboy is crying, “Mmm mmm mmm, I’m so happy!” Wait a minute, are you an alligator? “Yes.” I don’t think so. “Good, you are.” Oh, look, I’ll slam you from a raindrop. I’ll slay you from a raindrop. Look what I have in my mouth! Now, I was your... “You can’t kill me, I’m your bad king. Don’t you fight!” Shshshshsh! I’ve got it! I’ve got it! Wait there! “Ooooh, looks like a very hard place!” Why do you think so? It’s not a I’ll carry this guy, Here, because he was... Sssss! So I’m angry, And this, you see, This is my, yess, yess, it is! This is my... Hey, okay, I’ll carry you! Carry you where? Okay, I’ll be a... Okay, now... No, now, (in whispers) tch tch tch tch tch tch tch tch bow bow bow bos ts ts ts ts Are you my bad guy? Pwew pwew pwew pwew pwew pwew pwew pwew Ffff fff pwew pwew pwew pwew pwew Swew swew Ha ha ha So, oh, There, “I’m stuck!” Heh heh Here-Hey, What’s that? 22

Ssss ahahah how how how how how how how (like a coyote) Woooo how how how howwwww how how how how how how how how how how Howhww howhowwwwwww howwwww howwww wwwooooo How howww how how howwwwoooo howooo howooo Ho ho ho ho ho ho Are you ready for the last trick? You’re a baby! “I’m a baby?” You’re a baby! Everyone, I tell some very very very... Shshshsh shshshsh Weh Weh Oh, yes, “I have a diaper on...” “I don’t have a diaper on...” Yes, you do! When I took the text out of its folder, I was struck by the truthful, logical and illogical landscape of raw imagination, its directness and energy. As these things go, it also took me back to a day twenty years ago when I was a young mother sitting at a writing table. I remember my son was playing in an alcove in the same room. The baby, his sister, was sleeping downstairs. This was a moment of freedom for both of us. I had no idea what I was going to do with my time that afternoon. It was serendipity that I wrote down the dialogue I was over-hearing, the many voices of a little boy, cowboy, alligator, bad king, coyote, and baby. I could just as easily have chosen to be alone in my own head. In the revisiting, I feel humbled by the honesty of the imperative as well as the protean and astonishing resolution: “I have a diaper on...”“I don’t have a diaper on...” Yes, you do! Yes, there’s something bittersweet in catching this glimpse of that “beatific” little boy who vanished because he’s grown up, knowing that both of us will spend the rest of our lives trying to return to that moment because that’s what art strives for. If I was a facilitator for a fragile artistic insight, I was also a midwife for something that could have existed without me but wouldn’t exist today if I hadn’t paid attention.

verso: Mierle Laderman Ukeles Washing, Tracks, Maintenance: Outside Performance at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT July 22, 1973 Photograph, 16 x 20 in Courtesy of the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NY above and right: accompanying documents Courtesy of the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NY

From Maintenance to Precarity: Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Christina Kelly, Sara Grace Powell Chloe Wyma At my graduation from Barnard in 2011, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg delivered a commencement address focusing on women in the workplace. In her speech, Sandberg spoke of the pressures of juggling a high power job and conventional family life, the need to close the ambition gap between the sexes, and the ways in which women self-sabotage their careers through timidity, fear, and a refusal to “think big.” These were talking points she would later commit to print in her best-selling self-help bible, Lean In. It might seem strange to use Sandberg’s unapologetically corporate feminism as a point of departure for my essay. Her invocation of “work/life balance” refers to that ever-diminishing equilibrium between the parts of life that are colonized by economic production and those that are not. This dichotomy is central to my essay, albeit in a way she might not have anticipated. How does artistic labor—understood as both serious and ludic, sold as a commodity but not compensated with a wage—stand between the two poles of work and life? In Lucid Gestures, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Christina Kelly, and Sara Grace Powell present alternatives to the turbo-charged “rocket ship” Sandberg describes: work that attempts to demystify artistic labor, work that critiques its own conditions of production, work that is deliberately nonproductive. Leveraging her privileged position as an artist, Ukeles brackets the tedious and uncreative task of cleaning as artwork in her 1973 performance, Washing, Tracks, Maintenance: Outside. She mops and scrubs the steps and exterior plaza of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, bringing stereotypically female domestic chores onto the steps of the museum. This strategic reframing or rebranding is familiar in the logic of the Duchampian readymade. But rather than interrogate the privileged status of the artwork or art object, Ukeles targets the vocational activity and material practice of artistic work, which remains propped up as a beau idéal of professional agency, creative autonomy, and an emancipatory foil to alienated labor. In an elegant economy of gestures, Ukeles shows that the putative freedom of artistic work is contingent upon the economically and socially undervalued labor of workers who maintain the bourgeois art museum. In her “Maintenance Art Manifesto,” Ukeles divides labor into the gendered categories of Development and Maintenance. The former is associated with entrepreneurial innovation, avant-garde provocation, and “pure individual creation” of male geniuses; the latter with the degraded and feminized provinces of custodial support, conservation, and housework. In contrast to the imaginative and exciting realm of Development, she writes that Maintenance “is a drag; it takes all the fucking time (lit.) The mind boggles and chafes at the boredom. The culture confers lousy status on maintenance jobs = minimum wages, housewives = no pay.”1 28

In her text, Ukeles crafts a strategic identification between the underpaid labor of custodians and the unwaged labor of wives and mothers. This association between janitorial and domestic labor is expressed in Washing, Tracks, Maintenance: Outside, where Ukeles’ scrubbing and mopping signifies both the invisible labor of the nighttime custodian and the housewife’s “labors of love.” Ukeles’ double critique of minimum wage work and wageless housework presciently anticipates arguments of feminist Marxist scholar Silvia Federici. Federici postulates that the expropriation of women’s unwaged labor is an invisible yet fundamental condition of the reproduction of capitalism. “Housework,” she wrote, “is already money for Capital… Capital has made and makes money out of our cooking, smiling, fucking.”2 Writing in 1975, Federici’s focus was a traditional division of labor that, for many members of the liberal metropolitan middle-class, was already being dismantled under a permissive, sexually liberated new capitalism, which aimed to assimilate men and women, though not equally, into the workforce. Indeed, Federici’s critique of labor conjures visions of the disaffected Friedanian housewife, a cultural specter that might seem dated and irrelevant to the concerns of many female professionals working in the culture and media industries today. Christina Kelly’s artist book, A Field Guide to Office Plants, takes place in this technocratic professionalized milieu. Whereas Ukeles scrubbed floors, Kelly’s protagonist—a middle manager at Valudated Core Data Partners—scrubs data. She steals company time from her monotonous day job to create a field guide to office plants. Her irreverent and fascinating guide acts as a record of its own creation, linking the rise of the American office plant to the colonization of Africa and the ascendency of twentieth century capitalism. For Kelly’s first-person narrator, art is quiet revolt against the cubiclebound tedium of post-industrial office work, while concealed under an interface of seamless productivity and uninterrupted workflow. With a fluent command of administrative tech jargon, she writes, “I kept shared databases open in my internet browser so as to easily toggle between our databases and Sansevieria websites. At a moment’s notice I could cover my monitor entirely by maximizing a reserve of minimized documents. I concealed my research under the cover of streamlined data, flexible approved processes, and archived Committee transmittals. The multi-tasked browser kept up appearances. I successfully gave the impression of being very busy.”3 Whereas Ukeles shows us how the privileged category of art defines itself against the denigrated activity of maintenance, Kelly’s project maintains the possibility of art’s subversive agency, not as a motor of social change, but as a vestige of critical negativity. It’s her field guide’s autonomy, she suggests, and therefore its special identity as “a project of no measurable or accountable worth,” that makes art incompatible with and dangerous to network capitalism and its fetishes—algorithms, analytics, big data, and monetizable “products.” Sara Grace Powell’s video Untitled (Pure) documents a performance inspired by Ukeles’ Washing, Tracks. Naked and planted on her hands and knees, Powell compulsively scrubs the surface of a white monochrome canvas for a vexing eight minutes, performing a kind of slavish adulation of the art object. Segments of the artist’s naked body and seafoam green hair intermittently fall into the frame. Powell’s uncomfortable, erotically charged update on Ukeles’ “maintenance art” could be read as a belated joke on Modernist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, “Maintenance Art Manifesto,” 1969. Silvia Federici, “Wages Against Housework,” (1975), reprinted in Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, (PM Press, 2012) 19. 3 Christina Kelly, A Field Guide to Office Plants, 2014. 1 2

medium specificity. But what’s more relevant is how Untitled (Pure) brings Ukeles’ feminist critique of invisible labor to bear on the contemporary art world. Whereas Ukeles intervened in the putative autonomy of the museum by acting out the alienated labor of the janitor or housewife, Powell, drawing a formal analogy between washing and painting, suggests that artistic labor itself is predicated on the self-exploitation and downward mobility of the so-called creative class. The extraction of unwaged and insecure labor is a precondition for the maintenance and reproduction of art world inequality. Just as the naturalization of cooking, cleaning, breeding, and childrearing in the heterosexual nuclear family masks the domestic exploitation of women, the discourse of “creativity” obfuscates the immiseration of a new class of contingently employed culture workers, a nouveau poor some economists now call the precariat. The uncompensated or poorly paid work of interns, freelancers, and self-exploiting volunteers greases the wheels of a byzantine machine that produces symbolic value and cultural capital for a minority of corporate philanthropists and wealthy collectors. While no shortage of ink has been spilled on gender inequality and precarious labor in the art world, these two critiques have yet to be brought together in a rigorous way. Are female artists and culture workers particularly burdened by precarious labor compared to their male colleagues? Is precarity a feminist issue? The incomplete but grim data available suggests as much. This year, a count by artist Micol Hebron found that 70% percent of artists represented by contemporary art galleries are male. At the same time, 3 out of every 4 unpaid interns are women, according to a 2010 study by Intern Bridge. It’s not unreasonable to assume that in the art world, where male artists, curators, professors, and gallerists accumulate at the top of the pyramid, and women are consigned to supportive, administrative and—as Ukeles would put it—“maintenance” roles, the division of labor would fall along similarly gendered lines. In recent years, belle-lettrist curmudgeons and tenured radicals alike have criticized contemporary art as a fig leaf for corporate malfeasance, a trophy for the 1%, an engine of gentrification, an echo chamber of liberal consensus, a bastard child of a failed leftist project, and an apologia for casual work. Nevertheless, despite art’s instrumentalization as soft power in networks of global capitalism, artistic practice remains underwritten by the promise of self-expression and bohemian nonconformity. Situating creative labor against the backdrop of the maintenance tasks of cleaning and administration, Ukeles, Kelly, and Powell foreground the distinct character of artistic labor, one that is both autonomous and contingent, implicated in current power structures, while also functioning symbolically as an emblem of creativity and self determination. For today’s female “creatives,” the new frontier of feminist struggle may not be in the kitchen or even the boardroom, but the MacBook—the lightweight, portable site where our professional, intellectual, social, libidinal energies accumulate as form. One might say that Walter Benjamin’s revolutionary figure of collective authorship, the author-asproducer, has been perversely realized under neoliberalism as the author-as-contentproducer, her precarious and unequally compensated labor abstracted in the myths of creativity, flexibility, and self-determination. Without explicitly addressing this new elastic and accelerated world of work (“Put your foot on that gas pedal and keep it there,” Sandberg tells us), Lucid Gestures leans in towards new critiques of female labor, whether creative or custodial. 30

verso: Sara Grace Powell Untitled (Pure), 2014 Video installation, 8:09 mins Courtesy of the artist

verso and above: Lizzy De Vita Untitled (Redheads), 2009-present Colored pencil on paper, ongoing performance Courtesy of the artist

Excerpt from I Love Dick Chris Kraus Hundreds of little colored Christmas lights were draped around the cactus plants outside your house. And there you were: sitting by the picture window in the living room, grading papers or pretending to, deep in thought. You got up and at the door we kissed hello kind of brusquely without lingering. The last time I was at your house for dinner back in January you kissed me when my husband, Mick and Rachel and the two men from the Getty were seven feet away. That kiss radiated such intensity I stumbled past you through the door. Later on that night in January, when all the other guests had gone and the three of us were drinking vodka, Sylvère and I confessed to twelve years of fidelity. And suddenly that concept seemed so high-school and absurd we started laughing. “Ah but what,” Sylvère said, “is fidelity?” That night the Some Girls album cover with the chicks in pointy bras was still propped up against your wall. I’d spent eleven weeks deliberating whether your display of it was camp or real and decided I agreed with Kierkegaard, that the sign will always triumph through the screen of an ironic signifier. But tonight you were expecting me alone. I looked around the living room and saw the Some Girls album cover missing. Were you responding to my second letter, questioning your taste? After the kiss, you invited me to sit down in the living room. Right away we started drinking wine. After half a glass I told you how I’d left my husband. “Hmmm,” you said compassionately, “I could’ve seen it coming.” And then I wanted you to understand the reasons. “It’s like last night,” I said, “I met Sylvère in New York for a French department dinner. Régis Debray, the guest of honor, never showed and everyone was kind of tense and uneasy. I was bored and spacing out but Sylvère thought I was suffering from a linguistic disability. He took my hand and said in English to the Beckett specialist Tom Bishop, ‘Chris is an avid reader.’ I mean, C’MON. Does Denis Hollier say this about Rosalind Krauss? I may have no credentials or career but I’m way too old to be an academic groupie.” You sympathized and said, “Well, I guess now the game is over.” How could I make you understand the letters were the realest thing I’d ever done? By calling it a game you were negating all my feelings. Even if this love for you could never be returned I wanted recognition. And so I started ranting on about Guatemala. The femme seduction trip seemed so corrupt and I was clueless how to do it. The only way of reaching you apart from fucking was through ideas and words. 37

So I started trying to legitimize the “game” by telling you my thoughts about Case Studies. I was using Henry Frundt’s book about the Guatemalan Coca-Cola strike as a model. “Cause don’t you see?” I said. “It’s more a project than a game. I meant every word I wrote you in those letters. But at the same time I started seeing it as a chance to finally learn something about romance, infatuation. Because you reminded me of so many people I’d loved back in New Zealand. Don’t you think it’s possible to do something and simultaneously study it? If the project had a name it’d be I Love Dick: A Case Study.” “Oh,” you said, not too enthusiastically. “Look,” I said. “I started having this idea when I read Frundt’s book after getting back from Guatemala. He’s a sociologist specializing in Third World agribusiness. Frundt’s a structural Marxist—instead of ranting on about imperialism and injustice he wants to find the reasons. And reasons aren’t global. So Frundt researched every aspect of the Guatemalan Coca-Cola strike during the 1970s and 80s.” “He recorded everything. The only way to understand the large is through the small. It’s like American first-person fiction.” You were listening, eyes moving up and down between me and your wine glass on the table. I saw what I was saying register across your face…cryptically, ambiguously, shifting between curiosity and incredulity. Your face was like the faces of lawyers in the topless bars when I started telling Buddhist fairy tales with my legs spread wide across the table. Some Strange Scene. Were they amused? Were they assessing their capacity for cruelty? Your eyes were slightly crinkled, your fingers wrapped around the glass. All this encouraged me to continue. (Dear Dick, I always thought that both of us became political for the same reason. Reading constantly and wanting something else so fiercely that you want it for the world. God I’m such a Pollyanna. Perhaps enthusiasm’s the only thing I have to offer you.) “The more particular the information, the more likely it will be a paradigm. The CocaCola strike’s a paradigm for the relationship between multinational franchises and host governments. And since Guatemala is so small and all the facets of its history can be studied, it’s a paradigm for many Third World countries. If we can understand what happened there, we can get a sense of everything. And don’t you think the most important question is, How does evil happen? “At the height of the Coca-Cola strike in 1982, the army killed all the leaders of the strike and their families. They killed the lawyers too, Guatemalan and American. The one they missed—her name was Marta Torres—they found her teenage daughter on a city street, disappeared and blinded her.” Did it cross my mind that torture was not a sexy topic of conversation for this, our first, our only date? No, never. “Cause don’t you see? By recording every single memo, phone call, letter, meeting that took place around the strike, Frundt describes how casually terror happens. If Mary Fleming hadn’t sold her Coca-Cola franchise to John Trotter, an ultra-rightist friend of Bush, the strike might not have happened. All acts of genocidal horror may be nauseatingly similar but they arise through singularity.” I still hadn’t gotten round to explaining what Guatemalan genocide had to do with the 180 pages of love letters that I’d written with my husband and then given you, like a timebomb or a cesspool or a manuscript. But I would, I would. I felt like we were facing 38

each other from the edges of a very dark and scary crater. Truth and difficulty. Truth and sex. I was talking, you were listening. You were witnessing me become this crazy and cerebral girl, the kind of girl that you and your entire generation vilified. But doesn’t witnessing contain complicity? “You think too much,” is what they always said when their curiosity ran out. “I want to own everything that happens to me now.” I told you. “Because if the only material we have to work with in America is our own lives, shouldn’t we be making case studies?”

Chris Kraus, I Love Dick, (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) 1997), 152-155. 39

Look to Listen Ali Rosa-Salas Walking through Barnard Hall has always caused a confrontation with myself, whether or not I wanted it. Four years ago, a full-length mirror sparkled clean and bright on each landing of the five-story building. While rushing up the stairs to class, I’d sometimes catch a quick reflection of myself and let the unprocessed blur fade into nothingness. Oftentimes, the confrontation was intentional. I’d walk up to the mirror on the second floor landing and take inventory of myself before darting to the next destination. Was my hair in place? Was my skirt riding up in the back? I wasn’t the only one who was checking in with my reflection. Some students (like myself) would routinely make a casual-cool walk to the mirror, only to stop and look for two seconds and stride away as if they hadn’t just engaged in a self versus self staredown. I’ve seen others (like myself) who would rush past, only to rewind their steps to glare at the glinting pane. It is mirror etiquette to wait your turn to be seen, standing in a single-file line as you await the elevator. Though I shamelessly participated in this voyeurism, it bothered me that by virtue of the mirrors’ placement in the hallowed Barnard Hall, I was obliged—or rather, required— to see and care about how I looked. It is only now, almost two years since graduation, that my memories of the mirrors are offset by questions of respectability and gender performance. Beyond simple objects, mirrors are emblematic of our own visuality. The mirrored panes were mechanisms of supervision that oriented me and my classmates for habitual inspection, a daily ritual I learned to adopt as a woman navigating public space. I am part of a generations-long line of Barnard women, who have gazed at their reflections for affirmation and critique. I learned that in 1960, Columbia University president Grayson Kirk filed a complaint to Barnard’s administration about Barnard students’ “inappropriate” wardrobe choices of bermuda shorts and pants. Due to this complaint, Barnard enacted a dress code that required students to wear loose pants and shorts that fell no more than two inches above the knee. Additionally, Barnard students wearing these articles of clothing were to wear a long coat when entering Columbia’s campus.1 Given these events, it is no wonder that the mirrors were strategically hung on every landing and adjacent to each exit. Though seemingly benign and devoid of history, I discovered that these mirrors had stories to tell, as objects that pass through time. When I read Christina Kelly’s A Field Guide to Office Plants, I thought of the ways her investigative methodology could be applied to my own experiences as a Barnard student. Through a scrapbook combination of illustrations, short stories, and archival documents, 1

“Ban on Shorts Threatens Classic Barnard Couture,” New York Times, April 28, 1960.

Kelly’s 80-page manual tells the story of a recent college graduate whose mundane data entry job leads her to wander into the depths of the internet. One ordinarily boring day, she notices a neglected but stunning plant in the corner of the office and decides to do some research. What the protagonist learns about the potted specimen leads her to a complex web of histories dating back to the early twentieth century Belgian colonization of the Congo. One hyperlink after another maps the haunting and exploitative journey of the seemingly benign Sansevieria laurentii. It was extracted from the Congo by Belgian botanists for inclusion in the Belgian Botanic Garden, along with hundreds of other “exotic” flora and fauna stolen from Africa during European conquest. From her cushioned office chair, the main character uncovers the brutal treatment of native peoples and their natural resources for the sake of exhibition and industrialization abroad. Ironically enough, the Sansevieria’s rise to popularity occurred during the Great Depression, during which it was marketed as a “luck plant,” an association that has led to the plant’s popularity as a verdant addition to offices and homes. An image of a twentieth century Congo whip in the Brooklyn Museum’s collection is a sobering encounter with the torture inflicted upon those who cultivated the Sansevieria. She tacks a note on top of the photo that reads “not on view” to remind readers of the way object histories are often rendered inaccessible in the tradition of fine art. Silence about objects and their origins is perpetuated in favor of aesthetics alone. Also included in the guide is a reproduction of Henri Rousseau’s The Dream, a fantastical lush landscape that features the gold and green Sansevieria in the corner of the painting. Kelly writes that Rousseau spent a lot of time in Paris’ Jardin des Plantes, where the brutal spoils of the Belgian Congo inquisitions were cultivated and displayed for the adoring public. The book’s snapshots of Sansevierias inconspicuously placed in shop windows and whimsical diagrams of plants in their office habitats are haunting in their “normalcy.” The images remind readers how pervasive are the tragedies of colonialism in our daily visual landscape. Kelly’s approach to the history of a seemingly neutral object reveals hidden narratives that impact us and our daily environments in very real, micro-aggressive ways. By empowering yourself with the awareness of these histories, you gain a greater sense of your surroundings and your position as a subject interacting with institutional histories. In Barnard Hall’s visual landscape, the mirrors remain as ubiquitous as clocks or potted plants. As aesthetic contributions to our living spaces, plants are bursts of color that acquaint the mundanity of the indoors with the exotic beauty of the outdoors. Like mirrors, plants help dictate purpose and place. They remind us of the notion of care and responsibility in appearances. If Barnard Hall’s mirrors could speak, they would share stories of Barnard women years before my time who triple-checked that they were “in code.” The mirrors would echo questions and confirmations of one’s worth as a woman and an intellectual. They would recite countless mantras of self-doubt and self-affirmation. Christina Kelly reminds us that objects don’t talk unless we listen.

Excerpt from A Field Guide to Office Plants Christina Kelly

At my desk I took some some basic precautions. My cubicle had only three walls. I was continually exposed to curious colleagues who wanted drop by and gossip as well as two management officers who were interested in keeping tabs on my productivity. I developed a simple system to minimize detection while I followed a daisy chain of links from reference books to historical botanical drawings to fascinating horticulture debate to early 20th century accounts of the Congo Free State, all freely available on the internet. I feigned a profound concern with the tedious business of conforming a backlog of action requests to the organizationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s upgraded systems. I kept shared databases open in my internet browser so as to easily toggle between our databases and Sansevieria websites. At a momentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s notice I could cover my monitor entirely by maximizing a reserve of minimized documents. I concealed my research under the cover of streamlined data, flexible approved processes, and archived Committee transmittals. The multi-tasked browser kept up appearances. I successfully gave the impression of being very busy. I exaggerated the need to inflate and deflate the pillows around my back. Sometimes when the Executive Assistant approached I inflated the cushion under my butt which raised my head just above the cubicle glass and said hello. This caused my colleague in the cubicle next to me to stifle a laugh which turned into a coughing fit. He was coming down with the mysterious office malady. Against company policy I got out of my chair frequently. Away from my desk I walked quickly with focus as if I had gotten a call from IT asking me to go to the server room to help with network emergency. I never made eye contact. I did the minimum required for my job while I pieced together the story of the the Sansevieria laurentii, a plant so common as to go unnoticed.

“Stop institutionalizing my life.” Melanie Kress I have known my best friend for over fifteen years, and since the day we met, she has been doling out the kind of tough love that can only come from the person who knows you best. But of all the truth-telling reprimands she has offered over the years, there is one in particular that has stuck in my mind as the most piercing directive I have ever received. Her statement arrived on a breeze of mild, passing annoyance that pierced the core of everything I had been blindly driving toward at full tilt, ever since I could remember. The precise situation I can’t recall, especially as I was knocked so swiftly off my feet by her remark, but I was proposing either to start a film club in her living room, or even more likely to turn her house—which was later nicknamed the Rainbow Inn and was renowned for its fantastical costume parties—into a well-documented life-as-performance/ performance-as-life artwork. In any case, I was rattling on, proposing to formalize the contents and happenings of her living room under the haughty name of Art, and she cut me off at the quick — “Stop institutionalizing my life.” Fast forward about two years, and I have since graduated from Barnard, moved to Philadelphia, become an incompetent bartender, then a competent bartender, then a fired bartender. I moved back to New York through a string of storied sublets and unamusingly incompatible job interviews (both me to them and them to me). I am sitting at a picnic table in the backyard of the Levee with my brilliant and bubbly friend, Rosie DuPont, having just experienced the utter victory of signing an apartment lease. We were both vaguely employed—I cannot remember exactly what Rosie was doing at the time, but I do remember us having a rotating and overlapping cast of employers during the course of our year living together. I was bartending again, this time at an unremarkable restaurant bar on the interminably hip Upper West Side. I don’t know exactly where the idea came from, aside from the fact that I previously organized shows during the two years before I’d left New York, and itched to get back to it, but I announced to Rosie, “Let’s start a project space in the apartment.” And probably something else along the lines of, “the apartment’s big enough, we’re not working for anyone else yet, and we know lots of brilliant people who need a platform for their work.” In other words, we don’t have jobs, let’s do it ourselves. And after a good deal of carousing, convincing, and thrilled squealing, she said yes. Fast forward again to about six months into what had become the project space, Concrete Utopia, and I found myself in Brooklyn City Hall at the apex of my relationship with the space. Upon the recommendation of an incredibly generous mentor who gave us choice advice 52

on how to get the space off the ground, I decided to apply for a DBA (“Doing Business As”) certificate, which would mean that I—Melanie Carolyn Kress—could do business under the name of Concrete Utopia, thus fusing us together as one legal entity. I remember so vividly bouncing out of City Hall with my signed DBA certificate as if I had just validated the informal civil union I’d been living under so passionately until that point. It was a literal marriage to my work, my practice, my externalized self that was not only a literal “we” of me and the collaborators and participants Rosie and I reeled in, but also an abstract “we” of the creative entity I wasn’t necessarily ready to be on my own. I felt freed from the paralysis of creating work surrounded by the pressures, standards, and speeds of New York City. I felt able to create personally, but as a “we” rather than as an “I.” Now, on bad days I attribute this externalization, this formal “we-ing” of myself to a lack of courage, to a fear of presenting myself to the world as an artist. I do wonder to what extent this fear plays into the common criticism of women not taking enough credit for their own accomplishments. But I also wonder the extent to which my supposed need to be a single artist also supports a masculine, individualist model of the genius artist. For the moment, however, I am more curious about the strange urge to create an externalized collective self than about my own fluctuating insecurity. We extrapolate and extend ourselves into the formalized entities we call institutions, organizations, and businesses, to be able to maneuver within the legal and financial structures that have outgrown the scale of the individual being. Some of us live in less formalized worlds, but still interact with these out-sized entities. Others of us live in micro-worlds wherein individuals are barely recognized without their institutional shells, suffocated by their smallness among these abstracted giants. But beyond the formalized groups we understand as institutions, what does it mean to build an anonymity larger than a pseudonym, seeking out ways to treat myself as a “we”? What is this desire to extrapolate, to function beyond and outside of ourselves? Is it a protective shell? Is it my own insecurity at my perceived inadequacy as a single being? Is it a vehicle required only by the financial and legal structures of capitalism that have overgrown their human-scale beginnings, or is it something else, something we see in mythic or deified rulers, in nation states, in something as simple as a pseudonym? We find ourselves a group that develops an identity only from the outside looking in, in others’ categorization through difference. How do we go from this identity to starting as a single being and extending a fabricated group identity outwards? I now work for an organization, rather than as one, and I don’t think about these questions nearly as often, nor do I wonder about my organization’s founders building a 501(c)3 out of any reason other than absolute financial and legal necessity. Which makes me wonder further—perhaps this act of building a collective persona is itself a creative act, a playfulness with identity that leads to an increased fluidity for the actual person. Perhaps it is taking these aforementioned legal and financial structures as the medium themselves, a jungle gym to be swung from with imaginative aplomb.

Excerpt from i am not a good enough feminist A Conversation with Joan Snitzer Concrete Utopia Joan Snitzer is an artist and the director of the Visual Arts program at Barnard College. She has served as an advisor to many of the Concrete Utopia staff, including Melanie Kress and Kate Ryan. Concrete Utopia: So, we’d like to start by talking about the title of our project, i am not a good enough feminist. Do you identify with the title? If so, when and where have you had the feeling of not being a good enough feminist? Snitzer: Certainly there have been periods in my life where I wanted to put politics and my own female identity to rest. I have a tendency to over saturate my mind and body with information, and at times, I just want to do something else, or think about something else. These periods of rest and contrast provide the space for new information and growth. When I’ve extended myself enormously in one way, I feel an internal impulse that moves me to think in other directions. This impulse is useful for creative thinking. Creative thinking is useful in serving feminism. Many of the ideas in early feminism were constructive and helpful in my artistic life. There were also activities that I wanted to explore through my life that were outside of that political arena. I did give the feminist identity a rest at certain times and wondered if I was “not a good enough feminist.” I have now come to understand that as a focused and engaged person I can be a strong woman. That is being good enough. 54

CU: There is this question of being marginalized for being a feminist, or alternatively being marginalized for refusing to identify as a feminist. Do you feel like you’ve criss-crossed on both sides of this idea? That you’ve chosen to identify your work as feminist, and then when you put it to a rest like you said, you have been marginalized for not actively engaging feminism? JS: This is an interesting question because I find that negotiating how one’s politics are represented in one’s work can be interpreted in the public eye differently than it is in the personal eye. Many artists want to say that they are making work, and they want to say that they are also women, but to say that, you know, “I make feminist art” implies a certain kind of 70s protest or political work. If that is not the way that you are wired up to make work, then it’s insincere. So it already sets up a difficult situation, because the first thing that a woman artist or any artist has to do is have a sincere commitment to their work. You can’t just apply some politics to it and say, this is good. CU: So, where do you situate the politics in relationship to your work and how you identify as a woman, as a feminist, as an artist, as a politician? Do the politics have to be in the work? If you consider yourself to be a feminist, will it come out in the work, or do you have to frame the work as feminist?

JS: I think that it’s in the vision, and I mean that in a literal, figurative, and emotional sense. My work as a woman is in my direct line of vision and also in my peripheral vision. I believe that one who is conscious and has a political consciousness, in words and ideas, also will translate that sense into the visual realm as an artist. How does that belief demonstrate itself in the visual? That’s not always obvious, because there are many claims in the visual arts of feminist work that in face could be interpreted or admired for very different readings. Something that started out as a feminist act or statement can be publically valued for many ideals even those with antifeminist social appeal. CU: And there’s that politicisation, and that can be done by the artist, or the people who are trying to sell it or... JS: Or through interpretation, yes. So that’s the peripheral vision. We could name several artists whose work was sincere in its political intentions, when through a network of unprecedented art market beliefs — buyers, collectors, gallerists — a very different kind of product is represented in the public and economic realm. Can an artist stop making or exhibiting work because it is being acquired for the wrong reasons? That’s a very difficult position. Every art movement in history that began as protest or a position outside of the mainstream is faced with this problem: how will the work be received, collected and viewed in public? Will the reception of the work change in the future? The art market is currently favoring the idea of young, physically attractive, sexual females. The impulses of many women to take ownership of their bodies and gender, as political and personal statements, are at risk of being reduced to social entertainment. The fashionable idea of feminist art is frequently equated with playful or coquettish art.

There can be a disconnection between what the creator was actually making and the motives of exhibitions and sales. My eyes are always open.What is the intention of this work, and how is it seen? CU: I think this leads into a major question that I have about the recent exhibitions such as elles@centrepompidou, Wack!, MoMA’s Modern Women, these massive, very highly promoted women’s shows and publications at these major institutions that continue to be criticized for not showing enough women. To me it feels like, “Look, look, look, it’s okay, we’re showing women. Look at this amazing, beautiful show with all these women in it.” And then they can kind of do that and then go back to what they were doing. How do you feel about these kind of exhibitions and organizations in relation to the politics we are talking about? It’s often argued that this is a necessary step in moving forward women in representation in the art world and these large institutions. Or do you think that’s something we can now bypass? JS: That’s quite difficult to answer. All the shows that you mention are wonderful to see, even if they are very uneven. There is a problem with museums mounting them as separatist women’s shows. I agree with you, they become token demonstrations of inclusion and the autonomy of intentions become shadowed in tokenism. What’s interesting about the women’s show of the last few years is recognizing that there’s been so many of them. Museums are sensitive to their admissions counts. These shows obviously are bringing large numbers and have a mass popularity, or they wouldn’t exist or exist so frequently. I am encouraged by their popularity, but does being popular alone affect social change? I’m not sure. CU: Where is the drive coming from, do you think? Are there particular organizations that are pushing it? I don’t think that Guerilla Girls is that much more active or effective today than they were twenty 55

years ago. JS: My opinion would be that there is some justification from admissions tickets alone. I think that more people, more families, families that have created daughters, families that are more informed about gender and other issues of equality, are participating in museum activities. So I think that museums are sensitive to the fact that their audiences have changed. That’s probably a good thing, but it has to continue and become part of the museum experience and not a novelty. CU: To kind of jump topics, this question almost seems wholly redundant talking to you, but how does your feminism affect your role as an educator? I know that in so many ways it embodies.. and if that’s the answer, then that’s great. JS: I was a student, luckily, at a period when feminism had also changed things for women artists. I remember my experiences as a young woman, how it felt to be accepted by groups of smart and productive women. It was inspiring meeting strong women working together to create work that reflected their lives and experiences. I attended art school at the time when collectives, like A.I.R., were being formed to exhibit and promote the work of feminist art. I use my own personal development during an historical time for women and extended it to my students. Their politics are different from the time when I was a student, but their need to be seen and understood remains the same. I’ve always taken an open approach to art-making. I’ve never proposed that students should make political art, or that women should make feminist art. I’ve always been fascinated in seeing the uniqueness of each student. Feminist art is a natural consequence of creating strong and sensitive work. The subject does not have to be political. 56

CU: What you were talking about, coming of age at a certain time - who were your role models then? You keep mentioning these organizations, and it seems like they acted as a whole as this really lucky role model you had in front of you, and opportunity. JS: Art schools in the mid-70s began to include some courses on feminism. I started to read things about the history of sexuality and articles by art historians, Linda Nochlin’s “Why Have There Been No Great Female Artists” and Lucy Lippard’s “From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art”. I began to explore the galleries in Soho. The day that I walked in through the front door of A.I.R. Gallery, the first women’s collective art gallery in the country, I volunteered as an intern. I just wanted to move in. I literally wanted to move into A.I.R.

Feminist art is a natural consequence of creating strong and sensitive work. The subject does not have to be political. That same day I discovered A.I.R., I had come from a painting class where I started to paint an abstract painting. The male professor informed me that women make representational work and men do abstract work, which was also intellectual work. He instructed me to go back to painting the figure. I was really discouraged. However I put the easels and stools around me in a circle and told this professor that he was not welcome in my studio. It’s a funny story now. I couldn’t have created that story or made that protective circle around me if I hadn’t been exposed to women who were working politically. I would not have had that special, brave resistance to an absurd inequity, had I not had the support from other women.

The first woman artist that truly inspired me and changed the way that I saw the world was Nancy Spero. She was an amazing woman in many, many ways, as an activist, a feminist, and a mentor to women worldwide. She welcomed young women into the gallery and into her studio. She enthusiastically listened to their views and aspirations. Nancy was also a wife and a mother. She advocated feminism through her professional activities, through her unconventional but functioning domestic life and through her own art production. Nancy was a “good enough feminist.” However, she also had doubts throughout her own life about what a good feminist was.

to have an illusion of being independent. Their support is in place and effective most often when needed.

The male professor informed me that women make representational work and men do abstract work. I told this professor that he was not welcome in my studio.

Do we still call it community? Can we call it another word? The concept will remain the same. If women form a community, they are viewed as isolated. If men participate in community building or organizational activities, they’re viewed as very smart and leaders. There’s just a difference in the way women’s groups are viewed and there remains some bias in what that meaning is in terms of productive activities.

CU: You always stress this idea of a community and network that I’ve come to absolutely believe in. But there is a critique that I’m interested in: the idea that women require a community structure to be able to get anywhere. This idea that men can be independent and do it on their own, and women need these familial structures and communities. Or is it just that men have communities and networks that are so ingrained in society that we can’t even see them?

CU: You often talk about the need for a new vocabulary in feminism, and it’s something that I’ve internalized to a certain extent. This project is “i am not a good enough feminist” and it’s coming from men, and then it’s branched out to so many people who are 23, 24, 22, who are all grappling with the same idea. So the question is, what kind of contrast and conflict have you seen between how different generations read the word feminism, and where they think its activism lies and is necessary? And if you could talk a little more about your ideas for a changed vocabulary for feminism.

JS: Men often have the appearance that they’re acting on their own, and that they’re very strong and independent. These are male values. I think the reality is they are part of a community, and they’ve always been part of a community. Whether we see it as a men’s club or a community, they support each other and it is often unspoken. Their support system has been there for so long that they can afford

Women seek community, form clubs, and this trait is often seen as a flaw. From the inclination to share emotional connections to the resourcefulness of exchanged childcare, a community that provides security and freedom is value second to independence and solitary achievements. I think that the word “community” connotes sewing circles and quilting bees, and not “worldly” thinking, activities or participation. The word is often misunderstood. Communities also produce social capital.

JS: I think that our example just a minute ago of this term “community” having a sort of semiotic history, being loaded with associations. When you say “community,” you think of enhanced domestic family life. It is really important to be 57

domestic, but domestic itself has a connotation of not being really brave and innovative and moving forward. Or, is even moving foward important? Is the concept of success something we must progress toward? So, these terms already are loaded with male and femaleness, and male and femaleness value, so yes, I think certain words can be reinvented or at least have new meanings. But I am seeing the word “community” now being used in male groups, and somehow if a male uses them, they’re being practical, and if a female group formed, the group is isolationist. So, for me, the descriptive word is important. How can women take ownership of our own projects, needs, desires, impulses, remain true to themselves, and communicating? Is it important to have a new vocabulary to describe the objectives in terms that can be defined clearly? Or the alternative, to be misrepresented, old-fashioned? Or alone? CU: I think that might be it, unless you want to attack this question: you deal with all the young people that are coming through the ranks JS: Not all of them, but a lot of good ones... CU: A colleague of mine has said that being an activist involves being disapproved of. That’s something that we associate with being a good enough feminist, because we’ve seen all of these women who went through being absolutely disapproved of from all sides. Have you seen that strength coming out in women you teach today? Are they willing to be disapproved of in order to move things forward?

herself as a feminist and identifying her work as what it is. Because identifying yourself as a feminist in so many ways - I mean, one my favorite quotes that I heard at Columbia was, “Oh, that’s so sweet, you’re another Barnard girl who likes art.” As you well know, that’s not the easiest thing to move forward in. So I think it’s one thing to be a woman making art, and it’s another thing to be making art that’s not going to go over very well. JS: So, that’s not disapproval. That’s perhaps opposition, or lack of critical reception. And to move out of that paradigm does often mean that one is either against public taste or butting against some kind of conflict. Now that conflict, or opposition, historically has always been good for creating new forms of art. The critical part of it is, one can’t do it in complete isolation or it becomes impossible. We have a lot of romantic stories about isolation of artists, but the reality is that behind every great new movement or new invention, there is a group offering critical and informed support. It may not be the mainstream, but it has to be there somewhere and generated by someone that you respect, who is listening to you and can comment, advise, and critique. The support from your grandmother who thinks everything you make is wonderful is not enough. I’m thinking about another group of likeminded people, with an understanding of the current social environment. A group providing discourse and the skills to make changes is what will move women forward. Women have had community centers, but they haven’t always had support in the world and rigorous critical exchange.

JS: I’m not sure what you mean by disapproved of. Define how they are being disapproved of and who is disapproving them?

CU: Except here.

CU: I mean, in terms of a woman who is going to make the work she wants to make, without being coquettish, and identifying

CU: That’s what you get.

JS: Right, except here. People say, “Oh why would you want to go to a woman’s college?” Because...

JS: You get it.

“Some people major in my day job”: Musings on the role of the day job in the life of the artist Julia Caston I have quit four jobs in the two years since I graduated college, and each time felt great. Each time I was leaving a shitty food service job for a progressively less shitty food service job. At a certain point, I realized the futility of trying to find a job “in the arts,” because even low paying jobs in museums are so competitive that at least half of the staff in the coat check have master’s degrees. However, several important and interesting things happened within those two years. I continue to create art in the absence of a formal structure. I learned not to conflate my day job with my art practice. Crucially, I learned that there is a difference between one’s occupation and one’s vocation. I should note that I come from a very low-income background and am the first person in my immediate family to obtain a bachelor’s degree. So, when I was initially rejected after interviews at three grocery stores and four coffee shops, I felt that not even graduating from Barnard could break the cycle of poverty. I finally was hired full-time, a year after graduating, as the office manager of a fantastic environmental nonprofit. Though I believe in the mission of the organization, have great co-workers, and receive decent pay, being an office manager is irritating. I would rather be working for myself than for someone else. I believe the essence of a creative vocation is the need to own one’s labor. This often feels arrogant, especially as this type of assertion is in direct opposition to how women are socialized to produce rather than to create. For myself, my first effort in this direction was small but necessary. After graduating, I made a pointed effort to describe my profession as “artist” when meeting new people, or even when talking to my dental hygienist. Before that, I would just name whatever my day job was at the time. This was difficult, and I was angry at my initial feeling of “posing” as someone who I supposedly was not, in part because so much of career success is measured by monetary gains. For some reason, there seems to be very little critical discussion of the role of the day job in the life of the artist, even though this is a reality for an overwhelming majority. This silence might be because most artists see their day job as an unfortunate reality of creative labor, and discount the influence of their mundane livelihood after they go home to do their “real work.” The artist’s day job, as a concept, truly affects how we view our own creative labor. The most immediate effect I see in artists around me is that they are too quick and willing to work for free and not value their artistic production, as they implicitly accept that this is not what they are paid for. I am not exempt from this behavior. A telling sign of this accepted imbalance is that for all the nonprofit programs which exist for bringing art to the public as well as underserved populations, there are many fewer organizations specifically designed to serve artists. While the first category is important and laudable, it is not until we support each other 59

and convince lawmakers and the public of the importance of nurturing artists, that a real change will be seen in the potential of creative labor as a viable livelihood. The other day, I was having lunch with my coworkers, and several of them were remarking that what they had studied in school has nothing to do with their current jobs. I certainly did not major in human resources, which is something that my job entails. I piped up, stating that I use my major in Art History and Visual Art every day, though not necessarily between the hours of nine and five. I really mean this, and in retrospect my education at Barnard seems increasingly invaluable. This is where the idea of occupation versus vocation truly takes hold. The incredible freedom of having studied art is that I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have to be formally employed in a specific position to put my education to use. While this could be said about almost any liberal arts major, it is particularly true of art because communities of artists thrive on working outside of established boundaries. In this context, the ability to claim ownership of oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s creative labor is the fulfillment of a powerful education.

verso: Anna Liang The Real World, 2014 Audio diptych Courtesy of the artist

Fabricating Self-Representation Andrea Metz As a recent post-grad, there are overwhelming numbers of potential choices to make. Some of these potential choices will be realized, others discarded. The choices I make and then share with the public will largely determine how I am perceived. They inform my public persona, which is simplistic and often founded on half-truths and misconceptions. The post-grad experience, as such, is filled with the problem of self-representation. Here, the critical aspect is what I choose not to share with others, what parts of myself I choose to de-emphasize, and vice versa. Self-representation necessitates a reduction of the intricacies of the individual, for a representation is just that, a representation (and reduction) of something that cannot be easily understood or digested. Feminist artists and writers have historically examined questions of representation and identity. In his now famous 1979 essay entitled “Pictures”, Douglas Crimp discusses how postmodern artists (examples used by Crimp include Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, and Jack Goldstein) use “processes of quotation, excerptation, framing, and staging that… necessitate uncovering strata of representation. Needless to say, we are not in search of sources of origins, but of structures of signification: underneath each picture there is always another picture.”1 These past efforts sought to question and deconstruct dominant strategies of representation using the artistic processes Crimp discusses. Unlike modernism’s formalist approach, the “Pictures” artists, notably including Sarah Charlesworth, uncovered the complexly constructed “structures of signification” that exist beneath a seemingly forthright image. Her piece in this exhibition, entitled Work, does just that. She described her Objects of Desire series as taking a “deconstructive approach to visual language, confronting a given world and trying to discover its architecture, its formal and political nature.”2 Images cut from magazines become emblematic of opposing types of work, seeming to present the viewer with two choices for identification within the image. How we associate ourselves with images and thereby depict ourselves is akin to her creative act of selecting these objects of desire. What if, using Crimp’s understanding of signification and representation, we began to view self-representation in itself as creative labor? Self-representation, like representation, is not a straightforward sign of intrinsic or innate qualities. What we aspire to, what we choose to present to the world, the things we do to become or remain “types” of people (that do yoga, that are artsy, that are bankers and lawyers) are indicative of our desires and societal positions. Fostering a conscious awareness of our own production of the self will promote a better understanding of paradigms and dominant discourses that influence this production. This process is creative because, 1 2

Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October 8, Spring 1979, 74-88. Betsy Sussler, “Artists in Conversation: Sarah Charlesworth”. BOMB Magazine 30, Winter 1990.

as with the production of any narrative, we are forced to make choices, to highlight certain favorable or desirable aspects of ourselves over others that we consider less desirable. We create a dominant narrative of the self that privileges some things and discounts others. For women in particular, self-fashioning is constantly influenced by conscious or unconscious paradigmatic pressures. In her piece, The Real World, Anna Liang is heard, saying, “OH no no no no no…I didn’t do it just to get into med school” and “Yes! I bought myself a Chanel bag…but I can’t afford anything else,” deftly highlighting how our choices and actions create a persona that is at once made up of inward aspirations of the ideal self and outward interpretations of sets of easily recognizable qualities. Of course, like making visual art, fabricating the self can never be completely under the control of the creator; outsiders will understand and interpret sets of facts, images, and sensory experiences in unexpected ways. That said, self-representation is a dynamic and creative labor, one that confronts self-identified artists and non-artists alike.

following spreads: Marina Zurkow, Mesocosm (Wink, Texas), 2012 Custom software-driven hand-drawn animation, 146-hour cycle (24-minute day, 146-hour year) Courtesy bitforms gallery, New York

left and previous: Ada Potter Ice Field #2, 2014 Platinum palladium print fragment, 1 x 1 in Courtesy of the artist

A Conversation with Valerie Smith Eunice Kim Eunice Kim: When I was doing research on your past projects, many of the articles frame Artists Space as your first curatorial position. Valerie Smith: It actually wasn’t the first time I curated a show. Through the art world, I met a number of artists and one of them was Robert Longo, who invited me to curate a show at Hallwalls, which is an alternative space in Buffalo, New York and the sister institution of Artists Space. Robert had gone to SUNY Buffalo and with Cindy Sherman, Michael Zwack, Charlie Clough Diane Bertolo, Nancy Dwyer and other young students they started showing on the walls outside of their studios that then became a nonprofit gallery. Early on they did exchanges with Artists Space and when all of them came down to New York to live and work, they stayed connected with Hallwalls and Artists Space. I met Robert when I did an article for Arts Magazine on a show that Robert did. He thought that I should curate a show, so he facilitated it. It was really more a collaboration with a lot of friends and some of his young assistants, but he wanted someone else’s name attached to it. Buffalo was my first freelance curatorial venture. But my first proper curatorial position was at Artists Space. A boyfriend at the time, an artist and highly respected critic, who wrote for Artforum and was in part responsible for defining the Pictures Generation, as well as, participating in it as an artist, recommended me for the 78

position. But, I had to fight for that job in a funny way. Artists Space consisted of a very small team of almost all women and one guy, who was the registrar and head preparator. The director, Linda Scherer, felt that they lacked men on the team. Either she was forthright with me about this, or I heard it through the grapevine and was warned. In any case, at some point during the interview, it became obvious that they wanted to hire a guy, so I somehow mustered the wherewithal to challenge this in my interview. I said, “You’re probably looking for a guy because you want good distribution in your team.” I said, “Isn’t that a sexist position?” or something like that. The director, who is now an old friend, may have been surprised. I think it affected her so she hired me. I was completely green. I didn’t have, with the exception of the show I curated with Robert, any experience. I had just graduated from Barnard and I was beginning to write. Even when I was at Barnard, I was writing little reviews in Arts Magazine and Flash Art. I had been recommended by Brian O’Doherty to work at Artforum. It was just at that moment that I got the job at Artists Space, and Ingrid Sischy, their editor-in-chief, told me it would be a conflict of interest. Of course, today wearing several hats would not be an issue. You can curate, write and paint at the same time!

My salary was $9,000 a year. My rent was $125 a month on Ludlow Street and East Broadway. It was a great job. I really learnt my craft there. I quickly knew all the artists in New York, at least the emerging artists, because that was the mandate of Artists Space. I started putting together themes around certain work that seem very naive now, but it was a way of responding to the work immediately. I was the only in-house curator, so we invited many guest curators to organize projects, most of whom were artists. I was also in charge of the re-granting programs, small amounts of money from $50 up to $800 to give to artists to do independent exhibitions and help them pay for materials. It was a great experience. I loved it and stayed for eight years. It was wonderful to work closely with the director, Linda Scherer and then Susan Wyatt. Looking back I feel we all had an interesting and really good time. EK: I’ve been trying to give myself a postgraduate education. Vanessa and I end up reading a lot of essays about curating. A lot of people are very critical towards new curatorial programs for a variety of obvious reasons. It seems like there has been a rapid professionalization of curating. How has your role as a curator shifted in the past twenty years? Twenty years ago you were working on Sonsbeek 93. VS: There are many different ways of attacking that question. But, I have said this to museum professionals anytime the subject arises: I really dislike curatorial programs. When Joan Snitzer offered me this teaching position, I was between Berlin and New York and taking a little hiatus for family reasons. I was honored to be offered this wonderful teaching position at Barnard. But, I was thinking to myself, if I am hired to spearhead a curatorial program in its early stages, if not, at least to provide for that gap in the curricula, how am I

going to keep my integrity and do this job? I was not interested in teaching the craft or anything close to it. So, I decided to accept this great opportunity to devise a program, which is really art history through exhibitions, 1966 to the present. In addition, I wanted to bring to the course my experiences in Europe, so it had to be a comparative study of exhibitions in Europe and America on global issues. The seminar is also broken down thematically. As I started to shape these discussion sessions, I thought that this is what I can get away with and feel as though I am not participating in the burgeoning trend of curatorial programs. We’re all subscribed to e-flux where you constantly read announcements for curatorial programs mushrooming worldwide. Many of the academies and individuals, who are teaching these programs, sound wonderful. But, there are many that are not worth the enormous tuition. I believe it is very important to get art history degrees and then, if you choose to curate, just go out and do it. That’s the best way to learn. The problem will soon be, if it is not already, that there are too many young curators graduating from curatorial study programs and not enough jobs for them. The job market is filled with assistant curator positions. But, when you get to the level where you have 30 years of experience, it becomes much harder. You are retired into freelance work or pushed into becoming a director. Hiring young people is preferable sadly for many obvious reasons. I saw a listed requirement for a senior curatorial post at minimum of five years experience. But, what if you have 30? You will not get that job, because they’re looking for a young curator with only five to eight years experience. You are considered overqualified, even for a senior curator position! My professional trajectory might be considered unconventional by American 79

standards, because I have worked a lot in Europe. Those years that I was away, I did projects that I would never have been able to realize in the United States, let alone New York. The average European has a knowledge and respect for culture that is more sophisticated than the average American and European governments support it. In New York the dominant subject that comes into most discussions about art often diverts into gossip about the art market. In many European cities, the market is not as strong as it is in New York; and in Berlin, it is virtually invisible. This produces a more equitable society committed to culture and knowledge production around ideas and not market issues. In Europe I had opportunities to produce incredible projects with wonderful artists. When I have proper funding, I often create new commissions with the artist, and, I have to say, they were phenomenal projects that were sitespecific. This work was very satisfying. I would not have been able to do this to such an extent in the US. I am very fortunate and appreciative of the work I was able to accomplish in Europe. But while I was there, my New York colleagues were, for the most, part fairly oblivious. Although Europe and America are very linked, there is a big gap in awareness, unless you are really bicoastal and follow what is happening beyond the big names. If I had taken another path and decided to curate exhibitions of major artists, who were in the 6-figure range on the market, it might be a different story. EK: You seem to take on huge projects financially, emotionally, and academically that are site-specific over a very large geographic area: Sonsbeek 93, Crossing the Line and Architektur and Ideologie. How do you take on that load? VS: I have always been interested in art in the public realm, art in context. I start these projects with a lot of passion and 80

it sustains me. At the moment, finding the right subject is challenging. After a long period of working in Europe, I felt a bit disappointed. I could advise you to stay with the tried and true path by keeping your job. I have a many colleagues, whom I respect a great deal, who have remained at the same job for too many years. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m not sure they are so happy. If I could change the art world completely, I would insist curators change institutions every eight years. There should be a constant shift and it should be global in order to have the maximum experiences in the world and to be really knowledgeable. Everyone would benefit and grow more.

If I could change the art world completely, I would insist curators change institutions every eight years. There should be a constant shift and it should be global. I seized opportunities and this is the path that I took. My mother is French, so moving to Europe was familiar and natural. Also my husbandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work is respected in Europe. So Europe has always been a big part of our lives and will continue to be. Just when you get totally disgusted with what is happening in New York, you can go to Europe and feel like you have friends, who are not struggling to survive, climbing to the top, or too busy to sit down and have an honest conversation. However, sometimes travelling back and forth feels a bit schizophrenic, but, ultimately, I like the balance. EK: In the Oncurating interview, you said, â&#x20AC;&#x153;It is also a bit of a fallacy that people who work full-time for art institutions have time to see exhibitions. They largely steal the time to do so while sacrificing

something or someone on the other end. But, this is particular to those of us who have family responsibilities on top of institutional pressures. No one likes to hear about it, no one talks about it; it is just a bad pill you reluctantly swallow.” When you cite “those of us with family responsibilities,” are you talking about women?

in New York. One can curate shows in galleries or little off-center places, few museums work with unaffiliated curators on any regular basis. There are economic and touring benefits to working with other affiliated curators and institutions. In Europe, freelance curating might be a little bit easier, because there are different models and systems.

VS: Men and women. Naturally, having children impacts on work, especially on women with young children. Teenagers can be even more of a challenge. Parental responsibilities never stop no matter how old your kids are. But all of this is not spoken, because it’s just part of the life of every parent. However, in the art world, where it is understood and often expected that one works late and on weekends, this can be a huge sacrifice on the families, which is why many choose not to have one.

What I found is that when I work for an institution, which I have done all my life, I go further into a contextual work where the exhibitions deal with the site, whether it be the city, building, institution, or mechanism of the institution. The Queens Museum, Artists Space, Haus der Kulturen der Welt all have important histories. It’s about thoroughly understanding that context and coming up with ideas that address those issues or are appropriate for that community, that institution, that constituency. The issue is how to expand your public with new programs and exhibitions, and still keep it relevant to the place. You must find what is unique about it.

Whenever I work for an institution, I take it on like a cause—a mission. No matter how big or well off the institution is you are there to do everything in your power to make it visible and an exciting place to visit. And that inevitably takes a lot out of you. It’s slightly different working freelance, unless you are enormously sought after, the period between projects allows you to refocus on your life outside work. In a full time job there is the preparation, the openings and the promotion of exhibitions in a constant, often overlapping cycle. It rarely subsides. EK: So what are your measures of success in regards to your own shows? I know you will always try your hardest to be thoughtful and address issues, but at what point do you look at it and think, “Yeah!”? VS: First of all, the difference between working inside an institution and working on the outside for one is an interesting issue. There are pros and cons to both. Friends have asked me, why I don’t become a freelance curator? This can be difficult

There are curators who love to work with well-known artists, and there are a number of well-known artists, whom everybody wants to work with and be close to. This can be a win-win situation for everyone involved. But it is also a selfcongratulatory and self-perpetuating system. Often I have the feeling that the same artists get the big shows in the same big institutions. People don’t think out of the box. Most museums feel they can’t afford to take risks, but not doing so doesn’t broaden cultural knowledge to the public. There are so many artists and curators out there, who have done wonderful work, but get very little attention, because priorities are elsewhere and skewed. To answer the question of what is my personal measure of success, it would have to be when artists, curators and the general public tell me how much they loved my exhibition. 81

EK: I was talking to my brother, who is in film school and staying with me in New York for a short while. He was listening to a song by Drake the rapper that I thought was very funny. The title is “Started from the Bottom,” where he says, “Started from the bottom, now we’re here. Started from the bottom now my whole team is here.” My brother said that this is film school, “You work really hard on all these amazing projects and someone will become famous for it and you better be along for the ride.” I’ve been recognizing this explicitly in other areas now. There was always the sense that if you knew someone, then you are on your path to recognition in some regard. Drake put it in some terms for me that I had not recognized. VS: For your own satisfaction do your independent projects. There will be opportunities not immediately recognizable, which can pull you in different directions. You must be open to this. There are many assistant curators in major institutions that go nowhere, because senior curators hold on to their positions, because there is nothing better out there for them. It’s a terrible situation. So, my advice to young curators is to keep your imagination fueled, do the projects that are interesting and satisfying for you. And for the bread and butter, if you must, take an institutional job, and maybe you will get lucky.

previous spreads: Annabel Daou for sale, 2012 Ink, gesso, repair tape on gesso, 54 x 40 in Courtesy of the artist

following spread: Erica Baum Day For Night from Naked Eye, Volume Two, 2012 Archival pigment print, 19 x 12.8 in Courtesy of Bureau Erica Baum Irma from Naked Eye, Volume Two, 2011 Archival pigment print, 16 x 11.6 in Courtesy of Bureau

previous: Lara Saget i can, 2014 Polyurethane, acrylic paint, gesso, battery, plastic train, 26 x 18 in Courtesy of the artist

Interview with Susan Bee Eunice Kim Eunice Kim: Vanessa and I have been working together and have felt like we have really brought together a lot of alumnae, or women who are invested in the arts in general. Do you know Melanie Kress? She’s also a Barnard alumna and she is a curator at the High Line. She started an alternative project space called Concrete Utopia with another Barnard alumna. It was to showcase her peers, even though she was also a practicing artist. She was writing, curating in alternative spaces, whether it was in her own home or elsewhere. Margaret Lee who is a Barnard alumna started 47 Canal to showcase her peers as well. I thought, this seems to be a trend among Barnard women. M/E/A/N/ I/N/G, from my understanding, was also a place to engage your peers. Susan Bee: Totally. It’s ongoing. We did our 25th anniversary issue in 2011 with 83 participants, which is online. Mira Schor and I did 20 issues as a offset publication before we went digital. One of the reasons we started M/E/A/N/I/ N/G in 1986 was to have an alternative discourse. Partly about feminism, but not the kind of feminism that didn’t include men, unlike Heresies, which came before us. We were coming a little bit later and were interested in making a more inclusive publication. It was our way of getting feminism into the art world discourse without alienating anybody who might want to read this publication. We always had a pretty wide-open policy and included a lot of other people, poets,

art historians, curators. We would read different people’s work that they sent us and sometimes they were people that we never heard of. We’ve also edited a number of theme issues, and in 2007 we did a feminist issue online. EK: The feminist forum issue? I was reading it and saw that you wrote about your experience at Barnard. SB: I went to Barnard because I got a scholarship and I was a New York kid. It was very hard on me, I really wanted to go to an art school and I didn’t realize they wouldn’t even have an art department. I went to the guidance counselor and said that I really wanted to paint. She said, you should go to vocational school. The experience didn’t start that well, but I did learn a lot, especially about feminism. It was the beginnings of feminism on the campus. EK: I read that at the time there was no women’s studies major, or visual arts concentration. Now those majors exist. I was wondering what you thought about the general broadening of academic interests and how important is it to have those interests validated by an institution? SB: If you don’t have them, then you know how important they are. Actually, I took the first feminist courses. There were no women’s studies. I took the first classes that even dealt with gender as a topic. At one point, one of the women I was studying with said, “Maybe you can make an independent study.” I was really 93

interested in pursuing that idea and there was no such word then as “women’s studies.” I could see that there were related courses in all of the different departments, and she had the idea that I could go and ask for a major by putting them together. They said no way. I have the letter from Barnard somewhere that turns down this idea. It was about 1971 when the administration rejected the idea of a women’s studies major. For me, a lot of things were “no way.” I didn’t receive any grades in my art classes, because they weren’t considered serious academic work. So it was very hard for me to get into graduate school because I had no grades for anything that I was actually applying in. I only had pass/fail and art was my best subject. However, I learned a lot and I think the academics at Barnard were really helpful in terms of doing a magazine and being an editor. I am less upset about all of that now. At the time, I was very alienated because no one wanted to take art seriously as a pastime. But the art history department was always really great. I had to be an art history major. At the time, there was no feminism in art history or in art. I was writing one of the first papers on women artists and there were no books on women artists. Nobody can understand it when I say these things. They all look at me and say, what are you talking about, of course, there were these things. But there weren’t. I was doing independent research trying to find anybody to write about. It was a very difficult time, but exciting. EK: Do you still have those papers lying around? SB: Yes, they’re somewhere. My trend is to do everything when nobody else is doing it, and then it all becomes fashionable. Somebody just discovered an earlier period of my work, which are the photograms that 94

I did in the 1970s. Now that’s trending back. There are all these younger artists doing it. I couldn’t get that stuff shown and now I’m going to have a show of it in a few months. In a way, it’s great, and in a way, it’s terrible. I’m often doing things when no one else is doing them and then it becomes fashionable. EK: We have an arts journalist who contributed a piece are about how women are portrayed in journalism and how they get rediscovered, sometimes much later in their career than the work that they actually produce. SB: Actually my piece in the September 2014 Brooklyn Rail deals with discrimination against women and feminism in art. The whole forum includes 20 different writers, including artists, critics, and historians. I talk about the fact that women have to be in their 70s or close to death to get their first retrospective. I have known a couple of women artist who have died before or after their retrospective. They were 80 or even 90 years old. Even Louise Bourgeois was 70 before anyone would show her. Somebody said in 10 years, they’ll put you in a show. I’m 62. It’s a really long haul. By the time that somebody is really taking seriously the work that I did in the 70s, you know... that’s over 30 years ago for the works that I am showing now. It’s very frustrating because, I couldn’t get that work shown at that time. And now people are like, oh these are great paintings! Why didn’t you ever show them? Well, nobody would show them. I tried. I was very dedicated. I had dealers over. I had curators over. It’s just been very hard to get taken seriously or to get shows. EK: How do you think that the publication is related to your art practice? SB: It’s been really great because I’ve been able to include a lot of artists in the publication and I met a lot of people through the magazine. It’s very

interesting for us to have survived all these years. After the first issue, I thought I’d never do a second issue. We didn’t have any funding and we still don’t have any funding. We just decided to do it. It’s been a wonderful opportunity to actually pursue editorial projects that you’re interested in. It was a good thing to do. I just took it on in a very idealistic, naive way. I didn’t think about what exactly would happen. I didn’t expect to be doing it for 25 years, let’s just put it that way. EK: When Vanessa and I were putting together the show, we were trying to piece together the network of amazing alumnae that Joan Snitzer often told us about. We were both struggling with our next step and decided that we would like to talk to alumnae about how they go to where they are. Even outside of the art world, when they ask women about how they got their jobs, you’ll sometimes hear them disqualify themselves by saying that they were “lucky” and it “just happened.” It’s the problem I saw at Barnard where students would disqualify themselves in class before making a good point. It extends into what they say about their careers and creative labor. We were hoping people could show us the process of how they go to where they are. SB: That’s such a long question in my case because of many false starts. You’d have to go year by year. So many things happen. Sometimes I can’t even remember things about myself. When I looked at the paintings for the show I had in April 2014 of works from the early 1980s, I didn’t remember that I had used techniques and images in the 80s that I am still doing now. I base a lot of paintings on film stills and I had actually done that in the early 80s, but then I stopped and went through a whole other period of work. And then all of a sudden, I realized I had been doing the same thing for 30 years but I didn’t realize it myself because I lost

track of my own history. I was working with a younger curator and she was pulling all these paintings out of the closet, literally. I had access to my own history, but I might not remember or even acknowledge, or even know my own history because no one had really written it up for me. I remember it in bits and pieces. It’s hard to track all these things after you’ve done it for a while. One can hope that people start to pay attention to you because you’ve been around for so long.

What I think you need to do is make your own context. I met Joan Snitzer in graduate school, and it was great, and she turned me onto A.I.R. Gallery. I had already been into feminism, but it was in graduate school that I met the feminist artists like Nancy Spero. I was taken up by those people, but I wasn’t able to get into the galleries. I didn’t have my first solo show until I was 40. I would say that I was not lucky. Other friends of mine did do better. My work is always hard to assimilate, somehow. Something that I did in the mid 1970s, the altered photographs, is going to be shown in 2015. That should give you an idea of how long it takes some things to be assimilated. It happens to men too, but men are often taken more seriously. When I brought my work around in the 70s, people were wondering: Why are you doing abstract photography? Then I’d try to explain it because I had written my thesis on the subject. It wasn’t like I wasn’t informed about it. I could explain what I was doing, but that doesn’t mean that anyone was going to take it seriously or show it. What I think you need to do, from my point of view, is make your own context. That’s why A.I.R. was really important to me. Women were making their own galleries 95

because they couldn’t get shows. Mira couldn’t get her piece published about David Salle in 1986. She sent it everywhere, so I just said I’m going to publish it. We’ll do a magazine. We’ll publish your piece. We published a lot of stuff that couldn’t get published. EK: A publication requires a huge amount of effort, financial and personal. How did the publication come together?

EK: It seems like that project was a lot about giving people space to be seen and heard and I saw a lot of similarities with the projects that I mentioned before: this exhibition, Margaret Lee’s space, Concrete Utopia by Melanie Kress. Do you think—because I see it as a woman of color who is disenfranchised—that it is necessary to have a position like that in order to want to create a space? Is it a woman’s burden to create a community?

SB: It came together because I had been working on other publications. I had been working as a designer and editor, so I knew how to make a publication. I just didn’t think that it would go on for very long. I thought that we would just put out an issue and get some feedback. We spent our own money to do it. People really liked it. We got all this positive feedback. And then we got submissions, so we had to start reading them. Really, it was a labor of love.

SB: Yes, I think it is a great idea for women to create their own communities. I feel that certain publications now, n+1, Triple Canopy and Cabinet have a trendiness and fashionability to them, so people want to be part of their scene. We didn’t really.It wasn’t so cool to be a part of M/E/A/N/I/N/G. It was almost an anti-trend. We were not sanctified by the art world. We were square. We didn’t have that aura around us that I notice publications now have.

I had known Mira since childhood. Our parents were friends, they were also artists. We reconnected in our 20s. She was writing and couldn’t get her essays published, and I was really interested in what she was writing. Then we started getting some grants. We applied to the New York State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts, which gave us money. As we became more established, people wanted to write for us. We started many people’s careers as writers, which was very gratifying. Some of them have gotten quite famous. We did start careers for people who became quite well known as critics by giving them their first publications.

We had an issue on motherhood and art in 1992, that the Feminist Art Project of the College Art Association based a whole day of panels on a year ago. That’s a great tribute. When I did it, I knew that we were maybe breaking new ground, but I didn’t really realize it would have that long an impact. I think you do things and you later on find out that they might be important.

Even though we published people from all over, there was a small community in New York of artists, critics, feminists, and poets. It was an interesting group of people. I wouldn’t have met them or known them if I hadn’t done the publication. And it was great to publish someone like Nancy Spero, Alison Knowles, or Carolee Schneemann, to interview them, to take them seriously. 96

No one had discussed motherhood and art with women artists. I wanted to look at how these women functioned with children. A lot of them didn’t want to talk about it. They hid their pregnancies and children. They asked us how we even figured out that they had children. It was a very taboo subject. You have to address these important subjects. For our issue on race in 1990, we sent out 150 letters, this was all pre-computer. We got 15 responses. People did not want to talk about this subject. It takes a while to break new ground. There’s a lot of stuff that was very

taboo. Now there is more discourse on these issues in social media, but there are still problems that persist. We just went ahead rather blithely. We decided to address controversial issues head on. Whether we got the right responses from the right people, it didn’t matter. We published everything that people gave us. We would never censor anything that we got. That was a very unusual approach to have at that time. EK: What advice do you have for young women who are interested in not just their studio practice, but other forms of validating their peers? SB: I think what you said was right, you have to form your own galleries, you have to make your own path. You have to curate shows, which I’ve done. You have to put yourself forward, or move forward together as a group. Those approaches are very effective because you can make your reputation doing these kinds of things. It’s also a way of asserting yourself. My feeling is that you can’t just have a studio practice. If I just had a studio practice, I would be completely isolated. I need to have larger issues, a larger community, partially through teaching, through A.I.R. of which I am a member, and just doing projects in the larger community.

previous: Annabel Daou which side are you on?, 2012 Video, Panasonic Quintrix 2; 3:06 mins, 13 x 11.25 x 13 in Courtesy of the artist

A Conversation with Carol Kino Vanessa Thill Vanessa Thill: I thought we could start with Barnard, since that is the arbitrary thing that connects all these people in the show. Tell me about your time there, whether it prepared you, what your experience was like there. Carol Kino: Well I loved it. I had come from Bennington, where I’d been a music major, and in some ways, the creative sophistication there probably prepared me better for what I am doing now, but I enjoyed Barnard more. I loved the classes. They were rigorous. I did Italian Renaissance studies, then French for a while, and then I ended up as an English major with a concentration in Creative Writing. If there had been a concentration in contemporary criticism, I might have done something like that. VT: So you knew you were interested in writing at that time? CK: Yes. I always wanted to write. Elizabeth Hardwick was a really thrilling teacher. I think she felt I could really write. She was so supportive and appreciative. I tried studying Art History, which had been my interest in high school, and I did take some art history classes but just didn’t end up majoring in that, mostly because there wasn’t much opportunity to study art history at Bennington and I had already gotten sidetracked. VT: I did Art History and minored in English. I think they are both really strong departments. So then after Barnard did you stay in New York?

CK: Yes, I went to work in book publishing, which was great and horrible. It paid just terribly. By the end of it, I decided I wanted to work for a magazine because I wanted to be more part of the product and be able to write myself. I worked briefly for Farrar Straus and Giroux and then for The Dial Press. I knew I wanted to be a cultural critic, but it just seemed like this impossible dream. That’s why I think what you’re doing is so great. At that time Barnard discouraged careers in the arts. They were really pushing young women into the professions: doctors, lawyers, business school, that kind of thing. It seemed a real shame to me because if any place is going to have people who are successful in the arts, it’s here! They have plenty of alumnae who have been successful, clearly. VT: I’m going to ask the question you might have been expecting, which is have you faced any unique challenges as a woman in your career? CK: Oh! I wasn’t expecting that! VT: Oh good. CK: Yeah, I think it’s always harder as a woman. I think in journalism it’s harder as a woman. But I’m not sure what to say about it. VT: Well I have another related question. Ashton Cooper, a young critic who writes for Artinfo, has written a text for this catalog about the rhetoric surrounding women artists in arts journalism. She 101

pulled up a lot of examples, and they are always something like, “at long last, this old artist is getting the recognition that she deserved all along, she was overlooked her entire life but never stopped toiling away in obscurity.” So I was wondering if you have encountered this kind of narrative and whether you think there is a disparity in the way that women artists are talked about in the media.

I wanted to be a cultural critic, but it just seemed like this impossible dream. CK: I think it’s a real phenomenon. There are female artists from the 60s and 70s who now fit this bill precisely, because they’re making a comeback, or didn’t make it at the time, or made it, but weren’t as renowned as they should have been. I’ve written about a lot of those women and it’s true there always is that narrative that you wouldn’t have with Robert Smithson, or somebody else like that. I did this story for Art + Auction years ago about female artists who had married male artists and what had happened to their careers, which was usually never good. But with the younger couples, it was often the woman who was really famous and the man who was not as well known. So I’m not sure. I know there has recently been a resurgence of the Guerilla Girls argument—there’s that other group [Micol Hebron] that’s done a headcount of artists in galleries and it still is women come out lower although not as low. I don’t think it’s as persistent as it used to be for young women artists. But overall there has been a tendency to favor men, to feel that men are the serious brighter ones, who need to brought along, and I think that’s true with writers, too. VT: In her text, Ashton talks about the physical reality of creative production. 102

Just to even have it be possible, you have to have a level of material subsistence and then there are all these elements of family and what other things are going on in your life. That plays a big role. CK: Yeah, and it is much tougher. Actually one of my power couples that I wrote about, she had the big career and then she had a baby. And she’s coming back from having had a baby, it just took a lot of time out of her life to do that. But then I know other young women artists who have babies and just keep on with the shows, without tons of money backing them. Basically, I think it’s changing. VT: With this discussion of creative work it seems like it can be really difficult and exhausting but on the other hand very fulfilling. You go to work and you are producing something that is your own creative work, but on demand. Has that ever been difficult for you. Or maybe the freelance model allows for more freedom? CK: Arts journalism combines the creative and the practical. And freelance is basically the way journalism is now. Otherwise I would be happy to be on staff. VT: So you’re not on staff anywhere? CK: No. I write regularly for some places but my career took off I would say about 10 years too late, if it had taken off 10 years earlier I think I would be on staff now. Journalism jobs don’t exist, basically. Especially not in this sort of area. I mean maybe if I had some specialization in the Middle East, and I spoke Arabic, instead of writing about culture. Journalism jobs do exist but not in abundance at all. VT: I guess that means it’s been a lot more difficult in terms of compensation, in terms of stability. CK: Yes. That’s true for many journalists now. People in the art world aren’t aware of how difficult it is when you are writing about them. I don’t think they have any conception of how precarious it is, how

stressful it is, how their behavior can cost you not just time and money but also harm you professionally. I feel less stressed now, because there do always seem to be jobs and projects there when I need them. But it’s still stressful.

CK: That’s good, you should be! It is kind of weird sometimes when that happens and you can see people bowing and scraping. But also, you can’t just do the writing for nothing, you have to have fair recompense.

VT: So you have some degree of freedom; do you propose what you want to cover?

VT: That was my second question. How does that really work? Especially now knowing that you transitioned from a more stable job to freelance work.

CK: It’s a mixture. With some places, I pitch almost everything. Recently it’s become more of a combination, but I’d say it’s still three-quarters my ideas. I say no to things, too, if they don’t seem interesting. VT: I have two somewhat touchy questions now. You said in your email that you were delighted that someone at Barnard had finally noticed you. I was wondering about that, because you are a well-known writer and you’ve had a lot of success in your career. How do you personally measure success, whether it’s financially, emotionally, within the industry? CK: I think it’s a combination. I’ve been in some situations where I’ve been told I’m at the top of my profession, but it doesn’t feel that way to me. One measure of success is how the world sees it, but you have to be careful that you are satisfied too, and if you aren’t then that disparity can make you very, very unhappy. Now I feel I’m in a place where people often want me to do the story because it’s me, not the publication—that feels like success. Success also means being able to work on really interesting projects, that aren’t staying the same all the time, that are creative, that teach me interesting things about the world and also about writing and telling stories. I also want some sort of power, so that publicists and galleries are a little scared of me! Enough to be cooperative. I would rather the power of being respected and nice but sometimes that doesn’t work! VT: Having worked in a gallery I know how it goes. We were terrified of the press.

CK: It was never that stable. The reason I never went into magazines was that when I tried to, there was another recession, and magazines were folding left and right. I wrote this great pitch letter and people were literally calling me up and saying we would hire you if we weren’t laying off the entire staff next week. VT: But you stuck with the industry? CK: No, I moved to California and did all the depressing arts things one does in the Bay Area to make money. I did a variety of different weird editing jobs, whatever I could get. That’s why I became freelance, because when I moved to the Bay Area there were no jobs. But if I had stayed in New York for two months longer.... as soon as my furniture arrived in California I was offered a job at Glamour Magazine, working for a wonderful editor. I would definitely have taken it if I had still been there. VT: This was the 80s? CK: Yeah. I was really unhappy in San Francisco and because I have two passports, U.K. as well as U.S., I lived in London for a year. I did a variety of freelance work and wrote for the Times Literary Supplement and New Society. I was really just trying to find myself, as they say. And then I came back to San Francisco and somehow reinvented myself as a copywriter for the Nature Company, The Gap, Banana Republic. I figured out how to work it. In England, I’d realized I was more American than I’d thought, and that helped give me focus. Basically, I 103

dropped my English reticence and became a lot more aggressive about pursuing jobs. Back in the Bay Area, which is filled with English and Australian expats, people were impressed by my TLS clips. That’s how I got my first copywriting job! My second was for Banana Republic, which revolutionized the retail copywriting field by hiring ex-journalists to work for them. I’m very interested in the technique of writing, and it never hurts to learn how to write to space or to find ten ways to say the same thing. Those are skills that are useful for all sorts of writing. VT: Wow. This is making me realize that writing copy is a skill that people actually pay for. CK: Very much so! Early on, I was offered full-time copywriting jobs, even after I’d moved to NYC. But I stayed away from all of them because I knew that would be the end of a serious writing career. It took a long time, and I pursued journalism very diligently, and independently, without much outside help. VT: What galvanized the decision to go back to New York and write about art, and for the first time, I guess? CK: I lost my apartment in the 1989 Loma Prieta quake. My beautiful apartment burned in the big fire in the Marina. The main thing that had kept me in San Francisco was the knowledge that it would be so tough to find an apartment in New York. But I was going to have to find one somewhere and it just made more sense to do it when I didn’t have much to move. When I moved back to New York a lot of people that I’d worked with in book publishing had gone to this art magazine, Art & Antiques. An old friend was the editor and I had an open invitation to pitch stories there. And suddenly art and this magazine had both become hot. I also had a contact from California, Jed Perl, who edited a column there and he proved to be really helpful and wanted me to start writing for his column. Because I turned 104

out to have an “eye,” as they say, and an ability to write clearly about what I saw, he got me a column on New York galleries for Modern Painters. Before that, I’d been reviewing books because I’d been in book publishing and I found it depressing because I often felt like I could write better than the person who was writing the book! I was much happier writing about art. VT: Well it is a very different activity to write about something visual versus another text. CK: Plus the visual stuff takes less time to look at! So if it’s bad it doesn’t matter! And it’s always interesting, because there are always interesting things to say about the world in which the art is made, there’s always a larger context. Then I had this long-standing contact with the editor of the Atlantic Monthly. The number of great opportunities I passed up when I was starting out would just fill, well they’d fill a couple of pages, not a whole book. But the editor had given me this invitation to contact him. I finally did, and because I had art clips, he suggested that I write about that subject for him. I soon realized that to write authoritatively I had to learn a lot more about the art world, because none of my editors understood it. So I started writing for Artnews, Art in America and primarily Art + Auction, which, back then, was doing wonderful, really rigorous reporting on the art market and also art-historical subjects. I learned an awful lot writing for them, and then it just kind of continued. Soon after Slate started, I realized that a lot of people from there seemed to get into the New York Times, so I got into Slate and within a year my editor [Jodi Kantor] was hired by the New York Times as the head of Arts & Leisure, so I started writing there. I had written for the Times in the past but mostly on books.

VT: What was art writing like when you started out and how has it changed? CK: In the early 1990s, it was really artspeaky and often almost impenetrable. And even if people outside the art world wrote about it in a way you could understand, it was clear they knew nothing about the art world. I think what made me successful was that I had this ability to see things like an art person but to put what I saw into regular English, so that people on the outside could figure out what I was talking about. It used to be that very few people could do that. But thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s been a big change recently, and now editors are into art, especially fashion editors. So that has other challenges but also opens up a lot more opportunities. I always wanted to find hip, insider stories that people within the art world would care about while also addressing issues of larger importance, that people outside the art world were thinking about. And I think thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s still my sweet spot.

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verso and above: Dahlia Elsayed Start of The Pre-Season, 2006 Acrylic and oilstick on paper, 46 x 33 in each Courtesy of the artist right: Margaret Lee collaboration with Michele Abeles The World is Not Your Oyster (Lemons and Lime Table), 2013 Aluminum, mounted photograph, resin, plaster, acrylic paint, 19 x 26 x 25 in Courtesy of the artists

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On Margaret Lee’s The World is Not Your Oyster Julia Wolkoff “Form follows function.” – Marcus Vitruvius Pollio The cultural valuation of function as opposed to form has commanded a perennial and long-standing debate. In the 17th century, Poussin famously declared, “la fin de l’art est la delectation,” (the goal of art is delight) diverging from the then-commonly held belief that in addition to aesthetic enjoyment, art must also be useful in some way. In modern architecture and design, “functionalism” refers to an emphasis on the practical application of an object; particularly the doctrine that the design of an object should solely be determined by its function rather than any aesthetic considerations, and that anything practically designed will be inherently beautiful. The World is Not Your Oyster (Lemons and Lime Table), a collaboration with Michele Abeles, engages both sides of this debate. It is not designed for useful enjoyment; the table’s improbable angles make it impractical as a countertop. The likeness of a pitcher is “decorated” on the surface, a hand leaning against its solid edge. Like a mirage, the photograph taunts us with the useful possibilities we expect from the piece of furniture in front of us, but its purportedly solid surface exists in image only. The citrus fruits that one is normally meant to enjoy civilly, atop her own table, here act as architectural support. I find unusual delight in the piece’s obfuscation and frustration of functionality. As a little girl, I dreamt of the belle époque, the last era of pure luxury. This was a time, I thought, when one could be the centrally happy pearl in one’s very own gilded oyster prison. Every useful object had to be exquisite to fully illustrate an exquisite life. Even looking at opulent objects—the purely ornamental and “frivolous”—was pleasure in itself. My assumption at the time was that I desired to possess them, to live beautified in their presence, but ideologically, my lavish tastes seemed absurd. Was I, who my father called “Little Trotsky” because of my longtime involvement with a socialist youth movement, a hypocrite? Even as a Barnard student, I primarily studied eighteenth-century French decorative arts and have yet to move on to a more popularly understood artistic moment. In today’s world, where form must follow function, extraneous ornament is deemed reprehensible by those vague aesthetic authorities. We are all suffering under the ubiquity of modernist design. Yet, to borrow Metropolitan Museum curator Luke Syson’s A recent example of this technical attitude can be found in the principle of “streamlining.” Originally a result of scientific research on air resistance as applied to fast-moving vehicles like cars and airplanes, streamlining soon came to embody the twentieth-century aesthetic ideal of “efficiency,” producing sleekly modern armchairs and cocktail shakers. 1

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phrase, decoration is a portal to somewhere else. Lemons and Lime Table, then, is not the bastard offspring of its once-utilized counterpart, collecting dust in a period room. It is not de-functionalized and therefore hopeless (a telling synonym of â&#x20AC;&#x153;uselessâ&#x20AC;?), because it is a thing that should be used but may not be. The world is not your oyster, Lee reminds us, with an object that refuses to behave, tilting away from function and forcing value to slide into a different realm. If ornamentation represents and allows for a constant of the imagination in peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s everyday lives, as Syson suggests, then Lemons and Lime Table both embraces and eludes fantasy precisely because it so clearly references reality. Unlike reality, however, fantasy is not compelled to support other things upon its surface. In the endless battle between form and function, one need not drag behind the other. A life worth looking at allows for both the concrete and the imagined.

verso: Emily Weiner You and I Are Disappearing, 2012 Oil on linen, 20 x 16 in each Courtesy of the artist

Louise McCagg Thousands of Years, 2000 Mixed media, 12.5 x 16 in Courtesy of the artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s studio

verso: Daryl Seitchik WWW, 2013

Biographies Erica Baum Anthropology 1984 Erica Baum’s photographic practice hones in on indexing and ordering systems in books, library card catalogs, newspapers, and blackboards. Her close attention to minute details of language has the effect of pointing out contingencies of a system through specific and poetic instances. She lives and works in New York, and is represented by Bureau, a gallery in the Lower East Side. She holds an MFA from Yale School of Art and a NYFA Fellowship in Photography. Recent solo exhibitions include The Paper Nautilus, Bureau, New York 2014; Harpoon the Monster: Blackboards, Blanks and Viewmasters (with Francis Baudevin), Galerie Mark Müller, Zurich, 2014; Erica Baum, The Public Imagination, Galerie Crevecoeur, Paris, 2013; Recent group exhibitions include Infinite Tuning, Murray Guy, New York, 2014; Everyday Epiphanies, The Metropolitan Museum of Art: AGORA 4th Athens Biennale, Athens, 2013; Postscript, Denver MCA, Denver, 2012; Her work was included in the 30th Bienal de São Paulo: The Imminence of Poetics, São Paulo, Brazil 2012. Susan Bee Art History and Art 1973 Susan Bee is a painter, editor, and book artist who lives in New York City. She has had solo shows at A.I.R. Gallery, Kenyon College, William Paterson College, Virginia Lust Gallery, Columbia University, and has been included in numerous group shows. She was the coeditor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: A Journal of Contemporary Art Issues from 1986-1996, and of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artist’s Writings, Theory, and Criticism, with writings by over 100 artists, critics, and poets, published by Duke University Press in 2000. She has had 124

fellowships and grants from Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Arts, the NEA, and NYSCA. She holds an MA in Art from Hunter College. Her paintings and artist’s books are included in many public and private collections including the Getty Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum, Yale University, Clark Art Institute, New York Public Library, and Harvard University Library. Bee teaches in the School of Visual Arts MFA in Art Criticism program. Natalie Bell Philosophy 2006 Natalie Bell is assistant curator at the New Museum. She received a BA in philosophy from Barnard in 2006 and a MA in philosophy from the Graduate Center in 2010. She was assistant curator for the International Exhibition of the 55th Venice Biennale and recently co-curated Here and Elsewhere at the New Museum. Frances Brent English 1972 Frances Brent’s book of poems, The Beautiful Lesson of the I (May Swenson Award winner, 2006), is about the way that consciousness, imagination, and play preserve what the eye takes in, turning it back into beauty and art. In this way, she has always been interested in the lives of things. When she wrote The Lost Cellos of Aronson (Atlas & Co., 2009), a cultural biography of the cellist Lev Aronson, she was curious about the intimate relationship between a musician and his instruments. Recently, she has been writing about modern objects, architecture, and design in mid-century Chicago where she was born as well as assembling a series of biographical studies of writers and artists. She studied poetry at Columbia University and the University of Illinois, Chicago. Her poems and essays have appeared in

publications such as the New Yorker, Modern Magazine, the New York Times, the Yale Review, and Tablet Magazine. She has taught at Yale, Northwestern, and Loyola, and was co-editor of literary journal Formations. Julia Caston Art History and Visual Art 2012 Julia Caston lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She co-founded the Minneapolis Art Lending Library, which lends original artworks by local and national artists to the public, free of charge. After a year of successful operation, she is planning to incorporate the organization as an official nonprofit. Julia’s artistic practice currently focuses on semi-confrontation word art with floral themes. She hopes to attend a MFA program in the fall of 2015. Julia can be reached at jcaston5@gmail.com. Sarah Charlesworth Art History 1969 Sarah Charlesworth is considered an important member of the Pictures Generation, a group of artists active in the 1970s-1980s who investigated mass culture through appropriation of imagery. Her critical engagement with photography was groundbreaking, and throughout three decades, she deconstructed popular imagery and questioned the logic of photographic meaning. Charlesworth has exhibited at The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, The Guggenheim, The New Museum, The Metropolitan Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, The Victoria and Albert Museum, The Queens Museum of Art, MoMA PS1, Gagosian Gallery, White Columns, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, Metro Pictures, The International Center of Photography, Wallach Art Gallery, and countless others. She was a professor at New York University, School of Visual Arts, Princeton, and Rhode Island School of Design. She was also a talented writer whose essays were published in exhibition catalogs and art periodicals, including

Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimpson’s Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology. She passed away in 2013. The gallery that represents her work is owned and directed by Barnard alumna Michele Maccarone, who graduted in 1995. She was the director of Luhring Augustine before founding Maccarone Gallery in 2001. Ashton Cooper Art History 2013 Ashton Cooper is currently News Editor at Louise Blouin Media where she edits Artinfo.com’s primary art blog, In the Air, and contributes to Modern Painters. During her time at Barnard she was the Editor in Chief of The Eye, the arts and culture magazine of the Columbia Daily Spectator and the school’s only weekly magazine. She has contributed to Art in America’s website, Artspace, and Jezebel, for whom she wrote “Blue is the Warmest Color and the Lesbian Experience.” She graduated with the class of 2013 with a degree in Art History. Annabel Daou Program in the Arts 1989 Annabel Daou was born and raised in Beirut and lives in New York City. Her work takes place at the intersection of writing, speech, and non-verbal modes of communication. Recent solo exhibitions and performances include: your secret is safe with me, Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin (2014); Fortune, MoMA PS1 (2013); you say I want revolution, Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York (2012). Recent and upcoming group exhibitions include: Territoire d’Affects, Beirut Exhibition Center, Beirut (2015); Art=Text=Art, UB Anderson Gallery, The University at Buffalo, New York (2014); Marking Language, The Drawing Room, London (2013); Discussing Metamodernism, Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin (2012); Political / Minimal, Kunstwerke, Berlin/Muzeum Sztuki w Lodzi, Lodz, Poland (2008/2009); Democracy in America, Creative Time, The Park Avenue Armory, New York (2008). She represented the U.S. at the 12th International Cairo Biennale and was awarded a Biennale 125

Prize. Daou is co-founder of dBfoundation (www.dbfoundation.org), dedicated to creating and fostering ephemeral edifices and intangible structures. Projects include Aporia: Aporia: Aporia, included in A Wicked Problem at EFA Project Space, New York (2014); CAFÉ at the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (2009); Disarmory, New York (2008); Aporia at EFA Gallery, New York and LACE, L.A. (20062007). Daou is co-founder of S2A (s2anyc. com) a platform for the arts based in New York. Lizzy De Vita English and Art History 2008 Lizzy De Vita is currently at Yale School of Art, where she is an MFA candidate in the Sculpture Department. She took printmaking classes in college and worked at Pace Prints before shifting her practice to focus on performance. De Vita has exhibited at the Invisible Dog Art Center, Carnegie Museum of Art, the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, McCagg Gallery in D for Devotion, curated by Emma Quaytman (BC ‘11) and Alicia Mountain (BC ‘10), and Concrete Utopia, a gallery project space run by Melanie Kress (BC ‘09) with Mountain, Quaytman, and Kate Ryan. Dahlia Elsayed English 1992 Dahlia Elsayed is an artist and writer who makes text and image based work that synthesizes an internal and external experience of place, connecting the ephemeral to the concrete. She writes short fictions for created landscapes that take the form of narrative paintings, installations, and performance. Visually, the work pulls from conceptual art, comics, and cartography and uses symbols of hard data (flags, signs, borders, geologic forms) to frame soft data (wordplay, metaphors, lists, idioms) allowing image and language to continuously modify each other. Her work has been exhibited at galleries and institutions throughout the United States and internationally, including the 12th Cairo Biennale, Robert 126

Miller Gallery, BravinLee Programs, The New Jersey State Museum and Aljira Center for Contemporary Art. Her work is in the public collections of the The Newark Museum, The Zimmerli Museum, Johnson & Johnson Corporation, The US Department of State, amongst others. Dahlia has received awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Edward Albee Foundation, Visual Studies Workshop, Women’s Studio Workshop, Headlands Center for the Arts, and The NJ State Council on the Arts. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. Elsayed is Assistant Professor of Humanities at CUNY LaGuardia Community College in New York. Christina Kelly English 1993 Christina Kelly is a filmmaker and visual artist. With films, drawings and public projects Christina playfully engages with local ecology and history. Her work has been presented at Proteus Gowanus, The Silent Barn, The College of New Jersey Art Gallery, video_dumbo, BAM, The New Festival, and the Brooklyn International Film Festival. In 2010 she was a LMCC Swing Space resident on Governors Island. She has received support for her projects from the Brooklyn Arts Council’s DCA, NYSCA and TIER re-grant program, and the DOT Urban Art Program. As a film and video editor she has worked with the filmmakers Ramin Bahrani, Casper Andreas and the visual artist Judy Radul. She currently shares workspace in Brooklyn with a six year old lego fanatic. Eunice Yooni Kim Art History and Visual Art, minor in Ethnic Studies 2013 Eunice Yooni Kim is a printmaker, writer, and curator who lives in New York City. Though born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, she also calls South Texas home. Her most recent work involves deconstructing silk flowers and rearranging them into symmetric forms based on 19th century botanical texts; she has been a member of the print studios

at the Gowanus Studio Space since May 2013. This is the third show that she has curated with Vanessa Thill, but would like to believe that their collaboration began when they met in high school. Eunice’s interests include the shifting photographic culture in contemporary protests; the history of information dissemination, from printmaking to the internet; and the legacy of travel-writing through reality television. In September of 2014, she launched Censoriously (www. censoriously.com), a blog on race and gender in contemporary art. Carol Kino English, Creative Writing 1980 Carol Kino writes about all aspects of art and the art world – artists, museums, galleries, auction houses, art history, the market, museum issues, and art law. Her work appears regularly in WSJ magazine, T Magazine and the New York Times, among others; she is also a contributing writer at Art + Auction. Her work has appeared in many generalinterest publications, including Slate, The Atlantic Monthly, and The National (Abu Dhabi). She has been a USC Annenberg Getty Arts Journalism Fellowship twice, in 2007 and 2011. Chris Kraus Chris Kraus is a writer and filmmaker. Her books include I Love Dick, Aliens & Anorexia, Torpor, Summer of Hate, and nonfiction: Where Art Belongs, and Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness. She is the coeditor of Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotext(e) Reader and the editor and originator of Semiotext(e)’s Native Agents imprint, which publishes radical and feminist writers like Kathy Acker, Eileen Myles, Kate Zambreno, and Michelle Tea. Melanie Kress Art History and Visual Art 2009 Melanie Kress is a curator and writer based in New York. She is the High Line Art Curatorial Fellow at Friends of the High Line and one third of the

writing collective The Rare Element. In 2010 she co-founded the New York-based project space Concrete Utopia, of which she was Director and Chief Curator until its closing in 2012. In this role she produced projects in collaboration with institutions including the New Museum’s Festival of Ideas for the New City, No Longer Empty, and Recession Art. In 2009 was the recipient of a Curatorial Fellowship at Slought Foundation, where she contributed to the projects John Cage | How to Get Started and Architecture on Display: On the History of the Venice Architecture Biennale. Her projects have been featured at Artists Space, New York; Art in General; New York; The Invisible Dog, Brooklyn; Bétonsalon, Paris; Schalter Projektraum, Berlin; and the Deptford Old Police Station, London. Alongside her independent curatorial practice, she has published numerous exhibition publications featuring accompanying theoretical and creative texts, notably Potluck | Dialogues (2009), MANIFEST–O (2010), i am not a good enough feminist (2011), and Dona Nobis (2012). She holds a BA in Art History and Visual Arts from Barnard College, Columbia University and an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London. Margaret Lee United States History 2001 Margaret Lee was born in 1980 in the Bronx and continues to live and work in New York. As an artist she has exhibited extensively both in the US and abroad and has participated in exhibitions including Made In L.A. 2014, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the 12th Biennale de Lyon, France; New Pictures of Common Objects, MoMA PS1, New York and The 6th White Columns Annual, New York, amongst others. As a curator, Lee founded the artist run space 179 Canal from 2009 - 2010 and has curated projects at White Columns, New York and the X-Initiative, New York. In 2011, Lee partnered with Oliver Newton to open 47 Canal, a commercial gallery in New York, which acts as an extension 127

of her curatorial practice and ongoing commitment to supporting emerging art. Anna Liang Art History and Visual Art, minor in Economics 2013 Anna Liang uses sound to uncover meaning. Her art work explores topics at the intersection of her professional life, personal life and spiritual life. Anna was born in Guangzhou China, but spent her formative years in Queens, New York. In addition to her pursuits in the art world, she is an Associate at Citibank. She is an alumna of Barnard College, where she completed a major in Art History and Visual Arts and a minor in Economics in 2013. Louise McCagg English Literature 1959 Louise McCagg is a sculptor who has exhibited through the United States and internationally. She received her MFA from Michigan State University and built two geodesic domes to serve as her studio and foundry. She worked there for twelve years, creating life-size sculptures and producing commissions for public artworks. She is skilled at manipulating metals and she developed her own casting system. She lived in Budapest, Hungary during the 1960s, where she was influenced by the political culture of Eastern Europe. She exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2009 with Hungarian filmmaker Peter Forgács. In 2010, McCagg collaborated with the South African artist Senzeni Marasela in a performance and exhibition that took place at A.I.R. Gallery in New York. She has also collaborated with the Fisher Ensemble from Seattle for a recent performance at The Judson Memorial Church. Solo exhibitions have included, A.I.R. Gallery, New York, NY; Lyman Allyn Art Museum, New London, CT; Center for Creative Arts, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI; SculptureCenter, New York, NY; Nippon Kan Theatre, Seattle, WA; Petöfi Museum of Literature, Budapest, Hungary; King Saint Stephen Museum, Budapest, Hungary; and Westwerk, Hamburg, 128

Germany. Her artist books are in the collections of The New York Public Library, New York, NY; Yale University Library, New Haven, CT; University of California, Santa Barbara, CA; Stanford University, Stanford, CA; Herron School of Art and Design, Indianapolis, IN; University of California Library, San Diego, CA; Petöfi Museum of Literature, Budapest, Hungary; and National Széchenyi Library, Budapest, Hungary. Andrea Metz Art History 2014 Andrea Metz majored in Art History at Barnard. Her senior thesis, entitled “After Apartheid: William Kentridge’s Ubu and the Truth Commission”, was written under Prof. Rosalyn Deutsche in the spring of this year. Currently, Andrea lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and works as a Litigation Paralegal at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP. Claire Mirocha Claire Mirocha is a curator and artist originally from Tucson, Arizona, where she studied contemporary art and the Middle East. Now based in New York, she co-founded Sorry Archive, a platform for exhibitions produced by alter egos that have so far included border-town taxi drivers, experimental archaeologists, and eukaryotic cells. With Alex Lombard, she runs Blind Arch, a publishing and multiples organ for inane and out-ofplace objects. Ada Potter Art History and Visual Art 2011 Ada Potter is an artist and curator living in New York. She is currently an MFA candidate at Pratt Institute, with a focus in sculpture. Her work re-stages products such as screens and webcams, making these forms tangible by printing them on organza, mylar, and acetate. Her objects seek to perform a multiplicity of material realities that underline the anxieties technology can incite.

Sara Grace Powell Art History and Visual Art 2014 Sara Grace Powell has maintained a solid practice of performance over the past few years. While she was a student, she curated exhibitions at AMO Studios, PostCrypt, and 111 Front Street. Also during her time at school, Powell experimented extensively with incorporating slime molds into her three dimensional work. She has exhibited and performed at such venues as Muddguts, 99 Cent Plus, Peninsula Art Space, Brooklyn Fireproof, A.I.R. Gallery, the Last Brucennial, Luck You Collective at The Newsstand, and various vacant spaces throughout the city. Ali Rosa-Salas Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, concentration in Dance 2013 Ali Rosa-Salas is cultural worker from Brooklyn, New York. She is a proud graduate of Barnard College, where she was Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies major and danced in works by Beth Gill, Heidi Henderson and Faye Driscoll. As a Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, Ali co-curated RE: PURPOSE, a visual art exhibition and performance series at FiveMyles. Her upcoming project, NO SUCH THING AS NEUTRAL, is a symposium sponsored by the Barnard Center for Research on Women about the contributions of Flex and Lite Feet to the contemporary dance landscape. She is also the curator of the 2015 Myrtle Avenue Partnership’s Black Artstory Month. This year, Ali was selected for the AUNTSforcamera Residency at the New Museum, where she and collaborators Salome Asega and Chrybaby Cozie will make a video game using Kinect software to teach the original Harlem Shake. Alongside her curatorial projects, Ali is the assistant editor of TOP RANK magazine and a dance critic for BroadwayWorld. She also teaches precious 5th graders how to non-awkwardly rhumba as a Teaching Artist with Dancing Classrooms.

Kate Ryan Art History and Visual Arts 2009 Kate Ryan is a photographer and designer from Kailua, Hawaii, currently living in New York City. Her photographic practice is based in the darkroom, where she creates images from her life. Ryan’s work has been exhibited at Concrete Utopia, Night Gallery, the Frame Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, the Center for New Media and the Arts, and Columbia University. She co-curated and edited the exhibition and anthology i am not a good enough feminist in 2011 with fellow Barnard alumna Melanie Kress. Recently, Ryan was assistant designer of the book Women in Clothes by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits and Leanne Shapton. She is currently designing for Chai Wallahs of India with authors Resham Gellatly and Zach Marks. Lara Saget Art History and Visual Art 2012 Lara Saget’s work considers the subtleties of human form, examining the body from the inside out with the intention of encouraging an ontological awareness. She uses methods of sculpture, installation, performance, and video to delve beneath the epidermal surface into the inner workings of the microcosm that is the human body. She is interested in how the human body creates a perceptual relationship to the outside world. Lara has participated in many exhibitions in New York City, Brooklyn, NY, Los Angeles, CA and Paris, France. Her most recent exhibitions include R E T R O S P E C T in 2014 at RePopRoom in NYC, Seeking Space in 2014 at The Active Space in Brooklyn, NY, Call for Bushwick: The Extensions of Human Being in 2014 in Brooklyn, NY, BFC Presents What’s Next in 2014 in Brooklyn, NY, the CLIO Art Fair in 2014 in NYC, Interior in 2013 at Studio 200 in NYC, and Multi-Channel Pt. I in 2013 at Launchpad in Brooklyn, NY. Lara curates student exhibitions at Barnard College, and she additionally curates independent up-and-coming artist 129

exhibitions throughout New York City and Brooklyn. Lara lives and works in New York, NY. For more information regarding Lara’s work, please contact laramsaget@ gmail.com or visit larasaget.com. Daryl Seitchik Art History and Visual Art, minor in English 2012 Daryl Seitchik is a cartoonist living in Philadelphia. She ices cupcakes for a living. Her comic strip “Missy” updates sporadically on tumblr (darylseitchik. tumblr.com) and is also available in printed issues through Oily Comics. In August, she was nominated for an Ignatz Award in “Promising New Talent.” Most of her work is based on her life. Most of what she remembers never occurred. Valerie Smith Art History 1979 Valerie Smith served as Chief Curator for Artists Space (1981-89), where she organized exhibitions and projects that included: Antoni Muntadas, Alfredo Jaar, Zoe Leonard, Diller/Scofidio, Min Joong group, Jîrí David, Judith Barry, James Coleman and Michael Asher, et al. She edited Artists Space’s 25th anniversary book, 5,000 Return to Artists Space, conducting 200+ interviews. She was the Director of Sonsbeek 93, Arnhem, Holland, a recurring international exhibition established in 1949, for which she commissioned 48 site-specific installations by artists such as: Mirosław Bałka, Juan Muñoz, Ann Hamilton, Paveł Althamer, Alighiero e Boetti, Annette Messager, Mike Kelly (The Uncanny), etc. She became Chief Curator and Director of Exhibitions for the Queens Museum (1999-2008) where she organized many exhibitions including: Crossing the Line (2001) - new works by 40 artists sited throughout Queens; Joan Jonas (2003), a survey for which she won an International Association of Art Critics Award; Down the Garden Path, The Artists’ Garden After Modernism (2004) for which she was granted an Emily Hall Tremaine Curatorial Award; 1.5 Generation (co-curated with Tom Finkelpearl, 2007), 130

installations by Pablo Helguera, Ellen Harvey, Emily Jacir, Mingwei Lee, Shirin Neshat, Seher Shah, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Nari Ward. She became Director of Visual Arts, Media and Film at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2008-2012), initiating the on-going project series, Labor Berlin, for foreign-born, Berlinbased artists and she curated numerous exhibitions, among them: Rational/ Irrational (2008), Tadashi Kawamata, Qiu Zhijie (2009), Uber Wut (2010), Ulrike Ottinger (2011) and Between Walls and Windows, Architecture and Ideology (2012) with new commissioned by artists and architects such as: Javier Téllez, Klara Lìden, Michael Rakowitz, ngela Ferreira, Institute für Architektur und Urbanistik, Wang Shu: Amateur Architecture Studio, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle. She also curated the touring exhibition: Juan Downey: The Invisible Architect (MIT, List Visual Arts Center). She is currently teaching “Exhibition Histories, Europe and America, 1966 to the present” at Barnard College. Joan Snitzer Joan Snitzer is the Director of the Visual Arts Program at Barnard College, where she has been teaching since 1986. As an artist, she has exhibited numerous times at A.I.R. Gallery in New York, as well as at Galerie IzArt, Pont-Aven, France; Warsawski Targi Sztuki, Warsaw, Poland; Sandvikens Konsthalle, Sweden; Galerie Kurt im Hirsh, Berlin, Germany; 2B Galeriá, Budapest, Hungary; The Museum of Arts & Crafts, Itami-shi, Japan; David Nolan Gallery, New York; Tollhouse Art Center, Scotland; Galería Ajolote Arte Contemporáneo, Guadelajara, Mexico; Juaquin Mercado, San Juan, Puerto Rico; and Kathryn Markel Gallery, New York. She has dedicated much of her career to developing and maintaining the visual art department at Barnard, which has now produced nearly 30 graduating classes of talented women.

Vanessa Thill Art History and Visual Art, minor in English 2013 Vanessa Thill is an artist, writer, and curator. She makes mixed-media sculptures using found objects, dollar store items, and synthetic compounds like silicone and plastic resin. She has shown new sculptures in four short-term exhibitions in 2014. This is the third exhibition she has curated with Eunice Kim since graduating. Her largest project before Lucid Gestures was a group show called Multi-Channel, Pt. I at the now-defunct Launchpad in Crown Heights, Brooklyn that included video animations, performances, kinetic sculptures, ceramics, audio pieces, yoga, and a science lecture. She works with Sorry Archive, a platform designed by Claire Mirocha and Joie Estrella Horwitz for creating exhibitions involving bizarre narratives and alter egos. Her next exhibition is And The Villagers Never Liked You Anyway, an art show set up as an indoor archeological dig at the Knockdown Center, presented by Sorry Archive, November 7 to 30. Mierle Laderman Ukeles History and International Relations 1961 Ukeles graduated from Barnard in 1961 with a major in History and International Relations. Her senior thesis was on “Checks and Balances in the History of Tanganyika Territory”. Throughout her work and continuing to this day, she has investigated representations of service work, especially in cities, the relationship between labor, gender dynamics and the creation of democratic culture. Since 1977, she has been the official, unsalaried artist-in-residence of the New York City Department of Sanitation, during which time she has produced many performances and projects with maintenance workers. She has participated in numerous exhibitions worldwide, notably including WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, the first comprehensive survey of feminist practices from 1965-1980. Some of the venues that have

hosted her performances and exhibitions include: the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Brooklyn Museum, the Queens Museum, The Kitchen, White Columns, MoMA PS1, the Jewish Museum, The Whitney Museum, A.I.R. Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Serpentine Gallery London, Grazer Kunstverein, Kunstlerhaus Vienna, the Negev Desert, Pier 99, Fresh Kills Park, Storefront for Art and Architecture, The Drawing Center, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, The New Museum, Artists Space, and the Institute of Contemporary Art London. She has been the recipient of many grants and awards and the topic of numerous articles and essays. She is represented by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York. Emily Weiner Art History and Visual Art 2003 Emily Weiner is co-director of artistrun space Soloway, founded in Brooklyn in 2010. She also runs an exhibition series and living room salon called The Willows. She has exhibited at A.I.R. Gallery, Kravets Wehby Gallery, Concrete Utopia, and in Re-turn at McCagg gallery, a show curated by Julia Westerbeke (BC ‘03) and Marley Blue Lewis (BC ‘05). She recently completed an Artist Teacher Residency at Cooper Union and has also been a visiting professor at Pratt, School of Visual Arts, Dia: Beacon, and Barnard College. Julia Wolkoff Art History and Visual Art 2014 Julia Wolkoff graduated cum laude from Barnard in 2014 with a major in Art History and a concentration in Visual Arts. She produced both written and studio art theses that explored themes of decoration, historical recreation and consumer identity. Julia was awarded a CJC Grant for her Visual Arts thesis project and has contributed essays to Goddess, Heroine, Beast: Anna Hyatt Huntington’s New York Sculpture, 1902– 1936 at Columbia’s Wallach Art Gallery and Joan Snitzer’s Compositions (both 2014) at A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn. Additional writing has appeared in Art F City and 131

Art in America, where she is currently editorial assistant. Chloe Wyma Art History 2011 Chloe Wyma is a New York-based writer and art history student. She graduated from Barnard in 2011, receiving honors from the Art History department and an award of distinction for her undergraduate thesis on Hannah Wilke’s critical engagement with Marcel Duchamp. After graduating, Wyma worked as a writer and editor at Artinfo.com. In 2013, she began her doctoral studies in art history at the CUNY Graduate Center, where her research interests include feminist and critical theory, performance and social practice, and the circulation of contemporary art in today’s political economy. Beyond her academic work, Wyma is an associate editor at the Brooklyn Rail and has published essays and art criticism in the Rail, The New Inquiry, Dissent, and other venues. Nicci Yin Art History and Visual Art, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies 2013 Nicci Yin is a graduate of Barnard College, having studied Art History with a concentration in Visual Arts alongside Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is currently a Post Baccalaureate Fellow at the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW), where she works on media, writing, and research. Marina Zurkow Performance 1981 Marina Zurkow focused on performance while at Barnard from 1980 to 1981, earning her degree from SVA in 1985. She explores environmental concerns using new media formats such as digital animation, interdisciplinary design, participatory scenarios, and public interventions. She uses materials and technologies including food, software, clay, animation, mycelium, and petrochemicals (when necessary) to foster intimate connections between people and non-human agents. Recent solo exhibitions of her work 132

include bitforms gallery in New York; the Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey; Diverseworks, Houston; her work has also been featured at FACT, Liverpool; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Wave Hill, New York; National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; Bennington College, Vermont; Borusan Collection, Istanbul; Pacific Northwest College of Art, Oregon; Marian Spore, New York; 01SJ Biennial, San Jose; Brooklyn Academy of Music; Museum of the Moving Image, New York; Creative Time, New York; The Kitchen, New York; Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria; Transmediale, Berlin; Eyebeam, New York; Sundance Film Festival, Utah; Rotterdam Film Festival, The Netherlands; and the Seoul Media City Biennial, Korea, among others. Zurkow is the recipient of a 2011 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. She has also been granted awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Creative Capital. She is on full time faculty at NYU’s Interactive Technology Program (ITP) in Tisch School of the Arts, is currently a PNCA Research Fellow, and lives in Brooklyn, NY. She is represented by bitforms gallery.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all of the artists and writers, as well as the following individuals, for making this show possible: JOAN SNITZER, for her long-standing commitment to Barnard arts; NICCI YIN and CLAIRE MIROCHA, for the design of this book; SOPHIE WHITIN, for help with editing; JANET ARMUTH WOLKOFF (Barnard College ‘75) and NEAL WOLKOFF (Columbia College ‘77), for their support of the Visual Art Department at Barnard, which in turn helped to produce this project; PATRICIA KEIM and the 125TH ANNIVERSARY COMMITTEE; MELANIE KRESS and NATALIE BELL, for challenging us and pushing us in the right directions; MEGAN MAQUERA and ERIN WOO, for the poster design; CHRIS KRAUS, the instigator, and Semiotext(e), for permission to reprint the excerpt from her book; LARA SAGET, for administrative help; ELISABETH SHER, for her loving preparations; and our family and friends. All copyrights reserved.

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cover image: Mierle Laderman Ukeles Washing, Tracks, Maintenance: Outside Performance at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT July 22, 1973 Courtesy of the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NY