CIRCA 89 Art Education Supplement
THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT IN ART EDUCATION
It is remarkable, looking back over the history of the intersection of the women's movement with the art world, with what regularity art education has been a crucial site of activity. The various liberation movements of the late 1960s produced many activist protest groups such as New York's WAR (Women Artists in Revolution) and WSABAL (Women, Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation), which later inspired Fanny Adams (London, 1980s) and the Guerilla Girls (1980s on). Alongside this, autonomous groups of artists, like Womanspirit (Bristol, 1970s) or WAAG (Women Artists Action Group, Dublin, 1980s) have been legion, forming as support groups for women in particular places or with particular interests; so too have been groups such as the socialist-feminist Hackney Flashers (1970s-1980s London) or anti-nuclear Sisterseven (Sheffield, 1980s). Mass-membership organisations, like WCA (Women's Caucus for Art, U.S.), or Women Artists Library (London) have lasted many years. But underlying all this activity has been the site of education.
For many women, art school provided their first adult experience of institutionalised sexism. When I studied Fine Art in 1975-79, I was taught by just one woman, an art historian (a second taught printed textiles, which I did not study). Today I teach in Belfast, and am the only full-time woman aligned to Fine Art—teaching mainly history and theory; two others are employed half-time (with ten men full-timers, four half). The problem is not Belfast's alone; the story is repeated in many colleges. Limerick, I heard recently, has no women teaching Fine Art. Where are the women of my generation, who formed 50% of the class of ‘79? Where are the women tutors, mentors and role models for the 60% of the class of ‘99 who are women?
The implications of this structural sexism are wider than simply one of ‘equal rights', as can be demonstrated by the usual response of an institution to its realisation of gender imbalance: make use of the visiting lecturer budget. But what can be achieved by a woman in one day's teaching? In the early ‘90s I was invited to do a lecture and an afternoon's tutorials at an art school which had better remain nameless. "We'd like a lecture on women artists," I was told—imagine a male lecturer being patronised in the same way; and in the tutorials I discovered that women had been advised not to attend, as my lecture "would not be relevant" for them. While such anecdotes are easily either dismissed or sensationalised, the underlying issues of responsibility, livelihood, pedagogy, and professionalism are usually not addressed by the liberal ethos of the art establishment.
Even at the level of employment, the issue is not really one of equal rights. It is more complex. As many men know, without an art-school job (or the good fortune to have a marketable product in the right place at the right time), one's practice may well not survive more than five-six years beyond graduation date—particularly if children arrive. Those who persist against the odds often work in dire conditions and live in poverty. Visiting lecturer gigs do not provide a regular cheque, security for house-buying, raising children, planning old age—or buying art materials and renting studio space. But even here, the mythical figure of the struggling, alienated artist is one constructed around masculinity.
Back in the institution, the effect of the gender imbalance among the privileged few carries momentous consequences not only for those with a regular cheque, access to the latest books and catalogues, workshop support, space to discuss the problems and pleasures of making art. It also has monumental effect upon the next generation of artists. While those visiting lecturers have no input to course development, no impact upon pedagogical practice, no say when it comes to assessment, the isolated woman member of staff is just one voice, and she has to think strategically about maintaining professionalism, decent working relationships, and a sense of her own equilibrium. This is the case whether or not she may be feminist, whether or not being in a minority is an issue for her, whether or not the workplace culture is overtly ‘masculine'. Beyond this, there are less quantifiable issues of pedagogical practice, ranging from the artists or writers a tutor might reference in a tutorial, to the student-tutor relationship, to the structure of seminars, to the definition of assessment criteria—to the issues of whether there is a ‘feminine sensibility' or ‘gendered vision', the impact of life experience or gendered subjectivity upon the content and processes of art, or the more politicised questions of what might constitute feminist aesthetics or strategic practices.
This returns me to my earlier comments about the crucial importance of education as a catalyst in the women's movement in art. Back in 1971 Judy Chicago taught what is considered to be the first feminist art-practice course at Fresno; the following year, at the California Institute of the Arts, she and Miriam Shapiro co-taught a Feminist Art Program. Shapiro wrote at the time:
We do not teach by fixed authoritarian rules. Traditionally, the flow of power has moved from teacher to student unilaterally. Our ways are more circular, more womb-like; our primary concern lies with providing a nourishing environment for growth. Classes begin by sitting in a circle; a topic for discussion is selected. We move around the room, each person assuming responsibility for addressing herself to the topic on her highest level of self-perception. In the classical Women's Liberation technique, the personal becomes political…We are artists. We search for subject matter. It is often wearying to struggle alone for the courage to bring material to the surface which would be fit for artistic form. In our group we make laws based on mutual aesthetic consent to encourage and support the most profound artistic needs of the group. [1]
By this time, after just three months, the group (students and tutors together) had produced Womanhouse, a germinal example of feminist practice. The program, which lasted only one year, produced such graduates as Suzanne Lacy (performance artist, latterly Dean of California College of Art and Crafts), painter and theoretician Mira Schor; performance and cyber-artist Faith Wilding, and many others who are known as artists today. Other graduates made educational interventions, establishing the Feminist Studio Workshop and the Women's Building in L.A. and the New York Feminist Art Institute, and becoming respected educators themselves.
The year before Shapiro published her account of the program, Linda Nochlin published her germinal example of feminist practice, this time in Art History: Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? [2]. Her ironically-titled essay began the questioning of the ideological structure of Art History as an academic field, including the notion of ‘greatness'. This sprang from the first feminist Art History course: Nochlin ran The Image of Women in the 19th and 20th Centuries in spring 1970 and with her students did primary research which proved that there had been great women artists, but that they were either not written about, or were discussed in pejorative terms or in terms of their appropriate or deviant ‘femininity'. Two years later, women in the College Art Association collated course descriptions of literally dozens of new courses with such titles as ‘Women and Art', ‘Images of Women', ‘Feminist Art Program'. The publishing of research findings and art activity had begun in earnest, both in northern America and Europe. Today there is no excuse in the English-speaking world for any course on art history or contemporary art not to include a good proportion of examples by women, and for discussion of the gendered nature of cultural production and the writing of its history to take place.
In art colleges here, things were different. In Ireland and Britain courses were single-subject: students went to art school and made their art, usually with a bit of art history thrown in for good measure. In the US, undergraduate degrees, built by students from a myriad of what they call ‘courses' (a cross between a seminar session and a module), and the system of ‘majoring' and deferring single-subject specialism to post-grad level, allow staff to propose courses following their own interests—or student demand—in a far more flexible manner. The huge growth of explicitly feminist courses in the 1970s U.S. could not happen here because of the different educational structure, which was more informal and liberal, and thus less amenable to intervention, than the American system. Instead, students self-organised, and graduates continued as small groups on a shoe-string. Women's groups were set up in a large number of colleges, lobbying created a circuit of ‘visiting lecturer' gigs; gossip was exchanged. WAC (Women in Art for Change) in England was a student-run conference, responsibility for which passed from one college to another for a number of years. Probably the most significant student group, it acted as an information exchange, a chance to hear speakers from other colleges and to form local strategies.
The second time I spoke as a visiting lecturer, way back in 1981, I had been asked to talk about women in Art Education. Today in some respects it feels as if little has changed since then: lack of appropriate teaching, and the issue of sexual harassment in particular are often ‘dealt with' by institutions, but scratch that surface and the results often don't bear too much examination. Women students, however, have greater expectations than I had when a student; it is a privilege to work with them to help them to develop their subjectivity and languages, and to articulate those expectations. Some institutions even have feminists running Fine Art courses… But in liberal structures, ‘equal rights' means ‘normalisation', ‘every one being the same as the dominant group', so we are still usually stuck with art and its history as supposedly neutral, gender-free activities, sometimes with a bit of ‘women's art' tagged on. The reason feminism is still a dirty word in colleges is that it is political: it demands that structures and ways of thinking shift—as Lucy Lippard said, who wants a bigger slice of a rotten pie? We need a new recipe. I'll be a post-feminist when feminism has achieved its goals.
[1] Miriam Shapiro, The Education of Women as Artists: Project Womanhouse, Art Journal, Spring 1972, Vol. 31, No. 3, p. 268
[2] Linda Nochlin, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?, Artnews, January 1971, pp. 20-39 & 67-71
Hilary Robinson lectures in Critical Art Theory and Practice at the University of Ulster, Belfast.
Bibliography
Judy Chicago, Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist, London: Women's Press, 1982, especially Chapters 4 and 5
FAN (Feminist Art News), no. 10, 1983, Special Issue: Education
Sue Findley, Painting by Numbers: Employment Equity and the Ontario College of Art, Fuse, Summer 1990, pp. 25-37
Judy Loeb (ed.), Feminist Collage: Educating Women in the Visual Arts, New York: Columbia University Teachers College Press, 1979
Griselda Pollock, Art, Artschool, Culture: Individualism after the Death of the Author, Block, no. 11, pp. 8-18
Faith Wilding, The Feminist Art Programs at Fresno and CalArts,1970-75, in The Power of Feminist Art, ed. N. Broude & M. Garrard, New York: Abrams, 1994, pp. 140-157
Women's Studies Quarterly, v.15, n.1-2, 1987. Special Issue: Teaching About Women and the Visual Arts
