Art critic Lucy Lippard’s first outing as a feminist curator in 1971 has, until recently, been almost entirely absent from history.

While Lucy R. Lippard’s work as a pioneering theorist of art and feminism is renowned, her first outing as a feminist curator has, until recently, been almost entirely absent from history. In 1971, she organized Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists for the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Today it is widely considered to have been the first feminist exhibition in the United States, and it marked the debut of several unknown artists who would later become stars, among them Mary Heilmann, Howardena Pindell, and Adrian Piper.

I first heard of Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists around 2008, when I was simultaneously researching Lippard’s “numbers shows”(1969-74),  including her feminist-conceptual exhibition C. 7,500 (1974), and writing an essay for the book Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, which I also co-edited. In the latter, I was exploring the fact that, during the 1970s, MoMA collected almost no work that engaged directly with second-wave feminism, and that the few works by women artists it did collect during this era were almost entirely abstract. I became particularly interested in the artists Alice Aycock, Mary Miss, and Jackie Winsor, all three of whom were personally involved in the feminist movement but whose activism was absent from their works in MoMA’s collection. All three also participated in Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists, and in my interviews with them described the profound experience of participating in the exhibition. I was keen to find out more about this largely forgotten show.

Η συνέχεια εδώ.