WCA 2010: From the Center: Now!

January 22 - February 25, 2010

For a larger view and/or more information, click on the thumbnails below:

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This exhibition, sponsored by the Women's Caucus for Art (WCA) and juried by Lucy Lippard, includes two parts. One that is both exhibited at Woman Made Gallery and viewable Online, and one that is featured in this Online Gallery only.

Artists Represented:

Woman Made Gallery: Enee Abelman, Katharyn Addcox, Catherine Blackwell Pena, Christie Blizard, Julie Bradshaw, Donna Catanzaro, Alejandra Chaverri, Emily Corbato, Priti Gulati Cox, Cat Del Buono, Liz Dodson, Henri Doner-Hedrick, Tara Fadenrecht, Virginia Fitzgerald, Christine Giancola, Sari Gilbert-Batchel, Kristi Hargrove, Sharon Harper, Delanie Jenkins, Christy Kelly-Bentgen, Mary King, Khara Koffel, Kathleen Laybourn, Margaret Leininger, Anya Liftig, Meg Madison, Mays Mayhew, Cindy Rehm, Kim Rogers, Marjett C. Schille, Shizue Seigel, Linda Stein, Deborah Thomas, Marydorsey Wanless, Darlene Wesenberg Rzezotarski, Ellen Wetmore, Deborah Alma Wheeler, Nancy Youdelman.

Online Gallery: Katharyn Addcox, Leslie Aguillard, Mariona Barkus, Karen Bondarchuk, Lydia Brockman, Donna Catanzaro, Marie Cenkner, Dail Chambers, Henri Doner-Hedrick, Stephanie Doty, Louise Glass, Karen Gutfreund, Kathy Halper, Shaqe Kalaj, Christy Kelly-Betgen, Dorotha Grace Lemeh, Meg Madison, Lily Mayfield, Freyda Miller, Avinger Nelson, Myrrh (Gertrude Reagan), Patricia M. Rodriguez, Alice Sharie-Revelski, Deborah Thomas, Mona Waterhouse, Darlene Wesenberg Rzezotarski, Sallie Wolf

Juror(s): Lucy Lippard
Lucy Lippard is an internationally known writer, activist, and curator from the United States. She was an early champion of feminist art, and among the first writers to books on contemporary art including From the Center and The Pink Glass Swan, and the recipient of the 1968 Guggenheim Fellowship, the Frank Mather Award for Criticism from the College Art Association, and two National Endowment of the Arts grants in criticism. She has written art criticism for Art in America, The Village Voice, In These Times, and Z Magazine. In 2007 Lippard received the Women’s Caucus for Art’s LifeTime Achievement Award.

Juror's Statement
"Jurying is a painful process, almost as much so for the juror as for the juried. After the initial selections, the remaining decision can be really hard to make. I always choose too many, so this show will be crowded. I miss slides, which were bad enough as stand-ins for a direct experience. The digital format is even less fair to much work, but there is no other choice today for national competitions. That said, I also enjoyed reviewing such a vastly varied group of works demonstrating that feminist art and ideas are alive and well.

Interestingly these works radiate not much further from the center than they did in the early 1970s. There is more polish and perhaps less passion than in the wild and woolly early days of the Women’s Art Movement. But just because some of these images have become familiar over the years, does not, alas, mean that they are any less relevant. At the level of social justice, a huge amount of progress has been made and a huge amount of progress remains to be made.

Of course every jurying process is immensely personal, and because of my own work, I tend to select pieces dealing fairly directly with content. A number of artists courageously confronted child abuse and domestic violence, cultural differences, family traumas. I was struck by a certain melancholy, balanced by an assertive independence and a welcome sense of humor. Another thread, so to speak, was the number of pieces on clothing, specifically dresses. How many of us wear dresses on a regular basis? Not me, for sure. Yet these dresses seem to represent fantasies. They are for little girls and sexy sirens, representing our childhoods (happy and unhappy) and the dreams of glamour and success that remain intertwined in the female image, often seen through a lens of irony or disillusion.

Given the fact that so many of the leading eco-artists are women, there were fewer images than I had hoped for dealing with environmental and political issues, which affect us as women as much as more intimate issues. (I’ve always agreed that the personal is political, but the political is also personal.) Overt Lesbian images also seem to have fallen by the wayside since the 1970s, despite the fact that Queer theory has grandly expanded that field.

I was given, of course, no names and no information whatsoever about the artists, so I have to hope that I’ve included some younger women whose feminism (or not) can be expressed in ways less visible to me in my own seventies. Not surprisingly, the videos were less reminiscent of feminist classics; this is a medium that has come into its own more recently. Nor was there any way for me to tell if any of the art selected was collaborative, a process I consider deeply feminist, brought home in the recent debut of The Heretics -- a film on the Heresies Collective, which provided many of my own epiphanies, a major inspiration to risk more, to support rather than to compete with other women, and to respect the power of more than one.” -Lucy R. Lippard