Introduction
In the very first issue of womanart magazine, dated Summer 1976, I indicated that this new magazine aimed to supplement the-then lack of sufficient “literary discussion of the work of women artists.” We did that and more. The Power of Feminist Art said that this “exemplary Brooklyn-based quarterly” (1) was “a careful balance of the historical and current;” (2) we looked closely at the contemporary art scene, always mindful of the myriad women artists overlooked or suppressed by history or by the power structures of the time.
For seven issues, concluding in Spring 1978, I think womanart succeeded in its goal; we added badly needed coverage of the exhibitions and ideas of women artists, past and present, of events and special projects about or by women artists. Through feature articles, exhibition reviews and news reports, we increased the available literature about women artists both quantitatively and qualitatively. Just in reviews alone, we published discussions of the work of hundreds of women artists (plus a few men) in solo and group exhibitions in New York and elsewhere. We sold copies on newsstands and sent issues out to subscribers and to libraries at museums and universities. We even sold T-shirts.
The magazine holds up as literature that is both a time capsule and timeless. This new website, womanartmag.org, represents my desire to have the full contents of the magazines available to scholars, students, historians, critics, curators and artists by digitizing the issues and making them searchable, by adding full guides to artists and articles in each issue on every issue’s home page.
Now, over 40 years after our first issue, the way we communicate about art has changed; there are many new ways to converse about art, to exchange ideas and images, and I’m happy to say that many of those conversations are about women artists.
But, while the number of those conversations may feel like progress, and while there are more exhibits of art by women, there are important ways in which women artists seriously lag behind their male counterparts – or are missing altogether.
Data assembled by the National Museum of Women in the Arts and available on its website is damning. Women artists are, in many important ways, virtually shut out of both museum collections and leadership, and out of auctions, if not vigorously suppressed. Here’s how NMWA introduces its data:
“People in the art world want to think we are achieving parity more quickly than we are.” — Susan Fisher Sterling, NMWA Director
“The truth is that women have never been treated equally in the art world, and today they remain dramatically underrepresented and undervalued in museums, galleries, and auction houses.”
In September 2019, information emerged that solidified this statement. According to an analysis by Artnet and by In Other Words, a podcast and newsletter, the belief that women artists had made a lot of progress in important ways was illusory; according to the new report, from 2008 to 2018 only 11 percent of art acquired by the country’s major museums for their permanent collections was by women.
The New York Times coverage concludes, “The perception of change was more than the reality,” said Julia Halperin, executive editor of Artnet News and one of two lead authors on the new report. “The shows for women were getting more attention, but the numbers actually weren’t changing.”
And, only two percent of global art auction spending in that time period has been on work by women artists, according to coverage of the report in The Guardian.
Now what?
The art world has changed, art media have changed, artists have changed. The struggles that feminist art magazines like womanart, Feminist Art Journal and Heresies (to name a few), documented, and the artwork they explored and exposed, may seem only of their time; in fact, the struggles of women artists to reach true parity, as documented in the reports named above, continue today by important measures.
As always, the Guerrilla Girls have a great take on this situation. Can their call for “More creative complaining!! More interventions!! More resistance!!” begin to spark a new women artists’ movement? Can the Artnet report? Perhaps those are just what we need – to start.
Acknowledgments and Thank Yous
womanart began with the desire to present its coverage of women artists packaged in an attractive, retail-ready magazine. A product of the ‘70s, womanart started (and pretty much ended) on my dining room table; producing womanart involved typing edited articles, ads, et al on rented typesetting computers, doing paste-ups at home and in an office, stripping negatives at the printer, and delivering the printed issues via shopping bags and then – success! – a van.
Of course, a dedicated community of writers and workers started womanart magazine and kept it going for seven issues over two years.
Most important was Gyorgy Beke, my collaborator, art director, designer, and photographer. Without him there would have been no womanart.
Thanks as well to Barbara Cavaliere, Cynthia Mailman, Vernita Nemec, Gloria Feman Orenstein and Elena Borstein, who worked in various important capacities. And many, many thanks to the writers, who like all of us, were unpaid volunteers. Their expertise and the women they wrote about were our most important contributions to the literature about women artists. They are all listed in the artist indexes.
The womanartmag.org team includes coder and mediagirl Anna Brown, who created this website, Blue Leaf Book Scanning, graphic artist Adam Fredericks, and archivist and collaborator Rachel Cockrill.
My ongoing debt of gratitude is to my mentor, Lawrence Alloway --
-- and to my husband, Mike Cockrill.
Ellen Lubell, Editor and Publisher
Brooklyn, NY
January 2020
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(1) Rickey, Carrie. “Writing (and Righting) Wrongs: Feminist Art Publications,” in The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, Harry N. Abrams, New York, p. 123.
(2) Ibid.