Reprinted with permission of the Times Union, Albany, N.Y.
by Timothy Cahill
Staff Writer, Times Union
To get an idea of what women artists used to face in the press,
consider this excerpt from a 1941 review in Cue magazine of an
exhibit by Louise Nevelson:
"We learned the artist is a woman in time to check our enthusiasm," the
critic wrote. "Had it been otherwise, we might have hailed these
sculptural expressions as by surely a great figure among moderns."
This quotation, reprinted at the beginning of the catalog for
"Crossing the Threshold," sets the tone for the exhibit of 32 women
artists, all over the age of 70, opening this week at the
University
Art Museum at the University at Albany. While it's difficult to know
exactly how to take this artifact of critical chauvinism — was this
attitude commonly seen in print, or is this an
unusual example? — the mere existence of the quote demonstrates
what women once faced plying their art.
But that was more than a half-century ago. Why do he need a special
exhibition for women artists in 1999?
"No one bothers to look at yesterday until someone yanks their cord,"
said Bernice Steinbaum, who curated the exhibit. "My idea was that it
would make connections. To show younger women that these women had a
harder time."
Broad survey
The exhibit is a broad survey of artists, some all but unkown, while
others, such as Grace Hartigan, Helen Frankenthaler and Louise Bourgeois,
are already part of art history. Steinhaum organized the exhibit in 1997
for her own Steinbaum Krauss Gallery in New York, and is now traveling it
to 25 venues around the country through 2001.
The show contains more than three dozen works of art representing a
variety of media, from traditional fiber weaving to ceramics to abstract
painting. Among the highlights are 82-year-old Mary Adams' intricately
constructed ash-wood basket in the form of a wedding cake,
Muriel Castanis' classically inspired female
sculpture constructed entirely from
epoxy-sized cloth, and Gladys Lander's surreal photograph of New
York's Easter Parade.
At the University Art Museum,
the show also features work not
included in the New York show.
Steinbaum stipulated that each new
venue add three local artists to the
existing mix to "demonstrate that
art is alive and well and does not just
live in New York."
Museum director Marijo Dougherty
amended the stipulation
slightly, inviting Kingston-area
photographer Lilo Raymond into
the exhibit and expanding the selections of two of the artists already
included in the show, Toshiko Takaezu and Edna G. Lazaron. By
borrowing from two private local
collections, the museum is able to
offer an impressive display of Takaezu's elegant ceramic jars and Lazaron's
quirky, inventive artist's books.
Steinbaum's gallery is largely devoted to women artists and to what
she calls "artists of the American school —
African-American, Asian-American,
Latino-American and Native American." In conversation, the curator is
earnest and high-minded, affecting a
kind of wonder in her voice that one
doesn't usually associate with downtown dealers.
She speaks in terms of art as "magic" and says things like,
"through the making of art we make connections, and we make community."
It was in such generous and generalized terms that Steinbaum spoke of
the museum show during a recent telephone interview from her gallery.
"I call the show `Crossing the Threshold' to say that . . .
a lot of these women burned a lot of bridges behind them," she said.
The original title of the show was "Crossing the Threshold with Thelma
and Louise," referring to the characters in the 1991 film who transform
themselves from dutiful drudges to rebellious wildwomen in the course of
an accidental crime spree. Steinbaum dropped the film reference after
prospective college venues objected that it sent the wrong message to
their students.
"They felt that `Thelma and Louise' encouraged lawlessness, but to me it
implied risk-taking. All of (the artists here) have taken a risk —
they went against the grain. It wasn't about money.
It was about passion — they gave into their passion."
Along with gender, the exhibit celebrates longevity. Steinbaum insisted
that each artist be at least 70
years old to be included (the oldest,
potter Beatrice Wood, was 105) and still be actively working.
"It's about survival — the indomitable spirit," said Steinbaum.
"Nobody told these women that at a ripe old age their creative
juices stopped flowing."
Three artists, Wood, Clyde Connell and Lois Mailou Jones, have died
since the show's New York opening.
Steinbaum's sex- and age-specific show harkens back to a period in the
1970s and early '80s when women-only shows proliferated. While the
curator is convinced such a show remains necessary —
she acknowledged that some artists refused to take part specifically
because it was built around exclusive categories.
"Their careers had moved on, and they were above this," explained Steinbaum,
who would not name any of the women who declined. "They wanted to be
judged by their work and not by their gender. Of course, that's what we
all want."
For the artists in the show, the question of being singled out by sex
and age received mixed reviews. Not all the naysayers are missing
from the exhibit, and the most vocal was Grace Hartigan, who spoke
by telephone from her Baltimore studio.
"I hate being ghettoized. What in the world is the point?," said the
artist, whose 1962 painting "The-The" is familiar to Capital Region
art fans as art of the Empire State Art Collection. "I call this the
old broads show. How about the old geezers' show?"
To Hartigan, who in the late 1940s and '50s
was part of the New York School of painters that included Jackson
Pollack and Willem de Kooning, the suggestion that older women
artists endured onerous prejudice runs counter to her experience.
"I was never the recipient of any kind of prejudice from the artists I knew,"
Hartigan insisted. She said she agreed to take part in the show after
learning that Frankenthaler, Bourgeois and Agnes Martin were also in it.
"Once I found that some of the women I respect were going to be in the show,
I didn't want to snub them. I did it because I respect (them)."
Sex-prejudice wasn't a problem for
Lilo Raymond either, who began
working as a photographer in the 1960s.
"I never felt any discrimination. Whether you were a man or a woman never
came across," she said, adding that in her perception gender-lines have
never been as strict in photography as they may have been in other
disciplines.
"It's not really a medium where you
can say `That's by a woman; that's by a man."
Painter Clare Romano also admitted the show's demarcations "took me
back a little bit," but she said that
overall the exhibit "is historically interesting and historically correct.
Women have been overlooked in galleries and museum collections.
It's been very hard."
"I've always felt (like a pioneer), Romano added, "I had a sense of
responsibility to be the best I could be."
Beatrice Riese, born in Germany in 1917, recalls that although she knew she
wanted to be an artist at age 7, her dreams were never taken seriously.
" The idea was to study to spend your time, until you found a
suitable husband, and then you raised your family. You were not working
on a career or a future," Riese said.
Riese was one of several artists who noted that age was more often a
stumbling block than gender. "Commercial galleries wouldn't take in an
artist over 40," she noted, a point Fay Martin Chandler experienced directly.
Chandler didn't begin studying or making art until after her 40th birthday,
and soon encountered age discrimination.
"Quite a number of galleries were interested when they saw my slides,
but when they saw me they weren't," she said. "I could see it in their eyes,
a look of, `Why haven't you already accomplished something?'"
While the artists had different points of view on past discrimination,
all agreed that gender has nothing, to do with actually making art.
"Nobody's equal in art," insisted
Hartigan. "You just do what you were born to do."
American school
Longevity at work
Mixed reviews
Stumbling block
Crossing the Threshold
University a Albany
State University of New York