the feminine critique

Keren Tully Arizona Daily Wildcat Feminist artist Miriam Shapiro stresses the importance of never giving up on yourself as an artist even if the work is not selling. She said that once you start making art for money, you have lost the whole purpose of art and therefore you have lost yourself.

Doogan, a professor at the University of Arizona and a member of the Board of Directors of the College Art Board, told a story from one of her first jobs as an artist in New York working at a graphic design firm.

Doogan recalled being invited to a meeting between the firm she was head designer for and the firm's prospective client. At the meeting, Doogan remembered feeling inexplicably out of place until it was pointed out that the establishment in which they were meeting was a men's club. The embarrassed client insisted that this was a meeting between them and the head designer, who was assumed to be a man. Implicit in their statement was the kind of pervasive sexism that would propel the feminist movement into action in the coming years.

Judith Golden, like Doogan, encountered substantial friction to her desires to pursue art as a career.

"My family didn't want me to be an artist at all," said Golden, who now makes a living as an artist and teacher, and through various local and state art grants. "[They] wanted me to get more 'traditional training.'"

karen c. tully Arizona Daily Wildcat

Traditional training, for Golden, translated into the skills necessary to finding herself a wealthy husband.

Miriam Schapiro, whose work is presently on display at the Tucson Museum of Art, is touted as one of the leaders of the feminist art movement and the pattern art movement. Unlike Doogan and Golden, she received considerable support from her family and her husband Paul Block. Nevertheless, Shapiro couldn't shake an ever-present "veil of insecurity."

While in New York, Schapiro and Block spent much of their time at the Cedar Club, which Schapiro described as "one of the strongholds of Abstract Expressionism, presided over by the king - [Willem] DeKooning."

DeKooning, who gained considerable acclaim among Abstract Expressionists, painted a number of aggressive and often dehumanizing paintings under the title "Woman." These paintings have been since railed upon by feminist critics.

"If you were a man," said Schapiro, "you walked into the Cedar Club, you had lots of confidence, [and] you made your way from table to table. I had a husband, and therefore there was a sign on me that read: 'Don't bother her.'"

While the Abstract Expressionists plumbed the depths of their emotional potential through painting, the emotional impact of the marginalization of their female counterparts went wholly unexamined.

The wife of Willem DeKooning, Elaine De Kooning, was "a writer, [and] belonged to a group of critics," explained Schapiro. "There were many women in the club, sitting quiet, and [Elaine] knew that the wives of those artists were very good artists themselves."

As a result, Elaine De Kooning curated a show of all women artists, of which Miriam Schapiro was a part.

"This was long before feminism," said Schapiro.

When feminism did begin to gain attention, a whole set of institutional and psychological undercurrents in society found expression in the works of artists and writers.

"I remember," said Golden, "reading Betty Freidan's Feminine Mystique - I was on an airplane and I turned to the man next to me and said, 'Isn't this exciting?'"

When Doogan discovered that designers with less experience and less seniority than herself were making more money at the graphic design firm, she took action.

"I did the manifesto thing, the Martin Luther thing," said Doogan, "and I quit anyway."

When Doogan moved on, she moved on to education, and in the direction of the University of Arizona.

"When I first taught at the University," said Doogan, originally hired as a graphic design teacher, "I was the only woman on the faculty."

"At the point where there were five women on the [art] faculty, out of a total of forty," explained Doogan, "it was said we were taking over."

With 50 percent of the arts faculty at the University of Arizona comprised of women, what might they be saying now?

"We need more people of color," said Doogan.

"The way changes came about," said Schapiro, "is [that] women have learned how to empower themselves, through grants, through public arts, through commissions...the changes have occurred because women have democratized art."

"I think the reason why there's so many women going out in the art world," said Doogan, "is because of the increasing number of women faculty."

"This whole show is about women's culture, anonymous women, so called 'ordinary women,'" explained Schapiro.

Throughout history, the genres of art in which women have entertained some support, from quilting to photography, have been constantly degraded as non-fine arts, or craft practices. In an attempt to undermine this degradation, Schapiro elevated these "crafts" to the status of fine art.

In the Museum of Art's retrospective, Schapiro's skill as an artist and as a craftsperson can be viewed in terms of medium, and through the lens of time.

"Certainly Miriam Schapiro hasn't sacrificed those symbols which have been part of her work for the beginning," said Golden.

But, Schapiro warns, "feminism is not a style...feminism [is] concerned with everybody, with the social inequities...[and] as long as there is a large gap between the haves and the have-nots, feminism does not succeed."