Being an artist, it’s being engaged in a mystery. There is something about making art that is involved
in such a tangible abstract experience of living that it really does feel like an engagement in a
mystery. So from very young I’ve always been interested in the unseen, in the unknown, the
unexplained, the unexplored. By making art it gives me a vehicle to work with this. It gives me a root
and a direction to kind of understand what words don’t give us and to kind of understand also what’s
around us all the time and what’s around us all the time and what we take for granted, which when
you make art there are many things that manifest themselves that you are just familiar with in such a
way that you don’t realize that they are special. So even watching a sunset sometimes is something
we can take for granted but when you are an artist and you look at a sunset in a special way and
than you work with your art in relationship to that, it becomes or it can become a whole new world.
Well, I think an artist in society can and should have a role of being a spokesperson. Leading and
guiding people to an insight, which the artist has, or hopefully is working towards. So that as you
make your art, you begin to develop an understanding which when the art is finished the viewer has
an opportunity to experience. And it’s about that mystery, its about that kind of very ephemeral
unspoken unseen places that’s within us that the artist is sharing with the person. That has a lot of
political, social and spiritual ramifications because if you are talking about a kind of peace within or
kind of turmoil within of which you are looking to resolve than you’re presenting to the viewer a
place where they can examine that within themselves. And have another dimension, another way to
look at things other than a concrete form. Because we are so, almost imprisoned with concrete
reality in our culture that we forget that it’s only part of our existence. And so art is really about taking
people from that place to another space. Or can be. I mean I don’t think all artists are interested in
doing that. Some artists are just interested in working with their mind. Other artists are interested
only in working with their sensate feelings. But to me one needs to put it all together to really make a
kind of presence so that the viewer can have a way to rethink things perhaps.
Well, for me my route of direction has been probably I was trying to place it in time in my live but I
think my route in direction from very young has been feminism. You know the questions about what
women’s art is really like and if we had an opportunity to experience the world they way we should
than I think that we would really advance ourselves in a way that we can’t at the moment or it was
very hard and I think that that’s my place as an artist is to present this point of view. And that’s my
place in the art world too and I think in a lot of cases the art world may be close to me because it’s
not a very popular point of view. It’s changing now because the younger generation is seeing
feminism as a very necessary essential part of existence, which of course we, all the feminists have
always known and we’re beginning to embrace each other in a new way. So I would say that my
place in the art world is about speaking from the voice of the feminine, speaking from the voice of
the goddess, whatever that means, and the voice from the (not clear: infinite power of women
within?). And I think I have a lot to say about that. And I think it’s very valuable for men as well as
women and don’t think it’s important to say it in big bright letters. I think it’s there and I think people
experience it.
Well, I had a traditional art education at a place called the art students league, so it wasn’t an
academic collage setting. But it was still as patriarchal as anything. The sculpture teacher for
instance, of course a male, there were really only maybe a couple of women who were teachers at
that time and those women taught children or I think maybe there was one who taught design and
I’m talking about the 1960’s. So the sculpture teacher used to come to class and he used to give
demonstrations to the ladies. And he, lets say, pick up clay and put it in his hands and shape it and
said: Ladies you make the work like hamburgers and he’d slap it onto a wall. Or hotdogs and he roll
up a hotdog and slap it onto the wall, and it would go on like that so on and so forth. And then after
he finished the demonstration with the ladies he’d go out to lunch with the men. And that was the
way, that’s a good metaphor for the way art school was for me. Most of the women were told that
they were good artist who were there to be excellent wives to a male artist. They would be very
supportive and be very perceptive because that was really their role in live was to be an accessory.
So I think that’s most why women artist were brought to experience art school in
those days. I mean I don’t think it’s changed a great deal because there is still an underlying part that
exists today. But nobody would say that anymore. So that planted a seed in me and than this first
piece I made, a major work of mine, it really belonged to me, was a huge maple, carved maple, a
piece of the crowning. You know the crowning is the experience of the actual birth. Well, that’s what
its called in English, I don’t know what it would be called in another language, and so it was the
actual sensate feeling of the crowning of when my daughter was born. And it’s an immense piece. I
have some nice pictures of it. So that piece I think was a seed piece because it was about feelings
and it was about the intellectual experience of feeling and it was about an expression of a female
experience. One of the ways in which art was dealt with in those days, was that if you didn’t like a
work of art and or if it was done by a women, and you felt it was not so good you would say that this
work is to personal. You would always say, that person doesn’t make very good art because it’s too
personal. So personal was something that was deeply looked down upon. And the women’s
movement came along and just smashed trough all of that, and so this is my first conscious
awareness just before the women’s movement started because my daughter was born in 1967 and
the women’s movement started in 68\69. It was beginning in 67. So as that information came from
the women who were working on change, like I was working on change and we were all working on
change, most of us in isolation. Some of the women were very political so they were working on
change in a more broader scale in the world in terms of politics but those of us who were artist in
the New York art world were working on a kind of understanding of where our inner forms came
from and giving ourselves permission and saying the personal is political. Here we are and we’re
gonna make art out of that deeper place inside of us. Too bad guys, thats not what we feel and
figure out a way how to make that seen. How to make that really become part of our environment
and part of the art world and it did happen. I can’t say that it happened as well as we would liked it to
happen. Someone was pointing out the other day that most of the women’s work that did get
known came out of the same kind of place that was already set up like a conceptual reverence, or
some kind of sort of reverences that were already established in the male environment, so that was
the case. But now I’m thinking that maybe that’s gonna change because the younger generation of
artist make work that is so different in many ways. I as an older artist, a women artist, because it is
gender specific in some ways. I as a women artist have to make myself look at some of this work, I
have to tell myself, ok I don’t like it, but if I don’t look at it what will I ever learn and maybe I’ll
understand it and maybe liking is not that important anyway. Maybe really understanding and dialog
and dynamic is the most important. Which is what I always believed in anyway. But when you are
contested with that, when you really experience that out front like that, than you have to rethink, you
know, o yeah I don’t care if people don’t like my work, but what about this work that I don’t like
either, what does that mean. So a lot of the younger women artist, who make works that I don’t
understand, and I don’t feel comfortable with but I don’t really think that that’s a reason not to
experience it and find a dialogue with it, or lack of value. I mean it has real major value, much of it,
and of course its fun to get to know them then because I can have a dialogue with them, too.
Most of the women in the New York art world worked in solitary. Most of the women in California
worked in groups. And a lot of times we think that that’s why the California women feminist
women’s art experiences got more attention because there were large groups. Whereas the women
artist in New York, most of them worked singularly in solitary in a much more traditional manner.
And many of them didn’t want to be just called feminist artist. Many of them wanted a broader term,
even though they were working of and out of a feminist place. So as the years began to develop in
the 1970s and as we were doing, consciousness was raising more and more, and we started to think
myself, and the school started with myself and five other women, but many of us began to think and
talk and explore whether or not there really was a women aesthetic, whether or not women had a
particular unique way of making art, and whether or not women had a particular vision that would
be expressed in their art. And so since it was a whole new movement, we really thought we are
gonna solve this quicker than we did. But you know women have been oppressed for thousands of
years, we are not gonna change that in 20 years or 5 years or 10. We are not. So we don’t know. And
mostly now people don’t talk about this anymore, but it is possible somehow, sometimes to see the
women’s work has a bit of different touch to it. Maybe in a hundred years, maybe two hundred years
we will be able to know. Maybe we’ll never know, maybe it doesn’t exist. But that was the basic goal
of starting a feminist art institute. Plus women in art school have my experience. There will be special
classes for the ladies. They were just diminished, they were told that they were going to be excellent
artists for male artists as a husband. So they were always diminished, and they were made to make
art that didn’t come from inside of themselves. You know, women would go into art school and
they’d be so excited to go to collage, to get a degree in art, They’d been so excited because they
would be making art and they would have all this images and ideas. And they’d get to art school and
their teachers, who were all male, would say, no you don’t make it like that. And you are not gonna
graduate, you are not gonna get a good grate if you don’t follow this formula. And there are many
different formulas, but there were formulas, male formulas. So New York feminist art institute NYFI,
wants to just demolish that. Now your work from within, now you see what you are, what your
forms are, and what you want to make from them. And so that’s how that began to build. So we get
women from all over the country. Some women would be very young, our oldest student I think was
around 67, 68 at the time. Hellen, I have some pictures of these, I showed them yesterday. And we
were exploring that. And out of that came some very interesting art. I can’t say that its particular
female, because after that men, began to make art like that too, so I don’t know. But it was exciting,
it was vital, and it made them revive within them the sense of making art, with excitement they had
all their lives, to become an artist which had been lost. Many, many people from graduate schools
came, who just dropped out or went through graduate school and never made art again, because
they just couldn’t take working at this formula. So we start making a formula and they fell in love
again. So that was the idea, I guess we could call it falling in love with art in a way that belongs to
you. You know, not somebody out there of one or another.
