 Executive Director of Linthurst. I am joined by Nancy Carlyle, a senior curator at Historic New England, and Becky Hart, who is the former Contemporary Curator at Denver, an independent curator and consultant. So we're happy to have everybody. What we're going to be doing today is a series of three presentations followed by a private tour. For those of you who are online listening to us virtually, the session is going to be recorded. We will have a link that can be shared in the future. After each presentation, which will be 45, 50 minutes or so, we'll have time for questions. We will try to get to questions from the internet, but we have a lot of curators with us in the room today. And so I have a feeling we may have a significant discussion among ourselves in the actual attendance. And so we may not be able to get to those questions online. Linthurst is a property of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and this program is part of a series of four virtual presentations that are part of the National Trust initiative where women made history. There is one more that we're going to be having, which is on Thursday the 20th at one. It's a conversation between Lucy LaPard and artist Harmony Hammond. For those of you who don't know, Lucy LaPard was a critic in the 60s and the 70s. She wrote the review of the Womanhouse exhibition for Ms. Magazine. So that gives you a sense of her history in feminist art. And they will be talking about what happened initially in the 60s and 70s and if and how things have changed today. So if you'd like to listen to that, please sign up online. It's the last of our series. They've been extremely well attended. They're free. You just have to register in advance. So let's turn to today and what we're talking about. We're really going to be talking about where women's work fits in the museum environment. There's a lot of recalibration, I think, going on among museums, how they fit what they do. And I think one of the things that we're going to do is look at that in relationship to women's work and to Lindhurst as an institution. How does this exhibition fit into our overall mission as an institution? Where are museums as public institutions today? And as a house museum, where does Lindhurst fit into this larger museum discussion? And as a result, why does women's work make sense as an exhibition and a little bit of how it involved? And finally, I'll give you, before we actually do the tour, a little bit of the behind the scenes overview on the creation and how the exhibit evolved. So I think in the first question, where museums are today, I think there's actually a story of success for museums in popular adoptions as museums is somewhere to go. When you think of the long history of museums in New York and America, and you look back, for example, to the Met and the way Edith Wharton described the institution, there's a point in the age of innocence where two protagonists are supposed to have indiscreet assignation. And when they're trying to decide where they should go, they settle on the Metropolitan Museum of Art because they know it's completely appropriate for them to be there as upper crust New Yorkers. But there will be absolutely nobody there to spy on them. And essentially, that is where museums started as places for those who knew they were supposed to be there, which was a very small group of people. You move forward at somewhere like the Met to Thomas Hoving in the 1970s, introducing the Blockbuster exhibition, the characters that took in common. And what those exhibitions that the Met did were make museums places that average people went, which was not something that they did previously. And then you get to what we have going on today, something like the Van Gogh experience, which you see pictured here, which is something where you don't even need the paintings, you just need the electronic vision of the paintings so you can experience them. So in many ways, there's really been a switch over time through the success of museums determining or knowing who their audiences were and who they were supposed to be, you know, to the audiences determining whether they were coming or not. And that really is a huge, you know, switch, I think for museums, and in many ways speaks to the success of museums. But this creates a need for a more considered response from museums as to what they are and who they're going to be because it's no longer about what you think is important. It's what the public thinks is important in many ways. You know, and this is responding to the fact that audiences for museums have very much changed. When you think of those of us who were trained in the traditional art historical canon, you know, and accept that there is a canon in hierarchies, I think many of us have broader interests than those that we were originally trained with. You know, I'm the type of person who studied Dutch and Flemish art and I'm one of the few people walking through the Flemish galleries at the Met, looking at these tiny little lovely paintings and even I'm thinking to myself, you know, how are these going to hold up against, you know, a huge work by somebody like Chubalala Self that's got a lot more presence and engagement. So if I'm not being captured anymore, then, you know, the others, the other issue is for those who really aren't trained in the canon, and there's not necessarily a validity to accepting a canon, how does this stuff work for them? And it doesn't necessarily. As well, artists are becoming more demanding. And one of the things that we've realized is artists as an institution related to museums oftentimes have a lot of power because in some senses they're the celebrity audience now that everybody is looking at. I have one artist, Nuffees White, who's in the exhibition, and she said something that I think is very valid. She said, I don't like performative talk. I want sustained action. And I think that reflects what many of these newer artists are looking at. They don't care, you know, who the museum is. They care how the museum relates to them and that they're being, they're being looked at appropriately and shown appropriately. And I think one of the things that a lot of people have talked about is the fact that pandemic and social movements that we've had recently have, to a certain extent, accelerated some of these trends. But I think many of these trends have long been there. I don't think museums have necessarily recognized them. They don't have a choice anymore to recognize them. So I'm one of the agnostics. I don't think it's the recent movements that have actually done this. I think the museums have done this. And with those recent movements, there's no going back essentially. And part of this is audiences want to be met where they are. When we look at our exhibits now, one of the things I often look to is what I call the Whitney model of exhibitions. It's almost like there's object overload. There's too many things on the wall. There's lots of things on the wall and on the floor. And some of this in my mind is because you need to provide enough things for the visitor to hang themselves for them to find something that they like, because they're not going to like everything. They might not like a lot of it, but they need to find something to engage with the exhibit. Attention spans are very short these days. And one of the issues with that is also about labels and how you approach the labeling of an exhibition. People simply don't read sometimes a little. But what we see is if they're going to read a label, it's because they've visually seen something that has captured them. They then will look at the label to see what it is. So each label that you do has to have the spike in it. It has to have the interest that basically captures the whole essence of the show, because they're probably not going to read most of them. They might read one, two, or three. That gives you three to five sentences at the most to say who you are with every object, with every show, not very much more. These exhibitions also have to be visually intuitive for people. And this is one of the big issues that we're often faced with. First off, the way that people walk around and view exhibitions this day, these days is like this, picture, picture, picture, picture, Instagram, Instagram, Instagram. So really in many ways, even for sophisticated people, if your exhibit doesn't exist on Instagram, it doesn't exist. And so people need to be able to connect with things that they see visually. You know, it's very interesting to me, I'm on the board of the Eldridge Street Synagogue Museum and was, when Peaky Smith did a new window for the edifice, I was there when she presented her concept and she's incredibly cogent and smart when she's talking about why she does what she does. But she rarely wants to talk about her objects. It's very hard to get her to talk about her works. She wants people to actually look and have that visually intuitive experience of learning how to look at things, which I think is very important. And the last thing I would say that about audiences is you need to provide audiences opportunities for discovery. You know, telling people that something's important to me doesn't work as well as letting them find what they think is interesting and what they like and then engaging them on that. Julian Fellows, when he's writing his shows, always says, I hate shows where they tell me who I'm supposed to like and who I'm not supposed to like. I want people to figure that out for themselves. And I think he's very cogent and I think that's very true when you look at exhibits now. People have to be given the opportunity to find ways in. So how do house museums like Lindhurst fit into this whole perspective of where museums are these days? Well, first off, we often serve what I would call an entry level audience. But we also serve those in the Arterati who go everywhere and know everything. We typically get a lot of families who are desperately trying to introduce their 10 year old to the cultural experience. And if they don't like it, they can run around outside. We get people who don't think of themselves as museum goers because this is a little easier to see. But as is the case today, we also get people who know exactly what they're looking at and have looked at things for 50 years. We're also often generally looked at below traditional museums. And I think there's a relationship to domesticity and houses that labels us as less important. And of course, as we talk about women's work and his derivations out of woman house that of course becomes very important. But I think there's an opportunity for us in this environment in particular to reclaim a position of significance based on a number of things. We have an experiential offering and that is very timely for people. There are a lot, especially as you get younger, what they want to know is what's the experience, not what's the story of the exhibit. There's a greater license, I think for us as smaller institutions to explore new ideas. If you're the met, you have to vet everything that you say in every curatorial decision that you make, because once you've said it, it is in the art world, it is law. It is accepted broadly. I think house museums like us have more with an open opportunity without being reckless to really bring up things that need further research and might be true. And also, I think there's a place based presence that house museums have that offer a certain kind of authenticity and elevate the human interaction with artworks and that experience with artworks that you don't necessarily get in a regular museum. There's a way to come in to discover. So I think house museums really have a great place in current society in the way that current audiences are. Speaking about Lynn Hurst specifically, there are a few things that we really focus on that are appropriate and why this exhibition was appropriate for us. We look at the development of unique American culture. We're first built in 1938. We don't become a house museum until 1965. So it's after the revolutions till after World War II, that period in which America goes from being the importer of culture to being the exporter of culture. And one of the things that we always look at is the fact that American culture was never as linear or as one sided as historically described. It's not Washington chopping down a cherry tree. There's a lot of other stuff that was always happening in there. And in particular with Lynn Hurst, we had five owners. And of those three were definitely women. The first owner, the money came from the wife, not from the husband. So we always say we had three and a half women owners of the five. So a very significant history of women owning, constructing, changing the house. So we often examine at Lynn Hurst's often overlooked history of women on American culture. And I'll give you an example. We did a Tiffany show a number of years ago. Everybody assumed all the Tiffany in the house came from Jay Gould, our best known, you know, owner of the houses, the railroad baron who's being made famous in the Gilded Age again. Well, he actually dies before Tiffany has his heyday and really most of the things that were collected and in the house were from his daughter Helen, but she was the daughter, not the, the rainmaker. And so, you know, oftentimes we're able to correct inaccuracies like that. One of the things that is very true about what we see at Lynn Hurst is, you know, the wealth that was created here creates privilege and quoting Jenny Holzer here, money always does create taste. And that's something that we're able to see that because you have money here in significant ways, you're able to do things as a woman that other women weren't able necessarily to able to do till 50 or 100 years later. There's a huge history which is here of women and philanthropy and that impact on the country, particularly before you have government and civic institutions, women and landscape and nature, which is very true here. Much of the landscape that you see is the one created by Helen Gould, women and education and economic opportunity. Again, Helen Gould had a sewing school and a cooking school to educate women on her staff and in the community to give them more economic opportunity. Madam C.J. Walker, the famous first black millionaire in the United States lived down the street. She did the same thing for women of color. And then, of course, women in the arts, the patronage, the taste that women were expected to display, but often were overlooked for the men who were the professionals. So all of these things we have at Lynn Hurst because of our history and ability to really sort of show and to really discuss. So let's talk about this in specifics to this exhibition, the development of women's work and how that happened. Well, one of the things about it is it was supposed to come, it was supposed to open in 2020. And of course, the pandemic gave us the gift of time, which is one of the few gifts of the pandemic, to really rethink the exhibit. And it went from being 60 works to about 125 works in that. And it initially started as an exhibit about the history of marginalization of women artists by men, but switched to being about the revolution of women artists and the wholesale change of how women influenced how art contemporary art is created. And it went from being us rather than telling the story of what the marginalization of men telling the women what they can't do. We thought to ourselves, wouldn't it be better to actually tell the story of what the women did do, could do, beside telling that story of what the men thought they should or shouldn't do. And I think in that we really switched the sense of the exhibition from being one about a story of struggle to being one of accomplishment and celebration. And I think that is very important because I did want when people see this exhibition to be one where they thought, you know what, this is really cool, this is really pretty, this is really great, rather than, oh God, we're not getting there, you know, the things that we see every day, it's like are we moving backwards or are we moving forward politically. So, you know, I think that switch was a really important one to the zeitgeist of this exhibition. And where it started from initially was there was a woman named Helen Molesworth who was the curator in the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and she was dismissed, she based, Jeff Koons was going to give them $40 million and have an exhibit and she said, you know what, I don't think Jeff Koons needs another exhibit. We need to start showing these women who are not part of the scene, who are not getting shown, who are not getting sold. And when that happened, I thought to myself, okay, why are women being marginalized? And at the same time, another thing that I ran on to, I think because of an exhibit I saw at the Jewish Museum was this photo that's up here of the Erasables. For those of you who may not know, in I think 1950-51, there was a group of abstract expressionist artists who basically had a protest. They were protesting against an exhibit being done by the Met and saying, you know, you're not taking abstract artists and we want to be in there. And it was, and they did a huge protest in this photograph, as you can see, has one woman very prettily dressed with her handbag hanging in the front standing at the top. And the point was they did not want her there because for them, this was a careerist move. One of the things that happened with the WPA, as many of these artists for the first time, got a salary. And rather than seeing themselves as misfits, they saw themselves as breadwinners and careerists. And this was all about cementing, you know, in the 50s, the man's thing as, you know, providing for the little lady and for the home. And they felt that women as artists diminished that. And so that's where this all started. I thought, okay, let's talk about this. And one of the other things that I actually was thinking about and started with, there was an exhibit called Two Jewish at the Jewish Museum and actually Norman Cleveland, who was the curator of that fabulous exhibit. It just, it always stuck with me as one of the great exhibits where people told a story through disparate artworks and told an interesting and broad story. And just generally the feeling of that exhibit very much influenced me. But the switch that we made was to celebrate Womanhouse. So Womanhouse, for those of you who don't know, Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro in Los Angeles, 50 years ago, the first exhibition of feminist women art. And what we thought we would do instead is recognize that revolution. Because really by changing the types of things that were considered the domestic things, the women, the traditional women's handcrafts that we use that they incorporated into art, that started something that was not that was initially for women. But now is something that has completely changed what we think is an appropriate meeting for art and how artists work. And again, as I said, it wasn't the story of what men said you couldn't do. It's the story of what women could do and did. And I think at a certain point you really have to start, have you think that story of men saying no is a bad story? At a certain point you basically have to say, you know what, why am I telling that story? Why do I continue? Let's tell something else. So the challenge for us is that we thought initially that we wouldn't be able to get contemporary art. The contemporary art world, you know, if you're not a fair, if you're not a venue, don't care about you, you don't mean anything. But it was surprising to us. That was the easy stuff to get. A lot of women artists immediately understood the concept. They understood the title. They really wanted to be part of it. And as we accumulated women who were lending the exhibition, it was easier for us to go to galleries to go to museums and the contemporary stuff poured in. The historical pieces were actually much harder for us to find. And what was even interesting is when you go to a lot of the museums that have folk art or traditional arts, there was huge amount of stuff that every, you know, every sailor, male sailor in the world had, you know, rooms and rooms of all the stuff they did, all the itinerant furniture makers, all the itinerant painters. Women, it was like, yeah, pretty much quilts and samplers was about it. And a lot of those institutions didn't want to be publicly associated with this work being shown, which they didn't see as significant. And there really seemed in particular to be a professional bias where a lot of the women curator and the women professionals drank the Kool-Aid. I remember once said to me, like, why are you sticking us with sewing? We can be real painters now. The artists, not a problem, the dealers got it. A lot of the professionals didn't actually, it was actually Ulysses Dietz, who's also here with us, who introduced me to Nancy Carlyle, which is how we got a lot of the historic things for Historic New England, which has the collection, is interested in the collection, works with the collection continually. And again, initially, you know, a lot of what we thought is we were going to elevate all these contemporary women artists who Helen Mollsworth pointed out were, you know, being discriminated against. But what we realized as we looked at many of the names that we had, a lot of what we were seeing is, okay, so maybe Jeff Koons, you know, works are selling for 40 million and Louise Bourgeois selling for four million, you know, and there's an inequity there. But it's like, you know, these are, these, you know, there was the terroir of international money around all of this. It wasn't like we were sort of, you know, you know, manning the ramparts here. And we surprisingly realized that the elevation that happened was of the historic works that had less credibility. And when we put them together with the works by contemporary artists, women who recognize that work themselves and adopted it, that actually was what got elevated. And I think in the combination, this long arc of American women as a creative force and an artistic force in American culture, that's really what got clarified and what we elevated in the end. So for those of you who haven't yet been in one of the galleries or in the mansion to see, let's talk about what this women's work exhibition is and how we basically put that into play. So it's at its heart, it talks about the adoption by contemporary artists starting in the 70s and through today of the domestic handcraft tradition. All those artists in the 70s were taught to be housewives. They knew how to do this stuff. They did it. It's structured through side by side comparisons. And as you can see here, there's a work approximately from 1720 and 2020. So we're talking about 300 years of work in America of women doing these creative things place side by side. And it's about agency. It's about the fact that women didn't always have the agency to be considered artists, but they knew they were being creative. And a lot of the early stuff is saved because it's passed down and cherished by women and the contemporary women who then can come up and say, you know what, I've got the agency to do something with this and tell the real story that my forebears may not have been able to do. And I'll go through some of the ideas that are in this exhibit. So as I've said, a lot of the gestation of these ideas happens over hundreds of years. You're looking at a portrait by Gilbert Stewart from about 1820 of a woman who without assigning gender sexuality would have perhaps if she lived today been considered a lesbian. So you're talking about lesbian women trying to figure out how to be artists for at least 200 years in the United States. You may think it's only a new thing. It isn't. It's been there all along. And for us, it's very important, especially with millennials and youngers to get across that idea. It's been happening for a long time. What you enjoy has been long ingestation. As I said, homage to women's work, woman house exhibit. A lot of people don't realize it was actually installed in a Victorian mansion in Los Angeles that was falling apart. Lindhurst used to be falling apart. Luckily, we fixed most of it up. But we thought that really presented us a unique opportunity to, again, delve into the fact that a house allows you to exhibit and explore in a different way. And again, the difference, some of it's in a gallery that looks like any museum you go to. Some is in the historic house. And of course, what you're seeing here is you have Portia Munson contemporary Hudson Valley artist above a 19th century piece and 19th century dome next to a piece by a woman named Valerie Hammond. And it was important to have both of these things. And part of that is because we wanted to allow for discovery. A lot of people don't think they like contemporary art. If they're told you're coming to a contemporary art exhibit, it's like, I don't do that. And when you look at the way we set up things like this, it really is set up in such a way that if you walk through, you don't necessarily, and you're just here to take a tour of Lindhurst mansion because it's your one time in Terry Town, you don't really necessarily know that this hasn't been here always. But there are moments when you see a big lemon by rotted lemon by Kathleen Ryan on an Alexander Jackson Davis table from the 1840s, you have to stop and say, what is this doing there? And we wanted, we wanted a little bit of both basically. It was intended to be thematically rich and broadly representative. So the bloomers are by a Southwest lesbian Mormon artist. The hair, Reese are by a mixed race, queer identifying female genderfying woman artist. You have everybody from a cushion by Martha Washington to Yoko Ono in the same room. We really wanted it to be that broad, basically. So let me give you a sense of how we put this together and give you a sense of some of the artworks that we have in the rooms and in the mansion. So first, one of the things that we were trying to do is as you go into the exhibit, and you go into the exhibition gallery, the way that set up as we look at the very breadth of all the different categories that women worked in. Sewing, needlepoint, embroidery, quilting, china painting, you name it. And we tried to be as broad as we could in terms of the categories. But we also wanted to show how these themes transcended race, transcended place, transcended economies, etc. So what we're looking at if you start from, I guess, is that your right or your left? I guess that whatever that side is, moving this way. So we have, again, a figure that is believed to be the only surviving wax figure from the 18th century in the United States made by a woman named Sarah Gardner Guy, or sorry, Guy Gardner. I'll let Nancy talk about that, from Historic New England. And it's, you know, one of these figures that shows a, you know, it's the work of a very wealthy affluent woman who would have been trained by the likes of the woman in the lesbian woman in the portrait that I showed previously, how to do this wax work. She's idealized, has a lovely little face. She's in front of a fruit tree that says, oh, you're going to have lots of children when you marry me and their little lambs at the front that say I'm going to be very docile and do whatever you my husband, oh dear, says for me to do. And I am lovely and talented and idealized, and I'm trapped under this lovely glass dome, basically, you know, because this is what I can be. You move a step next to that, you have Sherry Boyle, a contemporary Canadian artist, and she's actually working in this vein in a very contemporaneous way. So she's telling the truth as a contemporary artist with agency, basically, what she's saying is look, you know, they're sexual fantasies, they're neuroses, I'm naked, I'm afraid, my feet are on backwards, rather than a fruit tree with lovely fruit, they're truncated, there are our faux penises coming out of them that I'm holding on to. But interestingly, she and the woman in the dome have the same idealized face. So she's taking this tradition of women making these decorative objects for home and updating the reality behind it. Then we have, and this is probably, I'm going to say, the picture is probably bigger than, like by twice of the actual object. That is by Leon Orphini, the European surrealist artist. And it is the Scaparelli perfume shocking, it's their bottle in 1937. And Scaparelli was very interested in Victorian form, she often takes a lot of Victorian forms and sort of reduces the size dramatically. So this, and you'll see a number in the, in the exhibition, we have 19th century versions, we have versions of these dome covered flowers by Kiki Smith, a contemporary version. But she's basically doing one of these flower covered domes and the perfume bottle is actually in the form of May West's dress form from the Scaparelli studio. The one that we didn't get is Betty Sear's liberation of Aunt Jemima, which is at the Berkeley Museum. I think we're just too far away from Berkeley to know where, you know, where New York was. But this is basically, you know, one of the things that I thought was very interesting is, again, she's dealing with one of these like pre-made figures to explore how we look at, how we look at women, how we look at black women. And I would have loved to have these together, we weren't able to get that one. So another area of that we examine is sewing with needle and thread. A lot of people don't realize that before the invention of the sewing machine in the 1840s and the 1850s, basically most women spent almost all their day sewing with a needle and thread. They did it, their daughters did it, their unmarried female relatives did it because you had to make your clothes, your undergarments, your bed coverings, your linens, your curtains, your towels, you name it, if it was cloth, there was no target to go to, you had to make it. So what we start with, again, over to the very far right, you see this dress that is made in Boston, the mid-19th century. It is a dress, and when you get to see it, you will realize just how tiny the waist on that dress is. It's a dress made in Boston for a woman to wear at home when receiving her female friends because you would wear it without undergarments, as somebody called it, a house coat. I'm not sure there was a house cut that was ever that nice, ever. And it was donated to the Home for Aged Colored Women in Boston and packed away for a good hundred years with a note that said, too good to wear. And so this is an example of where, when I was talking about before, that I think house museums have the ability to suggest topics that maybe a larger museum would not be able to suggest without solid proof and research. One of the things that that says to me, and again, this is not my objects, and Nancy, who will be speaking later, may disagree with me, but I think one of the things you can say as you look at this, you go, there was never an African-American woman who has a body like this, who this dress ever would fit to. And so I think the committee who got this and wrote the note was there in that note. Does that suggest that even at that point, there was a little bit of that, you know what, work for you for all these years. You couldn't give us something that our people could use. Was there not a sense of in a very nice way, thank you, too good to wear, we're putting it away, but it's like, you know what, couldn't you have been just a little more generous and seen who we were for all the years we were in your house. Again, I don't think Nancy might feel comfortable saying that. I'll let her say if she is or not. But I think as a house museum, you can bring up these things for a future discussion. So next to it, we have a work by Faith Ringel from the 1970s. These are the soft figures that she does. And this is of a woman named Sugar, who is a working lady in Harlem. Ringel felt that at that time, the larger white audience did not see people of color. They just didn't, unless you were committing a crime, you weren't reported about, you weren't on the news, you weren't on television, nothing. And she wanted people to see whether good, bad and different, the people who she was interacting with in her neighborhood in Harlem and actually give them face. And one of the things you will see, and I'll speak about Yoko and I'll admit it, is one of the things that we're trying to do in this exhibition is have a historical example in the traditional working method, a contemporary example in the working method, and then a contemporary example that is in a contemporary working method. So you can see the full progression of how these things influence women's art. So with Faith Ringel, a lot of people don't know her mother was a couturier in Harlem. And it was her mother who taught her how to sew, how to do the quilting, the African quilting that becomes historical for which she becomes famous with. And I believe Faith said that, I think her mother actually probably made the dress for these things, that she was just, you know, better seamstress than she was. And then you have Yoko Ono's piece here, the seminal piece, cut piece. And the concept, it's a video and it was, this one is filmed by the Maisel's brothers at Carnegie Hall. And what Yoko Ono does is she wants to raise awareness of the fact that men depict women in art for their pleasure and the way they want. And that in many ways, that is a very aggressive act. So she's kneeling on a stage in a dress, huge pair of shears. And she asks people to come up and cut off a piece of her dress to take away as a souvenir. And she repeats this performance a number of times. And in some of them, apparently, I believe she ends up naked. And this one she's just, you know, since we're a family institution, it's she's still got her undergarments on. But she retains the moment at which the performance can be stopped. So three ways in which needle and thread sewing, dressmaking influence the creation of women's garments. Incidentally, I just got a t-shirt, which I thought was genius, that said John Lennon broke up fluxes. And I have to, I have to fight a contemporary art fair to wear that too, because I thought it was great. So the ones that we didn't get, Harmony Hammett, again, these impressions, we actually got a handbag of hers, because they hang in a group. And she's got a big retrospective, I believe it's other at Pompidou or Tate. I can't remember Tate Modern coming up. These hang in groups, but they're essentially portraits of women, these, these objects of women's clothing, a coutrement are supposed to be portraits. And the last one, Rosy Lee Tompkins, the self trained quilter from California, who does these amazing quilts. This was actually a quilted dress that she made. And apparently all after being in the making, knowing in civet at the Whitney, all her stuff was sent out for restoration because they realized they had this goldmine that nobody was, that they had never done anything with. Another thing that we examine in the exhibition is also how in certain ways women used a certain format, this sort of circular format to, to express women, the womb, women's sexuality, women's presence. And so we have a number of different pieces. So all the way to the right from the Shaker Museum, a shaker rug from the late 19th century made by a woman named Sister Elvira Hewlett, who was very famous for rugs were very desired at the time sold very well. Then this work by again, Miriam Shapiro, this Femmage, which is this collage made with pieces of fabric from Lyman Allen, which is near the kinetic college for women and boys, which used to be the women's college in Connecticut. And it's interesting, it was donated by alumnus who was a collector in New York. But what they, as a women's college, they had all these women artists coming and Miriam Shapiro did a residency there. And they think that the woman who collected these things, like as an alumnus came to these saw the residencies and that influenced her collecting. Then next to that, Judy Chicago prototype plate for the dinner party, Elizabeth Blackwell plate. She was the first doctor, female doctor in the United States. And as Judy Chicago said, there's a pun, a visual pun, it's got a black well in the middle. She's like, you know what, you're doing these things, if you can't have a sense of humor about it, it's just, you know, you might as well give up. And then again, a Harmony Hammett piece that we didn't get. These are these, these floor pieces that she did, which were essentially abstract paintings in this form. And they, there was one that her that she had offered up and then her gallerist said, you know, the reason you can get that one and it didn't travel to the retrospective, it's so fragile. So if you want to risk it, you can and we're like, no, thank you. But I wish, I wish we had been able to get that one as well. And then another thing that happens in this exhibit, we were very focused on the fact that we wanted the works by the historical women to as much as possible be identified by at least a name and a birth date, a name and a portrait, a name and a photograph with the later things or a reputation, because we wanted to really sort of smash this myth that all this work was just done by little bored ladies at home who had nothing to do. And this was just a time wasted. It's like these were actually always things that many of these women who did them at the level that they did knew were excellent were handed down in the families were cherished were valued. And so it's something that we wanted to be able to show as much as possible. So the quilt that you're seeing at the far end and the portrait, this is at the Genesee Count country museum that's below Rochester, which is a great living history museum. They had this crazy quilt and it was made by this woman, Anna Brown, who you see there. And Anna, this is her portrait, her marriage portrait, and she makes this of course later in her life. They were not, they couldn't, they didn't feel comfortable traveling these, but that was a great example of where you actually very early on have portraits of these women and their works, both kept by the families. And of course to the side, this is Jane Kaufman, the gorilla girl and artist important in pattern and decoration movement. Is somebody from the Hudson River Museum here today? They were, yes, there you go. So the way interestingly, Jane Kaufman is Hudson River Museum did a very significant exhibit on pattern decoration long, I think it was like 2008, I want to say, long before anybody was paying attention to all this kind of stuff. And when we went looking for this object, they gave me her phone number, they said, you know, she's a complete Luddite, no email, no nothing, you know, a telephone that doesn't even have an answering machine on it. We called the number, she, you know, below, you know, and she committed, she said, yeah, you can have it. And then literally, I want to say less than a month later, we saw her obituary in the New York Times. And she wasn't married, didn't have kids, didn't have a dealer. So it was like, oh my God, what do we do? But we found it, we were thrilled, this was probably the last thing artistically that she committed to, and we're thrilled to be able to steward that. But, you know, especially with some of these contemporary women, they're, you know, their art services, their image. But I think in this, I wanted to show one of the pictures of her that that was in her New York Times obituary, because I we felt it was important to be able, like, to have people who are identifiable. So when many people who don't know art come through, they can go, they can go to Wikipedia, and they can see who these actual people were. And you can see this presence, and you can see her art. This was an interesting one. We wanted to show the breadth of work. This was a category we just couldn't put in these painted mirrors that were that were very frequently done. This is Rachel Feinstein who did these painted mirrors that were shown at the Jewish Museum in of of Crohn's as she calls them. And we contacted her and she said, you know, they don't have anything to connect them with. They're really fragile when we did one recently, it broke. So again, that's like, if you really want to put you in touch, but I wouldn't recommend it. So we weren't actually able to do it. And then again, one of the things, you know, the icons that can't travel. So I would have loved to have this on the Florian step behind the dollhouse at the Museum of the city of New York on that side, and then the Miriam Shapiro dollhouse from woman house to the side. And incidentally, one of the people who's joined us today, Anna Biala Broda was actually at woman house and is in the films. So if you want to talk about what it was like back then, I'm sure. And we have like coffee and cakes back there that that she'd be happy to do it. So let's talk about some of the outcomes from the exhibit. So, you know, one of the things that I, there's a lot of house museums that are doing contemporary art of their house museums. And I feel a little bit this is, you know, contemporary art's been poured on old houses, like the tomato sauce on meatloaf to, you know, to disguise something that's just, you know, not good enough and, you know, kind of horrible, which to me is, is the wrong point of this. This isn't a disguise. These exhibits really need to be authentic to the site. And I say that because I think a lot of unsophisticated people who come and see these, that's something they get surprisingly well without understanding anything else. Is this a gimmick to get me in? Or does this make sense? And I think that is something that's been very important that I feel that we've been able to do. I also would say we wanted to be authentic to the art and the artists. We've had a lot of the artists who produce this work come through to see this exhibit, which is very gratifying. You know, my husband who was an actor always used to say things like you got to trust the material, even if it's dated, even if it doesn't speak to a contemporary audience, you have to let it be what it's going to be. And I think so many of these works spoke in so many ways from decades ago or hundreds of years ago. And we really needed to respect them and treat them as real artworks. And I think we were able to do that and it made, you know, we were able to sort of be domestic and discoverable. A lot of the art you'll see as we go through is small. And a lot of that is we were look at the art, not at the scale basically. And I think we were able through this to again reflect that story of this has been a story at Lindhurst that women have been important to this institution. They've been important to the country and they've been important to the country's cultural life. And I think, you know, we're such a moment of reevaluation that, you know, I think in some ways, this elevated the canon, you know, the original objective was like we're going to make the contemporary stuff even more important than it already is. But it turned out that the history, I think in my mind, when you see this elevates everybody and really sort of makes this important. Judy Chicago, who's posted a lot of this when she was interviewed for the time, she said, you know, this is a really important exhibit. I wish the Met would do it, but, you know, I doubt that they ever will. But she was thrilled. She got us something within two days out of the Museum of Art and Design. She thought this is so important. And most importantly, it's a way to look at things differently, recalibrate, reevaluate. I think as a curator and as an institution, and you can't give people an opportunity to not look at the way they've always been looked at, but looked at in a new way. You know, isn't that what we should be doing as museums and as house museums? And so I think hopefully the outcome of this, it's been a new way to think of house museums and what they show. And a new way to think of women, their history and the history of creativity in this country. So thank you, everybody. We have, I think, about 10 minutes for questions from the people that are seated here. So does anybody have anything that they would like to ask Barbara? Go ahead. Miriam Shapiro. So that is in the Smithsonian, in the Museum of American Women. And, you know, a lot of things like that. The Smithsonian is an interesting institution to borrow from. It has to go through their bureaucracy. They have to pack it. They have to ship it. So a lot of times, you know, if we wanted that, I would have had to, you know, hand over somebody's first board and child 50 years ago and, you know, it would have come. We actually, it's interesting. We borrowed for the first time from the Met for this exhibition. And the Met is, to their credit, very strict about how they handle their loans. They want to know, do your cases have VOC paint, VOC materials, anything that can impact the art world. And one of the reasons, the artworks, and one of the reasons I wanted to borrow from them this time, and it was our first time borrowing from them, is because I do think it's a mark that you can steward objects appropriately. And it was something that was challenging for us and our staff. Luckily, our exhibition designer works at the Met a lot, but we did it. We got it and it was here. And I think also that's also elevated. We've always had a very good relationship with them, but this is the first time we've borrowed. They've borrowed a lot from us. So it's something we look to do with institutions because you really do get give and take when you borrow things. And I would have loved to have it, but I don't think we could have gotten it. Becky? Yeah. Anybody else? Any other questions in the room? Go ahead. Five years ago, I went to the museum to see the dinner party by Judy Chicago. And it was an incredible experience. It was the first time I ever, as a traditional curator, fresh out of grad school, realized the decorative arts of PR. And that I've always loved that piece because of that moment that Judy Chicago, there was also a spin-off in Soho called the box lunch for the women to oversell the room that had to do. The box lunch. That's interesting. But the idea that using these traditional domestic materials to say something huge, the next performance will have to place at least my daughter's room. So anybody can stick a lot of use and see that actually makes you a long career. Well, one of the things I would say about Judy Chicago and using its painted ceramics. So of course, women will see that internally. You know, especially in the late 19th century, became known for China painting. It was a rage that that traversed the country. And it also became a major artistic career for many women. Judy Chicago also includes embroidery because all the placemats for each of the women are embroidered. And I think what's interesting about what's happened in the art world is that when Shapiro talks about doing these things in Chicago, talk about doing these things in the 60s and the 70s, it was just like, what, why are you killing your careers? Why are you doing this stuff that just isn't important? And for example, Miriam Shapiro was a very good abstract painter. Her abstract paintings come up, you know, from time to time. And she had a reputation. And so this was a departure for them at that point. And in many ways, a career killer. You know, the men that you saw in the harassables, they wanted the income, they wanted to be breadwinners, and to a certain extent, perhaps because women at the time did not have the total pressure that they had increasingly in the later decades to be the breadwinner, were allowed to think of other things that were important to them, rather than the male dominated sense of I just need to make money and want to make money. They were saying this is important to me, who I am as a woman as an artist, I don't want to just do what all you guys have told me I need to do, I want to do what I think is important to do. And they looked at all these crafts that they had learned from their mothers and their aunts and their sisters. And it was like, you know what, you have to learn a technique, you have to master it, you have to be better at it, certain people are good, certain people are not. So explain to me why that is an art. And I think a lot of women, you know, did that at the time, fast forward to where we are today. It's like, much of this work has almost lost its gender relationship. A lot of it is just looked at as technique, as cultural history, and you oftentimes have as many men doing these things today. As you have women doing these things, there were a number of Nick Cave works where he took all these like women's beaded flowers that he just bought in huge numbers, put together sculptures out of it, that I, you know, initially thought maybe I should have one man in the exhibit, just like the Raspel's photo had one woman to punctuate where we've come. But it really is amazing. And it was one of the things that when I would see things come up, it's like, oh, that those are by contemporary men, not by women. And that is, that is really how revolutionary those Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro things were. Anybody else? Well, what I'm going to say is, and to our listeners online, we're going to take a few minutes. The restroom is to you right, there's coffee and snacks in the back. So everybody, please take a break and then join us back in just about five minutes, if you would. And we will continue with with Nancy Karla. So everyone for being here, I appreciate it. And I appreciate the people who are online listening to this afternoon of varied and I hope interesting talks. I have to say that this exhibition has been personally remarkably incredibly fulfilling. I've been working with Historic New England's collections for 35 years. And this has been a way for me to showcase some of my favorite people, some of the favorite historic figures that I've come to know. And also I will say that there was a lot of excitement at Historic New England about this and a measure of that is the fact that this piece is here. This is only the second time in its 100 year history at Historic New England that it's traveled. It gets asked for on many occasions. It's a remarkable survival. But we rarely let it out of the house because it's so fragile. And yet there was no discussion about whether it would come to this or not. It was to come. And thanks to Howard, it's become really the sort of centerpiece of the exhibition in many ways. Before I start, I'd like to acknowledge that what you'll be seeing is the product of straight and gay white women. Historic New England is working closely with Native and Black advisors and artists to forge a path towards a more inclusive collection. But it's a little bit like trying to turn a battleship. You know where you want to go, but it'll take you a few miles to get there. So we're working hard to expand our collection in ways that are meaningful and important. And in the meantime, we have collections that are also meaningful and important and that's my privilege to be able to share them with you today. For those of you who don't know Historic New England, and I'm guessing that's most of you, we are the oldest and largest heritage organization in the nation. We have 38 historic house museums around New England that range in date from the 1680s to the Gropius house of 1938. We have about 123,000 objects, although they're hard to count, paintings, furniture, ceramics, wallpaper, and the like. And more than a million archival items, photographs, manuscripts, and ephemera. And unless otherwise noted, all of the images that I'm going to be sharing with you this afternoon are from Historic New England's collections. So women's work, historic women's work, the topic that draws us together this afternoon. For many people, the notion of women's work historically is somewhat romanticized. It might bring up images like this one depicting a well-to-do woman sitting by a wheat window elegantly dressed, doing intricate needlework while a courtier gazes on her adorably, idealized in so many ways, of course. And the real story of women's work is far more complicated. And that's the story that I hope to share with you today. In the days before industrialization hugely transformed the price and availability of textiles. For women of all economic levels, caring for them was a major part of their work. And this is a highly, another highly romanticized view, but I grabbed it off the internet because it shows you all of the processes involved in developing fabric. So you can see for instance here that this woman is carting wool. So the wool, the fleece has been brought into the house and she's using these combs with very thin wire combs to turn the fleece into strands. And then the strands are, of course, spun on the spinning wheel. And these spinning wheels in the colonial revival period became a marker of women's work. And then from there the objects, the threads are woven. So as I said, a highly romanticized view, most women did not produce their own textiles in the pre-industrial age. They purchased textiles at huge expense, which meant that your textiles in your house, your clothing, your curtains, your bedding were the most expensive thing in the house and required the most care. So for instance, even women of means knew how to sew and in fact did sew all the time. Here we see Abigail Adams and a dimedy pocket that belonged to her. We know that she, like all of her compatriots, was involved in sewing because even when she was living outside of Paris with her family while John Adams was negotiating trade agreements with the French in 1785, Adams wrote to a friend of hers and admitted I still darn stockings. So the fact of the matter is that in the days before industrialization completely transformed the price and availability of textiles, women of all economic levels were working on them as a major part of their work. And here I just want to show you the more ornate types of textiles that women of means were able to create. This is a bed curtain that was made by Mary Fifield and her mother around 1710 as part of Mary's dowry where the thread was worn away. You can see, for instance, that the pattern has been drawn onto the cloth before the sewing is done. And according to family tradition, this may or may not be true, the Fifield's apparently sent to England for the cloth, that part I'm sure is true, but the pattern was already drawn on it when it came to Boston. A complete set of bed hangings like this remarkable surviving set at the Old York Museum in York, Maine, would have taken incalculable hours to complete, which meant that the person who made them had the luxury of devoting that many hours to the work. So this is the kind of thing that could be only in the household of the will to do. Others would have bed curtains to keep themselves warm at night, but they would not have been this elaborate. But women weren't only working on textiles and this wonky jug tells the story of one remarkably enterprising woman, Grace Parker, whose husband ran a successful redware pottery in Charlestown, Massachusetts in the 18th century. His early death left her in debt with 11 children to support. At least 40 potters were working in Charlestown between 1700 and 1775, where there was a good source of clay and also nearby wars for shipping. In the mid 18th century, Isaac Parker, Grace Parker's husband, had the largest pottery in town. An ambitious man, Parker wasn't satisfied with only making redware. He went to the seat of the general court housed in this building, which still stands in Boston today, to petition for the exclusive rights to produce stoneware. At a time produced only in New York and Pennsylvania, stoneware is different than redware. It is less susceptible to breakage. It's also impervious to the acids in some foods that get kept over the winter. And so you had to own stoneware. And in New England, in the 17th and 18th century, the only way to get it was to import it. So Isaac Parker was the success of redware production behind him saw this as a great opportunity. So in addition to getting permission from the general court, which was granted, he also got a loan of 125 pounds to help pay for it. Soon after he gained those rights and that loan, he passed away, leaving again Grace Parker with her 11 children to support and a lot of debt. So she went back to the general court and had his rights transferred to her. And she took over the process. And three years later, she advertised the sale of quote, blue and white stoneware of 40 different sorts. And this was the first of its kind produced in New England. And it would be the last for decades. Parker lost 2000 pounds in the venture, which eventually failed during the commercial disruptions of the French and Indian war. And after her death in the 1750s, no other local potteries attempted stoneware production. Redware pottery continued in Charlestown until 1775 when the battle of Charlestown burned the entire downtown area where the potteries were next to the wars. The story of Grace Parker was uncovered by this woman, a brilliant historian, despite the folksy image, and a specialist in the history of New England potters and potteries. And her book, which was published in 1950, remains the encyclopedic resource on the subject to this day. During the course of her research, she discovered this jug in the basement of a home not far from Charlestown. And given its wonkiness, its misshapen character, she must have decided the only place this could have been made was at the Charlestown pottery. And I will say that I sat with two experts, two ceramic experts, and the three of us did the same thing. We tried to figure out, okay, how did this survive? Where else could it possibly have been made? And the fact of the matter is that any successful stoneware pottery would destroy it. So therefore, it must have been made by a new venture, and it must have been seen as worthy of being kept. And it survives to this day. The amazing thing is that since she wrote about it in 1950, there's been a series of archaeological dates which have taken place in Charlestown, and which have turned up redware shard after redware shard, but also turned up some stoneware shards, including this handle fragment, which is an exact match to ours. So right here, you can see the thumb prints at the base of the handle, as well as this weird dark blue glaze that pools at the top and the bottom. But this and this pooling are identical to what you see on this pot. So it's clear that this is in fact a piece made by Grace Parker in her husband's pottery at a time when no one else was producing an important product for the New England market. And now we'll move on to Clementina Beach, who, as we've already learned, co-founded one of Boston's most successful schools for girls. Clementina Beach emigrated from England to Gloucester, Massachusetts with her father and sister around 1793. And there she met Judith Foster Saunders, who had left her husband, who may well have been abusive by 1797 and was living with her father. And Clementina and Judith formed a lifelong loving partnership. And in order to support themselves, they moved to Dorchester and to begin their lives together, running an elite school for girls. The Saunders and Beach Academy was close to the meeting house, just out of range to the right. It would have been just around here. And there it was thriving for more than 30 years. In 1804, there were 36 boarding students and 20-day scholars ranging in age from six to 18. And a former student, Sarah Chansey Cuts of Kittery, Maine, described her classes. Besides the Latin and English classes and mathematics in the course were music, penmanship, painting, watercolors, map drawing, done with pens, waxwork, fine needlework in the shape of lace and silk embroidery. Specimens of all accepting only music are in existence. So in other words, the women who were teaching there were extraordinarily well-skilled in a whole wide range of topics, not just sewing, also English, Latin, and mathematics. The students were children of New England's elite families who sent their girls to school to learn the refinement expected of the future wives of the region's educated and successful men. One student in the early years was Beech's younger cousin, Mary Beech, whose needlework survives in its original frame. And while Mary completed the needlework, the overall layout as well as the painting of the faces and the sky, so this is painted rather than needlework and the background is painted and the layout is all clearly done before the needlework occurs, all of that was likely done by Clementina Beech. And according to several sources, including Lawrence Park, who's the expert on the subject Gilbert Stewart, the early 20th, it's clear that or we believe that Clementina Beech studied painting with Gilbert Stewart. What we don't know is whether it was grateful students who commissioned this portrait or whether Beech commissioned it herself, but in either case, it's quite unusual for being an early portrait of a woman who was painted not because of who her family was, but for her own accomplishments. And there are other women who Gilbert Stewart, who was notably irascible, trained, and one of them was Sarah Goodridge. And these miniatures aren't in the exhibition, but I wanted to include them today because her story parallels that of Clementina. Sarah Goodridge was one of nine children born into a farming family in Templeton, Massachusetts, which was the back of beyond in the early 18th century. And it's fair to assume that her opportunities to learn to be an artist in Templeton were limited. And indeed, according to her sister, Goodridge initially learned to paint from a book. And at 15, she moved to Boston where she took drawing lessons and eventually gained the attention of Gilbert Stewart, who's believed to have painted one of his only miniatures in order to demonstrate the technique to her. In 1830, Goodridge, who never married, was one of Boston's most successful miniatures and miniatures, and she was able to support herself as well as her family. And the subject of both these miniatures, and indeed most, if not all of her subjects, were members, of course, of well connected Boston families. And another woman who learned from Stewart was his own daughter. And I say learned from rather than was taught by advisedly, Jane Stewart worked as a helper in her father's studio, cleaning up, preparing paints, and after a time probably interacting with his clients. And apparently she learned to paint simply by watching his father and copying his work. But eventually she painted with him, completing canvases that he did not. And as you can see here, the portrait of Perry at the Toledo Museum is listed as having been painted by both of them. And according to our understanding, Gilbert Stewart painted only the face, and the rest of it is by Jane Stewart. And the disappointing thing to me is that the recent exhibition that the net put on by Gilbert Stewart's work doesn't mention Jane Stewart at all. Now you can see a painting that Jane Stewart copied. And then you can also see one that she did on her own after her father's death, when she is supporting her entire family. And by the way, her father was dying in part of alcoholism, as fell to many in this period. I will say that the last painting I'm showing you is probably not her best work, but remember it's in a style later than the style of the earliest paintings. And so to a certain degree what you're seeing is a little bit of a romanticized mid-19th century type of painting. And now on to one of my favorite objects in all of historic New England's extensive collections. We've owned this painting since the 1930s, but it's only recently that we've uncovered its story. The painting is a copy of Vigila Brun's famous self-portrait. And for years our copy has appealed to me, I think probably because the self-portrait was on the cover of Germaine Greer's Obstable Race, which was required reading for feminists in the feminist art historians at least in the 1980s. And in many museums the fact that this is a copy would have disqualified it from being put on display. But the more we've learned about the painting, the more we've realized that it has a story that we think is very much worth telling. We knew that the painting was the work of somebody named Elizabeth Adams. However, with a name like Adams, we were a little bit worried about whether we'd be able to figure out which Elizabeth Adams. And sure enough, as you can see from the image here, we have figured out who it was. And also given the fact that there's a pamphlet that was written about her, she was pretty much hiding in plain sight. This Elizabeth Adams came out of a well-connected progressive family in Boston who sent their daughters to Emerson School for Girls, which was one of the first schools in the country to offer a similar curriculum to girls as was offered for boys to boys for decades. And Emerson was unusual for encouraging his young students to believe that they had a right to pursue their interests into adulthood. And for Adams that meant pursuing the life of an artist. However, there were two problems. And one was that in the 1850s, there were no professional classes open to women in Boston. It wasn't until William Morris Hunt opened his classes a decade later that women could get professional training. And the second was that even if there had been, until the very end of the 19th century, women were not allowed to study life models in the nude. And so you can see the result of Thomas Akin's life classes instead of studying live bodies, they're studying cows. And the question is why is this important? And the fact is that even today, live models are considered foundational to becoming an artist, whether or not a figural one. And you can see that these quotations explain why. And they're taken from a contemporary art school's material. Still, Adams had two distinct advantages over many similarly ambitious women. And one was that family wealth enabled her to avoid marriage, which meant that she avoided children, which meant that she could devote her life to art. And the other was the family connections. Her younger sister, Annie, and brother-in-law, publisher James T. Fields, went to Europe on their honeymoon, and Elizabeth went with them. And when they returned to Boston, she stayed behind, almost certainly using her brother-in-law's connections to get introductions to ex-pats in France and in Italy. And in Paris, she took classes with the artist Charles Chaplin, and like most female students, she almost certainly paid twice as much for her classes and got half the attention of the male students. But classes aren't the only way that people learn how to be artists. One of the ways they have learned and continue to learn today is by copying the work of other artists. And this would have been one of the principal ways that Elizabeth increased her own skill. And without question, she must have spent time like these artists studying the paintings in the Louvre. After a few years in France, Elizabeth left Paris and traveled to Florence to mingle with the artistic and literary expat community there. And in 1865, while Elizabeth clearly was in Florence, the Vasari corridor of the Euphizie gallery was newly opened to the public. And the Vasari corridor was the place where the Euphizie hung invited artists' self-portraits. So you could only have your portrait there if you were invited. So I imagine Elizabeth Adams walking down the Vasari corridor, looking for something to copy. She's passing paintings, self-portraits by Philippe Olipi, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Delacroix, and she comes across this. And I can only imagine her standing before Vigie LeBron's self-portrait and thinking, right, that, that's what I want. If she could do it, I could do it. In fact, she did carve out a career as an artist, never as successful, needless to say, as Vigie LeBron. You've never heard of her. We took a while for us to learn who she was. But in fact, one of her paintings was accepted for exhibition at the Paris Salon in 1885. And whereas most copies of paintings are either painted over or destroyed, this one was treasured, placed in an elaborate frame and preserved for two generations before it came to historic New England in 1937. And before we finally reclaim my friend Peter Trippie and I, her story just a few years ago. Unlike Adams, Celia Thaxter did not have to be rescued from obscurity. Thaxter grew up on the remote Isle of Shoals off the New Hampshire coast, and she was the daughter of a lighthouse keeper and a later hotel manager. And it might have been because of the isolation that she, at the age of 16, decided to marry a sickly law student 11 years older than her. And the marriage did not thrive. He rarely worked and it fell to her to support the family. And she did support the family and in fact quite successfully. Her first success came in 1861, when her poem Landlock appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. And before long, she had a thriving career as a writer and was part of Boston's vibrant literary scene. And this was a community that centered Elizabeth Adams's sister Annie and brother-in-law James T. Fields. And although Thaxter's writing provided income and a community of like-minded people, eventually she began to chafe at the demands writing to a friend in 1872, quote, when I've earned enough to keep me through the summer, I'll stop this fever of scribbling foolishness, I think it is ever to force one's pen to do anything. And of course, she didn't stop writing. Her most enduring work is almost certainly an island garden chronicling the progress of her garden during one year on Appletour. And the island had become a haven for artists, child Hassam, William Morris Hunt, John Appleton Brown, among others, went back year after year, often painting Thaxter's garden. And while Thaxter didn't stop writing, she did find a new creative outlet. And in 1874, she enthused in a letter, I've taken to painting, wrestling with art, I call it, in the wildest manner. And I can scarcely think of anything else. I want to paint everything I see. Such a new world opens. So in fact, you can imagine somebody who's stuck in one requirement to make a living has found this new interest in how exciting and enlightening that would be. And you can see the living room in Appletour, the inn, where the artist convened. And I'm sure that some of the things that are taped up on the wall are not only child Hassam's, but also her own. But happily, Thaxter was able to turn this newly discovered talent to profitable use. She painted scenes for Louis Prang's greeting cards and sold decorated cups and saucers, vases and bowls to visitors to her family's hotel. In the winter of 1877 alone, she completed 114 ceramics for sale. The important thing that I'm sure I'm getting across at this point is that she's working because she has to support her family. She's not doing this because she's a delicate, gentle woman who's, you know, working in a clean studio because she has nothing better to do with her time. The examples that you see here were made as gifts for her close friends, Annie Fields and Sarah Orange-Jewitt. And we can't talk about Celia Thaxter without mentioning this woman, Sarah Wyman Whitman. And she was by far the most financially successful of the artists of this group. And like the other married ones, she did not have a successful marriage. And in her case, the problem apparently was not that her husband was an alcoholic, but it seems that he was an unrepentant womanizer. Commenting on the marriage, William James wrote to his brother Henry, better for her surely to have left him and to have gone her way, not to have been faithful, perpetually exemplary and exasperated. Still, the marriage, although an unhappy one, gave her the status to move in Boston's highest social circles, and its failure gave her the freedom to build her career. And it was quite a career. She trained with the artist William Morris Hunt, took classes in Paris with Hunt's teacher Thomas Couture, and before long became a member of the National Academy of Design, where she exhibited paintings almost every year. She also trained as a stained glass artist with John Lafarge, a pioneering stained glass artist whose windows ornament churches and public buildings from Philadelphia to Boston. And Whitman's own windows are in churches and schools in Boston, Worcester and Maine. She made smaller stained glass objects like this fire screen, which was a wedding gift for a friend. And she also, we've recently learned, created memorial monuments and headstones. But her greatest commercial success by far was as a book cover designer. And here you can see just a few examples, including Celia Thexter's Island Garden. She made her first book cover in 1880. And within six years, she was the principal designer. Think of that. She was the principal designer for Boston's Houghton Mifflin. And her name became a selling point. Houghton Mifflin would advertise books designed by Sarah Wyman Whitman. She effectively changed the face of book cover designs, turning away from the elaborate decoration of book covers in the 1870s, in favor of these simplified Japanese inspired arts and crafts designs. And now to a woman who had a wildly variable career. Jane Tucker grew up the youngest of five children in this imposing house in Wisconsin, Maine. Financial reverses in the 1870s left the family insolvent with the upkeep of the house to pay for. All five children went to work spreading across the country and sending money home to their mother, while their father, perhaps predictably fell into the bottle. One brother sold insurance. The other became an astronomer. One sister moved to New York and became an actor traveling for a time with a circus. The other moved to Colorado and became a successful newspaper and magazine worker, writer. Their mother also worked teaching and writing music. Jane's career was by far the most varied. She worked as an embroidery at a Boston department as an embroiderer at a Boston department store. A skilled typist in the days when typing was something very new with a street railroad company. A traveling saleswoman traveling in the western territories. Imagine that traveling with male salesmen in the western territories. An office manager in New York City and even briefly as a domestic spy. She considered staking a land claim at West which explains the photograph on the right. The problem, of course, and the reason for that variable career is that for middle class women there were not many options if you needed money. An 1882 article entitled money making for ladies suggested ways that women could make pocket money but never suggesting that they might need to support themselves. A woman could sell homemade preserves or pies. She could teach classes preferably in her home rather than in a school. She might shop on commission for friends. And the author wrote, quote, how a lady can make money and not lose social standing is a question of absorbing interest. And it was a problem and it was particularly a problem for many of the women that were needing today. The same article noted that China painting was increasingly popular. Another author writing in 1881 acknowledged that the craft offered, quote, a solution to some extent to the problem of self support and independence for women. In fact, the better money tended to be for teaching China painting rather than selling painted objects. And Jane Tucker's tile palette with the colors written above each sample is exactly the type that's described in a popular 1886 guide to China painting and suggests that Jane was likely using it to demonstrate the technique for students. Eventually her artistic talents were put to a new money making venture after her father's death in the early 1890s. It fell to her as the youngest of the five children to move back home to be with their mother. And the two took in summer borders to help pay for the upkeep and Jane's artistry provided suitable decoration. The Piazza at Castle Tucker is an oversized example of her capacity to make do. Since there wasn't enough money to restore the 1850s painted walls and ceilings, she covered them with construction paper and filled the space with inexpensive Japanese fans, lanterns and parasols that remarkably are still largely in place today. This room overlooked the Sheetscot River and received the best cooling breezes. So it was the one that was most heavily used by borders in the summer, one of whom you can see stretched out here on the couch. The same borders tended to return year after year and between the income from borders raising vegetables and squab for nearby ends, Jane Tucker managed to keep the house afloat and pass it on on her death at the age of 98 to her equally intrepid niece who passed it on historic New England and its contents in the 1990s. So here are a few reminders of our cast of characters and I'm sure that I've driven this point into the ground already, but the one thing that I hope everyone comes away with is the understanding that many, many women in the 18th and 19th centuries used their artistry not to stave off boredom, but to make money to support themselves and their families. So this was important work. It was not sweet. It was not something that you could do in your free time. It was something that was required in order to be able to survive. Now before I end, let's return to one of the images that I showed early on along with a similar example. These are a type of needlework that became popular around 1830 through 1880. They're known as Berlin work and they came out of very much came out of the Industrial Revolution. Berlin work involves intricate patterns that are printed on canvas or on perforated cardboard and marketed along with newly available brilliantly colored yarns, especially a variety of bright red yarns that were something that could only be produced once the Industrial Revolution had gone into full flight. These could be quite large. We have examples in our collection that are three feet tall by about 30 inches wide and the scenes tended to be ones of courtship or piety. So having said that the artistry of the women, of many of these women help support their families, I still can't help but appreciate the 19th century commentator who described the excessive use of red in Berlin pictures like these as the blood of murdered time. And I'm happy to take questions if there are any. And I hope that this has given you a new appreciation of some of the work that's gone on by women of means and not of means in the 18th and 19th centuries. So Ulysses has asked whether the Wiedge-Lebron copy is routinely on view in one of our houses and the answer is that it's not sadly, although it has a place of honor in the very first place that you go when you come on a tour of our storage facility. Our collections are both in our houses, but those are largely ones that came with the houses. So they are related to the families that own those houses. But we've also been collecting for more than 100 years separately from the houses and our collections. This was not a house collection. And Wiedge-Lebron's self portrait was very popular in the Boston area in the second half of the 19th century. There are lots of examples that survive. And I've seen lots of examples that survive copies of Wiedge-Lebron's portrait. This one is as good as any I've seen. And I think Peter would agree with me that this is really a remarkable craft, a remarkably well-painted copy. And clearly her family thought the same since they saved it and put it in a big frame. Yeah. So it's an interesting question about whether you can divide out work that's done by women who had to work and women who didn't. I will say that the one example that I can do that with is China painting was done by a lot of women, both Celia Thakster and Jane Tucker, but also women who undoubtedly did not have to work. I would say that the quality of the women who had to do it was probably a little better because they were doing it more regularly. They had to produce in order to make money. But that's just one small example. I don't think that I can make a generalization beyond that. But it's a really interesting question because there are plenty of women who did not have to make money with the work that they did. And yet they had to keep themselves busy and interested in their minds engaged. And I think that artistry was one way that they were able to do that. The women's art was very closely linked to abolitionism in Boston where women's sewing circles were in fact the hotbed of abolitionism and they ended up making a lot of things for sale in order to support abolitionism. So there's a very strong political contention as well or a connection to a lot of women's work. It strikes me that especially in the 8th century before Claw, the industrial revolution, regardless of who you are yet, it serves to help you. But when it happened, secondary, it was called as the ability to keep a house in there. How was it easy for that to happen? So it's another, it's a great question and I wish that I had great quotes that I could share with you. What I would say is that there was definitely a division between the type of hand work that I showed in Abigail Adams' pocket. There's the day to day necessary repair and making of sheets and bedding. So day to day goods. The artistic stuff required leisure of some sort, whether it was the leisure time in order to make money, but it required you not to be working with a family, not to be working in a field, not to be supporting the income in other ways of your family. So I think there was a division between fine needlework and the day to day needlework that everyone did. Men did as well. I couldn't find it, but I'm pretty sure there's a quote of Abraham Lincoln when he's on the circuit before he becomes a presidential candidate that he's taking time off to fix things with his own needle. So in any case, I think there's a division. I don't think that it's as rigid as the division that took place in the 19th century between fine art and craft and which is slowly being broken down today. Yeah, Peter, I would say that women can have successful careers. Women of certain standing, as opposed to the ones who were doing it because they had to make money, happens around the same time. And the women who are doing it have either gone to William Morris Hunt's classes that open in the late 1860s or they start going to the Boston School and the Boston School of the Museum of Fine Arts took women as well as men and they were trained by in the same classes as men. And so you start seeing successful women artists with successful careers starting around the 1890s and going forward. That's true. That's true. I don't know of women's art clubs. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I can even talk a little bit about the pre industrial revolution. So this is a good example in that we don't know where the person who taught this class because we don't know who she was where she trained. She may well have trained in England, but she may well have trained with other women in Boston. This is very early. This is around 1720. And we don't even have ads for women's classes before 1740. So she herself might have been an immigrant. But what we know for sure is that after this figure was completed, the father sent to England further for the glass bell jar because there was nobody in America who could make a bell jar like that. And the reason there was nobody in America who could make a bell jar like that is that manufacturing was heavily restricted by the crown. And so it was one of the impetuses for the revolution was that we weren't allowed to make our own things in the colonies. And that got and that meant that we didn't get things that were as good as you could get if you were in London. And it also meant that you paid a lot more for those things that weren't as good. So I don't I'm sure that doesn't answer your question. But the fact of the matter is international trade was part of this community really from the get go. And after the revolution, we're trading directly with China. And so things are coming back from China with new designs and those designs are inspiring men and women in the early 19th century. Yeah. Right. They would. Yep, go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. So that also would have been a blank. You don't see them surviving. Right. Right. You can imagine how fragile these would be. Right. But they're pretty great, aren't they? But yeah, that would have been a blank. And so the people who were doing China painting were ordering their blanks and ordering their paints. And then once they had painted it, they were sending them off, in fact, usually to a company called Cooley's in Boston for them to be fired. And then they'd come back for sale. So it was a multi step process requiring cooperation of a bunch of people. So so I haven't seen other handles like that. I haven't seen other handles like that that aren't related to China painting. Yet they must have existed. But I haven't seen them. And in terms of the range of forms that were being used in China painting, there's a pretty broad range. There I can think of some really lovely tall attenuated vases that were China painted. And then lots and lots of plates, cups and saucers, cake stands, a whole variety of usually domestic types of forms rather than decorative. The one on the left of the great of the olives was one that Celia Thakster was particularly fond of. And she made several of these, one of which is at the Met. And there are several that survived. But there was something about the olive tree and this quote that I cannot and have not had translated that was very important to her. Wow. In the 1980s. There you go. Right. I've never seen one type. That's amazing. Yeah. So these were either, I think, mostly imported. The blanks were imported as blanks. And some of them you do see Limoges on the bottom. But you often also see the company that fired them cooling of Boston. And we attempt to office this. We have a number of types, the prototype type that we have in our part of the series. We have a lot of different types of people. We're all from the Johnna skin series of butterfly. But we're Johnna flights. We had a lot of flights that we saw this week. That gives me the chills. That's amazing. I'm so honored to have our collections to be part of this, I have to say. And I'm just bowled over by the fact that this has happened. And I'm so grateful that you're all here. Hello. I'm Becky Hart. And I just want to really thank Howard for inviting me to be part of the show along with Nancy. It's been such a privilege to work on it. And when you retire, you don't know what's going to happen next. And I have had quite a year getting to work here. I'm working for Save Venice. I did a show in London. I mean, it's just been fabulous. But one of the highlights has been working on this show because I brought artists to the table. I think that perhaps hadn't been considered for the show. And it really was wonderful to work with the artists. And also the challenge, you know, Howard talks about the challenge of the historic work. But there was actually a challenge getting some of the really famous artists in, some of the artists of color, of different backgrounds, convincing them that we would respect their stories and respect their work. So this is called spinning a fragile thread over time. And that's because women's histories are not linear. And here I show a Rackney who was the mortal who was considered the finest weaver. And here she is spinning a linen thread. A Rackney is credited with as being the person who figured out how to hackle flax. That's how to break it down enough so it could be spun. And then it is gathered and spun into a thread. It's very, very strong. And so I thought that this was a wonderful way to start. But also considering something that Howard had already, an artist Howard had already curated into the show. And she says, art historians, art critics and dealers sometimes make it sound like an artist development is like a single thread. More often it's like a rope with several strands intertwined and revolving around each other. And that's really how the story of women and women's work evolves. Because threads of the story and facts of many women's histories are thin and sometimes broken. And as we attempt to reconstruct the history of the women in the show, we find that it's about the evolution of feminism and contemporary art. Individual experience like Weber stands, twine, twisted and twisted together to become first the feminist art movement that evolved in the pervasive mode of creation that we now call contemporary art. Rosiska Parker, a British psychologist and art historian, notes that embroidery finds its heritage in women's hands. And today it is widely co-opted as a signifier of the personal and the domestic. And for this talk, my first consideration will be textiles and their intersection with both social and political history. Now Howard showed us the Erasable. So I'm showing you an image from 1985 of the Gorilla Girls. The Gorilla Girls were a group of artists, critics and art historians, anonymous, although Howard revealed the name of one of them today. And this poster was made, it's based on Ankres, the Grand Orlisk. And the woman is wearing the Gorilla Mask, which all the Gorilla Girls wear in their performances and their public appearances. But this is a protest because of the inequality of the representation of women. And the Museum of Modern Art had just with staging an exhibition titled An International Survey of Painting and Sculpture. And so the Gorilla Girls, in protest, did a survey of LaMette and less than 5% of the of MoMA and less than 5% of the artists in the modern sections, I'm sorry, LaMette, are women and 85% of the images of women. So it was very much a hegemonic society that women found themselves in. But the story is a story of disruption and of diversions. And in 1785, the Daughters of Liberty were formed. And this was a group of women who were protesting the Stamp Act and the Townsend Acts. And what they did is, as it protests, they refused to buy British materials. So these women spun their own yarn and wove their own clothes. And this is where the virtue of wearing home spun began, because it was an act, a very visible act of protest against the British. And the Daughters of Liberty participated in spinning these, they made these textiles. And what happened is that they actually, because they made the household purchases, the women of Liberty had a lot to do with the boycotts that happened. You see women unionizing. So in reaction to the Daughters of Liberty in 1769, the British decide that no woman can be paid for their work in textile in the textile industry in America. That is the British reaction to it. And you find throughout the 18th and 19th century very similar stories and actually into the 20th century. In 1865, the United Taylorists of New York formed. And in 1909, 20,000 women, the the shirt waste workers of New York strike. So women became a really big force within the textile industry. This story is intertwined with the stories of abolitionism and women's right. And on the left, you see Elizabeth Cady Stanton with her daughter. And she, along with Lucretia Mott, organized the radical women of Seneca Falls. And following the format of the Declaration of Independence, they offered the Declaration of Women's Rights, which included the right to own land, to earn wages, to vote, to submit to laws without to not submit to laws that are created without their representation, to assume authority and divorce and child custody, to have the right to college education and to be able to participate in the public affairs of their churches. Now, she was the mother of seven and called herself the caged lioness. And so she, her philosophy was promoted by Susan B. Anthony, the wonderful great Massachusetts born Quaker radical feminists. And what they realized is that the feminist agenda and the abolitionist agenda were closely linked. And so here I show Sojourner Truth. And you see her with her hand work in her, in her laugh, where she was responsible for making goods for her own household. And she says in a night, we tend to think of Sojourner Truth as, you know, a poorly educated woman. In fact, she was born in Ulster County. Dutch was her first language. She became a great orator in English. And in 1851, she says, I think that Twix, the Negroes of the South and the women of the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. So women did take things into their hands. And when the Centennial International Centennial Exposition was in formation in 1873, a number of wealthy women were asked to raise the money for the cost of the exposition. And in the course of the organization of the exposition, so many nations wanted to participate that the women who were promised space in the central pavilion were pushed out. So very quickly, the women changed their focus. And in four months raised all the money it took to build this building. And it was the first women's pavilion of any international exposition. Their aim was to employ women in the construction of the pavilion and even to power it. And the only man that was involved was the architect. The overarching goal was to advance women's social, economic and legal standing, abolish restrictions, discriminating against their gender, encourage sexual harmony, and gain influence, leverage, and freedom for all women. But in the women's pavilion, not only were the creative skills of American women profiled, but their formidable intellectual and material accomplishments were. And it was the artist and activist, Candice Wheeler, who visited the pavilion. And she saw a display at the Royal School of Middle Work from England, and it captivated her. In the 19th century, the name associated artists was synonymous with the highest standard in design and craftsmanship. The founders of the firm, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Candice Miller, and others, created an aesthetic that was inspirational and novel, particularly its incorporation of American-based materials and motifs. Wheeler left her business association with Tiffany and went on to lead associated artists. And as it became one of the most successful and highly respected women designers, and in 1882, she was invited to redecorate the White House. But what's important is that she learned from the Royal School of Middle Work an idea that women should be able to provide for themselves, to provide their domestic necessities, and that that businesses should be run for the profit of women and for the benefit of women. And that's what the associated artists became. With the onset of World War 1, women entered the workforce in large numbers. And it was this presence that gave momentum to the suffragette movement. The 19th Amendment, which was passed by Congress in 1919 and in 1920 officially ratified after over 100 years of protests. Now it had been a long-standing practice to exclude women from the workplace. And women were in the workplace because of the need for a workforce during World War 1. And as soon as the soldiers came home, the women were pushed out. Further, after World War 2, and Nancy talked a little bit about the WPA as a way of employing women, there was a double-edged sword. There was a law that said one member of the family could be employed. So yes, women were employed, but they could be the only person in their family employed. And then in 1944, with the GI Bill, it became an act, it became considered unpatriotic for women to fill classes that former soldiers might attend. And male artists who were teaching art in art school thought it wasn't worth their time to teach women because they assumed that they would marry and become parents with housekeeping responsibilities that would be in conflict with an artist's life. Now Howard talked a little bit about the Erasables and here I'm talking about it again. This photograph was taken for Life Magazine after the so-called abstract expressionists. And at the time, they didn't call themselves the abstract expressionists. They were named that by Time Magazine. And it was arranged in a way that these men were going to look like bankers, very upstanding citizens. And the photograph was about to be taken and Heta Stern knew it was going to and she arrived at the last minute. She pulled a table up and back and stood on top of it. She likes to say she didn't even have time, they didn't give her an opportunity to take off her top coat or put her purse down. And that's how she got into it. She really just pretty much crashed it. And painter Lee Krasner, who was the wife of Jackson Pollock and other painters, Joan Mitchell, other female abstract expressionists, believed that Stern was allowed through the door because Betty Carson's was both the dealer for these men and for her and she insisted. But Stern said, quote, they were all very furious that I came in because they were, they all were sufficiently macho to think that the presence of a woman took away from the seriousness of the photograph. Whoops. Sorry. Okay. Now, disruption has been at the heart of contemporary women's practice and it has a storied history. It's important to bring a European strand and that is the Bauhaus. It was the influential German art and design college that was disbanded by the Nazis in 1933. But there women were assigned or more honestly relegated to the weaving workshop. All women who entered the best design school, arguably the best assigned school in Europe, could only study textiles. Restricted by media and limited by gender, female students were encouraged to expand beyond the grid of the textile to think about the web of life, to look below the surface appearance and to consider how movement, material, emotion and design were integrated to find a pattern of meaning. When the Bauhaus closed, Annie Albers and her husband Joseph immigrated to the United States and they first landed in Asheville, North Carolina at the experimental Black Mountain College and this is where this photograph was taken. Annie was formerly the head of the weaving workshop and so she took up that position at Black Mountain College. But as the studios were being built, the women's studio, the weaving studio was the last to be completed. And so what Annie Albers decided to do was that she asked her students to collect materials from nature and to begin to learn by doing and to say that there is no hierarchy of material. And of course, as we jump forward into contemporary making, we find that contemporary female artists are doing this much sooner than the men. Her embrace of modernism encouraged direct experimentation with materials and process and it was intent on discovering new forms. You see this in work by artists like Sheila Hicks and Sheila Hicks and Annie Albers intersect because Sheila Hicks studies painting at Yale under Joseph Albers and Joseph recognizes that Sheila has this interest in textiles, introduces her to his wife and together Annie and Joseph sponsor Sheila Hicks for her first Fulbright to Peru to study Peruvian textiles. Now some artists in women's work are both background and foreground and that's the case with Sheila Hicks. Here I show you her untitled work in the center is the work that is in the exhibition untitled after Ford Foundation installation and this installation was a startling breakout embroidery made with commercial yarn stitched into a linen brown. She uses a traditional stitch, the satin stitch, yet she reinvents the process. Echoes of Annie Albers are heard in Hicks comments as she talks about the Ford project. I wanted to create a space to house you. I experimented with spaces, with shapes, with hard edges, the direction of the stitch and discovered that a curved shape and discovered a curved shape. Circles that almost touched each other reminded me of a beehive which is what I think of when I think of the Ford Foundation. So Annie Albers here I show you on the left, Annie Albers in 1967 making the original installation and then in 2014 the complete work was remade. As has happened to many textiles that are in commercial buildings they were installed at a time that fire standards were different and when they sprayed fire retardants on these textiles it degraded them and Annie Albers installation at Ford Foundation had been so degraded that about 1910, 1911 they were 2010, 2011 they were trying to figure out what to do with it and Sheila Hicks decided that at no cost she would recreate her work because she feels like this is her one of her magnum opus and she wants it to be as good as possible. Now we've talked a little bit about the feminist program and about woman house already. The feminist art program at Cal Arts was slated to occupy a new building but when they opened in 1971 they found themselves without a building. So the heads of the department Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro searched throughout LA and found the building the Victorian home that Howard showed you a picture of and decided that this would be not so much a studio but a place for women to really begin to think about the ideological and symbolic conflation of women and home. It inspired a really immersive response to womanhood. Shapiro and Chicago encouraged students to examine, exaggerate and subvert the social implications of being female. The subjectivity of the students exploration was physical and of the body even though the resulting installation used the lens of the social. The result women house was built by the students for the students and the first day that it was open only women were allowed in it was open for a short period of time a little about a month and 10,000 people visited it. This is what it looked like inside some of the things so Robin Welch's nutrient kitchen alternately called egg to breast visually linked the ritual of cooking to a woman's breast bodily function of a breast. She had subverted the masculine tropes that sexualized female breasts by linking it to its biological function nourishment. Sandra Orgel performed in one of two works collectively called maintenance and here she slowly ironed a single bed sheet over the duration of an evening. After needy woman house, Chicago and Shapiro began working strategically in ways that uplifted women. The format of Chicago's test fluid and energetic rainbow surrounding a cavity suggests female pleasure. Howard has already talked about the pun on Elizabeth Blackwell's name. Shapiro called her works from Ajah's their collages made from smaller decorative and patterned materials carefully cut and pieced together. Here she uses the techniques of a quilt maker in circular format reminiscent of a book drug or braided rug. Her story objects anchor each section of the exhibition which is loosely ordered either by type or technique. In this particular suite all of the imagery and the artworks is created with a satin stitch and they tell stories about women from very different vantage point. Anne Sutherland's, which is the bottom center, 19th century rendering of Princess Eremania illustrates a tale of female piety as told in Tassau's epic poem just Jerusalem Liberata. And in the canto it's a battle between honor and love is unleashed inside of the princess. So she's trying to decide which way to go. It's a moral crisis. Above Hicks is listening to lessons taught by Annie Albers using the satin stitch. But here she's shifted from using floss or a very fine silk and thread to using a plated yarn. She expands the leaf of the stitch and changes its direction to create an abstract motif. Her approach is very different from Judith Chicago in The Egg That Hatched Itself which is stitched by Kathy Lenhart. Chicago reimagines birth rendered by a traditional technique. The embroidery part of the larger birth project is an imaginary perhaps transcendental commentary on birth birth. And 20 years later Elaine Reichek uses the same technique to refine an epic narrative that highlights women as the, oh why do I do that, women as a heroine. Reichek's Adriana's Thread did a whole series based on Adriana's Thread and here is the one scene it is within the labyrinth. She selected this the myth because it highlights the intelligence agency and cunning of Adriana. The goddess that entrusted who ensured that Theseus would escape the labyrinth after he killed the manager by instructing him to tie a thread the thread that she gave him to the entrance and then follow it back so he would be sure to exit. It shows very clearly the strength this passage shows very clearly the strength of a heroine. Made 200 years earlier Anne Sutherland's embroidery depicting Eremania the princess of Antioch displays this female protagonist in a star crossed attempt to be with Kerbalovic. She has no agency. The collection exhibit the collection of artworks based on women's clothing looks at privilege agency and sexuality. By installing a 19th century dressing gown in proximity to contemporary work unspoken histories the effect of historical traumas becomes palpable. Now we've already been told that this dress was too good to be worn but seen as an historic object alone is to see it out of a social context because in a certain way a dress like this we would have been made not not that it was given to the home for colored women wrongly but it was made in the 19th century with rich decoration and it was an opulent garment an at-home garment. It's embellished edges and its elaborate skirt would have indicated a wealthy person would have would have would it was its original intent but the surrounding artworks suggest darker histories. Um in this performance Yoko Ono invited her audience to approach her on stage and cut away the clothing that she wore. She wore her finest clothing just like that dressing gown equivalent to the dressing gown to each pro performance and there were a total of three cut piece performances. One by one volunteers from the audience approached the artist and cut the clothes. Some people made a single cut others made multiple cuts and took away a portion of the outfit. She remained motionless on stage despite the emotional tension within her. Ono's cut piece records aggressions as the audience cuts away with large sharp scissors and disrobes her. She remains serene as she performs cut piece and it's intended as to address violence against women's bodies. Here I want to point out that this performance was made in 1965. This is before women women house. This is a very very early work and um Howard actually showed it at the moment that it ended is that a man approached her on stage and cut one bra strap and then the other and just as her bra was about to to fall off she crossed her hands and ended the performance. In the early days the black arts movement Faith Ringel who Howard showed you the doll sugar and Emma Amos became friends and used similar strategies in their work. Amos said it's always been my contention that for me a black woman artist to walk into the studio is a political act and her work is political. Her dress titled great grandpa Jefferson features a medallion portrait of Thomas Jefferson hanging from the waist. Amos associates herself with Jefferson's problematic relationship with Sally Hammond's his wife's enslaved half sister who he brought to Europe as his daughters made in the 18 in the 1780s when she was 13 years old. Hemmings became pregnant during that trip to Europe to Europe and and about she was about 16 and lost that child but under French law Sally Hemmings could have petitioned for her freedom and if she returned with Jefferson and his daughter to Virginia she would be enslaved. Jefferson wanted her to return and they agreed together that she would return to the United States based on his promise to free her children when they came of age. Now there are stories that go about this it doesn't necessarily happen in a very straightforward way but her children in fact are emancipated. Sally Hemmings however is not. The proximity of the historical gown to these and other contemporary works questions what the older what older histories are left untold as quiet as they are kept but we can no longer think about the dressing gown in terms of status luxury or bountiful gift. We are forced to think about the women who may have worn such a garment and the historical trauma that they inherited or the aggressions that they personally experienced. Inside the mansion contemporary artists are placed Nissan Sun with as they might have been used although most of the China seems to belong in this regal dining space. Cableware from the 19th 20th and 21st centuries have distinct meanings. The 19th century Severe Porcelain copy cup signifies wealth status and luxury and was probably purchased by the Duchess of Tallerand as a way of maintaining her connection to her life in Paris before she returned to Lenthurst. Such pieces though celebrate the French elites whose image are recorded on the cups and the Duchess was among Americans who collected this tableware to announce their wealth and demonstrate a gracious lifestyle. Photographer Cindy Sherman creates historical fiction by inserting her self-portrait into an original design for a porcelain set commissioned by Madame de Pompadour in 1756 at the manufacturing of the Severe. By reenacting Madame Pompadour, Sherman casts herself as a patron of the arts albeit somewhat tongue-in-cheek. But choosing to have the porcelain made at Severe, she asks us to recall the 19th century quest to own such luxurious objects and comments on the commodification of women by men as objects of desire. Beatrice Glow looks to actual histories as she created her rune hot and tea room. She calls on a history that links her Asian heritage to her life in New York City where she now lives. She used decals and acrylics to decorate commercially available ceramic blanks not fine china or porcelain. These non-luxury materials were selected to critique what is central to her tea room. Rune, a former British colony of the Banda Islands of Indonesia, was acquired by the Dutch when Britain traded the tiny archipelago for Manhattan. This gave the Netherlands a monopoly on the nutmeg trade and elevated the status of the Dutch East India Company. Here in the image on the left, Glow shows the relative land mass of the exchange using violet to represent the total area of rune in comparison to the geography of Manhattan. And you can see how vital this one little piece of land was to connect the spy silence for the Dutch. Glow chose red to suggest the bloodshed that resulted from colonialism and the brutality of the settlers. Her decals are made from prints that documented the occupation of both islands in the 18th century. The imperialist transaction, the exchange of land, caused violence, dispossession, forced migrations, and enslavement for the indigenous people in each colonial territory. Glow, who, as I said, has heritage as a Chinese and Native American, creates community-centered projects to connect the Bandanese of Indonesia with the Lenape, the indigenous people of Manhattan, and forms bridges that interconnect these legacies, trying to heal the aftershocks of historic realities. In more recent work, like Glow's Tableware, the subject has shifted from feminist agendas to stories about humans. Over the past 20 years, artists have embraced their own subjectivity, which fosters an expanded scope of commentary. Paula Hayes' terrariums use plant materials that live for years. The larger terrarium on display, TM1, which is on the table, was planted 13 years ago. She creates a controlled environment based on the Victorian invention of the Wardian case, now called a terrarium, that allows plants to thrive in an enclosed space at a constant temperature. Hayes' commissions handblown glass containers for her miniature gardens, rooting the plantings in spaces that mimic the shape of the Earth's atmosphere. The curved outlines suggest a warp in time or a gestational womb. Her works expand the parameters of art making, and she writes, what does it mean to own an artwork that will never look the same from one month to the next? And how does an ever-changing living sculpture tweak our perceptions of what it means to conserve an artwork for a prosperity? Buildings like Linterist, which are part of the National Trust, often futile like time capsules, memorializing people in times of the past. Projects like Hayes' terrariums and women's work, though, remind us that with attention, nurture, and creativity, these sites can continue to evolve with creative development as part of their legacy. Kiki Smith's stand-by lines, I must say that this is just a detail and the full work is under a beautiful glass dome. They are fragile lampwork glass sculptures enclosed in a bell jar. In a practice that considers elemental forces, procreation, death, and regeneration, using imagery from the natural world, here Kiki Smith chooses a common wee, sometimes called a blowing flower in other languages. But glistening fairy-light flowers invite us into a moment of wonder, musing about the suspension of the fluffy heads as they scatter. And she writes, and a scholar has written, though death spells the end of mortal life, the dandelion suggests a prospect of resurrection or continuity. Since it sees will be carried off by the wind, it already harbors new life within it as the work of one artist is the seed and the inspiration for the next artist and for all who witness the work. Visual language is one of the most potent linguistic modalities. It allows nonlinear investigation while inviting intuitive understanding. It works through association, not through causality. It invites newness and defends against oppression. The language of the domestic, the objects, legacies, and techniques over the course of centuries have invited creative invention and artistic initiative. As the 20th century progressed, there was a shift from using domestic techniques and art making as proof of a woman's worth to statements about womanhood grown from the hand, art, and mind. With using the language of women's domesticity, these artists, contemporary artists forged a space for alternative cultural production and epistemologies, creating a space for intimacy and community. This transition was the springboard that gave rise to the feminist art movement and now is common in contemporary practice. Beginning with the techniques and the language of the domestic, women find space, visibility, and agency. And I'd be happy to answer any questions. You know, that was not my decision. It was Howard's, although I will say that when, so where, where did I, how was it decided where to put the works? Howard really had in his mind a map of the building and groups. I think what happened was as the groups developed, some of the stories were more easily told in the exhibition space and some of them were just essential to the physical spaces within the building. Howard, you might want to say more, but, but they, each space has a language. So seeing those, see, for instance, seeing the room, hot and tea room, tableware in the dining room is much different from seeing it in the exhibition space. And yet there were other times that very close sort of comparisons or considerations like security, certain objects that were very small needed to be in the exhibition hall. You want to say more? Yeah. So I think the main distinction was the exhibition space was used in a traditional way to show the different techniques that women mastered and what those looked like in the heads of the precedent. And the mansion, the issue is more that we put things in the room for which the historic precedent would likely have been made. So you have quilts in a bedroom, dolls in the lady of the house's bedroom, which would also have been a nursery, the plates on the tables. And we did that for two reasons. A lot of the people who come to Lenthurst during this exhibit, because it's on from Memorial Day through the end of September, really are here to see the house and are not necessarily interested in the contemporary art. And one of the things that we wanted to do particularly in the house was put things up in a natural way so that as they went through it, there would be an opportunity for them to discover things and potentially like things that they saw not in the context of this exhibition, but like the signature of the house. What's that big lemon doing on that table? What's that? What does that statue have a scarf over its face? And that they would be able to sort of think about things rather than have being forced confronted with things of it, they'd be able to discover things of it. One of the things that was interesting with the table that has the Cindy Sherman and the Beatrice Glow works is that the very first weekend that we opened, one of the guys who was on had missed the training and Beatrice Glow was on his tour. And as they go into the dining room, he says, and these are all works from the Lenthurst collection. And she's like, excuse me, no, they're not. And she sort of explains, but it was set up in that way that people could have that assumption that when they're looking that, oh, yeah, this is from Lenthurst, but then what are these funny images on the books? Yeah. And there's, there is a feminist strategy of iteration. That means doing the same thing over and over again. And every time you do it, you shift it a little bit. So it gets closer and closer to your agenda. And that agenda is much more easily accepted. And then there is also a history of artists doing these sorts of interventions. And it starts with Fred Wilson, an African American artist, and his project was called Mining Museum. And he went and got the stuff that's in the basement of museums and put it in context. So if you saw a picture hanging on the wall of a slave owner in a vitrine next to it might be a pair of shackles. So that was, you know, so that they recontextualized. And that was the beginning that was in the early 90s is when this really kind of took took foot. And there have been many, many exhibitions. Justice, there have been many, many exhibitions called women's work. And one of the things to keep in mind is, you know, oh my gosh, another women's work show. Well, the truth is, and Judy Chicago said it quite eloquently in the New York Times article, that these are now accepted exhibitions, the work is seen as artwork. And it is kind of too bad that this has to happen over and over and over again. But what is happening is the agendas are shifting from purely feminist agendas to more human and global agendas so that they can be much more easily accessed. Yeah. The original tapestry of what? The four. Usually when that happens, there is a registrar involved who would get a written document. They probably preserved part of it. They did very careful photo documentation, not only of the object as at the time it was removed, but probably had documented the degradation of the object. They take samples. They probably took a part of it so that they could get to the parts of the cloth. I mean, Sheila Hicks, the reason Sheila Hicks insisted on doing it herself is she knew the materials, she knew exactly how it was done. And she offered to do this at no cost. But this is very carefully documented. And then by written permission of the artist, an artwork can be destroyed. One of my first shows that I did was in Detroit. And an artist had made great big sculptures out of airwick, that gooey air scent. And at the opening, somebody stepped flat in the middle of it and it went everywhere. And to this day, I had, and so she remade it. And with her permission, we removed the damaged piece and destroyed it. But to this day, one of my nightmares is that the registrar comes to get me because I've destroyed the artwork in her museum. Well, Howard is the director here. We have to be the person that talks a little bit about the visitor experience and the interpretation. So Howard? I'm going to get a slightly different show first. So the Philip Gustin show that's been traveling around, I think is one of the most remarkable shows. First off, because I don't think people know him or think of the full kind of play of the work that he does. But that show got rethought in the light of a lot of what happened politically and socially in the country. And I think it is one of the best examples currently of a show in which it really is about what, what do you think visitor of what you are seeing? And one of the moments in the show is they reference, I think it's best known about the images of the Ku Klux Klan and how those are treated. But one of the things that's shown is he was teaching in St. Louis at a time that there was an exhibit on the Holocaust of photographs of Dahau that Joseph Paltzer put up in St. Louis. And you know, you see people standing there and there's all the dead bodies on the wall and people just look at them. And that material is put in a case now that basically says, you know, this is sensitive material that will trigger you in a way that I, you know, and again, I remember growing up, I'm losing all those dead bodies. So recognizing that we're in a different environment, people have a very different sensibility that they're looking at areas in which people could draw or write comments about how they felt. Areas before and a card before you went into the room that had the images of the Ku Klux Klan sort of saying, you know, these are ways in which you can center yourself before you go in. So I thought it was a really for even for me where I was not necessarily person who's triggered by the images, I felt like this is like much of looking at art. To me as a, you know, somebody who's at the end of an art career, you go to look at art. I don't want to say to be triggered, but to or it to be provocative or it to make you think. But it was very interesting to me to see sort of in a different generation that has very different values, how an exhibit could be placed in that way in the American Zoom. For this exhibition at Lindhurst, I think one of the things that we were very cognizant of is that the people who were in this room today, and thank you all for coming, but you were the people who, if I can't get you to come, I'm doing something wrong, basically. You know what you're looking at, you've been looking at art for a very long period of time, and I rely on people like you as supporters, but what's very important to me is, you know, there's sort of a 10-year-old kid out there somewhere whose family doesn't necessarily think about museums or art or something that's going to walk through here one day and get a lot. This is really cool. Like I should maybe, you know, like, is there more of this than I could look at? And so a lot of what we're doing in a lot of the way that the house set up in particular, and I think when we walk through it, you'll sort of understand that, is it really a setup to allow people to discover for themselves and to look at things in a very subtle way so that they can be like, oh, what's that? What's that? Why is this here? And there are specific moments in there where you don't have much of a choice. You have to stop and say, hey, like, why do you have this in this historic house if I wasn't expecting that? And I think that's one of the most important things that we did because that is the heart of this. We're very good and we're very focused at the subversion here that gets people to look at things and engage in things that they don't want to engage in. There are many things that I wish I could do differently. I wish I could have had QR codes for more of the labeling for people who might have been interested and who would have taken a picture and read it afterwards. But I think that one of the things that's been very successful for us is that many of the people have come here saw us because of the Gilded Age, where we're one of the major filming locations, because of the Westminster dogs. So they're not necessarily coming for this exhibit. And I think I'm glad that people were able to experience these when they really didn't. Yeah. And if I can, I'm going to get you, if I can piggyback on that, I think there's a few other things that should be said. The reason, one of the primary reasons the Philip Dustin show was rethought is that it includes imagery of the Ku Klux Klan as a Jewish man. He was subject to the effects and to the violence within, you know, culturally. He was subject to this, but it was felt that in 2019, 2020, an exhibition like that could not be staged without a black curator. And so that's why National Gallery and the, there was consortium, I think, for museums stepped back until they could hire that person to be part of it. And this is an important part of museology today. It's the agency of the subject and of the artist. And quite often when I work in contemporary art, not not one word is published until the artist has read it and signed off on it. And that is a continuing thing so that when you think about curation, it's really a collaboration now between the artist and the curator. And here, the artists were absolutely thrilled. And I think Nafis White said it really well, using the words of Betty Saar, I stand on the shoulders of those who came before. And now I am in a great national monument and somebody can stand on my shoulders. Well, I'm right now involved in, say, Venice, which is an organization in Venice, Italy. And we are beginning to investigate the women's work, meaning who are the women artists of the time. And I think that Nancy did an amazing job of reconstructing these histories. And what happens over time is, you know, the stories get more complicated. It's hard to unlace and tell fact from fiction. And I think those are the really, really fun shows to be working on. Yes. So, and again, I would say that is one of those things where Becky was very useful and that is somebody that Becky brought in. Because in particular, I think kind of from Denver, you had a view on artists in the West, in the Southwest, that you don't always experience in the Northeast. So that's one of those things that I think. Yes. And I think that there is, maybe it wasn't done perfectly here. But the idea was to get these stories into the mainstream, to put them in a building like Lenders, to show it at the National Trust. And Daisy, I've mentored her for several years, she loved the fact that she had this piece and it gave her a platform to speak on a national level about her work. And her work is about the immigrant, migrant experience, really about the migrant experience these days. And she works, her actual work is the social work she does with the people that donate the clothing to her. That is her actual work. And I thought about including that today and I decided just to stay with the issue of race because I think it's a tighter argument. Yeah. I would say, and it's one thing, there's two very specific things. I think one of the things when we pick the objects is everything has a story. And it goes back to this point, we don't know what people are going to look at. I think if we're lucky, they'll read one or two of the labels in the exhibition. So everything has to have some kind of impact because you don't, it's essentially Russian roulette on what people are going to read. When we started doing the exhibit, we had a discussion internally. We were going to put a critical warning on the door that basically said, warning, you may have this, this, this, and this, and this, that you're looking at. And in the end, we decided not to. I think there were a couple of things. First, I think one of the things that we definitely want to do is make sure that people engage. And I'd rather that they are a little bit shocked sometimes than the other way around. And even I think in some of my guides, when I talked about the fact that like, there's a lot of stories of lesbian women in this exhibit. And I'm not sure some of them felt, always felt so comfortable bringing that up. And I felt that it needed to be a part of that comes from the fact that my parents were Holocaust survivors who were involved in the resistance in Europe and the war is a bit of uprising. And I think there's a sense with me that sometimes you need to make sure that the trigger warning doesn't prevent people from hearing something that that actually they should be engaging with. And I think it is interesting to me because I give a lot of private tours. And at that piece explain the story. And for those who don't know, it's a piece, it looks like a piece of underwear hanging on a little spike in the wall. Just a little white, you know, kind of little beat up underwear. And this the story essentially trigger warning, this may not be easy to take, but is that Daisy Fazzada is a Mexican heritage, but she's born in America would go back and forth between the Mexico and Mexico. And one day in school, a social advocate came in and was telling the story that as coyotes bring illegal immigrants over the border at a certain point, the men and the women are separated, the women are raped, and their underwear is thrown into these trees and the work is called both of the Alencia, like, you know, violence tree, rape tree. And those are the trophies of the rape. And so this is a piece of underwear. And she gets these underwear from other women that are cast in porcelain. So the cloth is gone. And what we see is this hanging porcelain worth of underwear. And in some ways, we felt that, you know, these are things that we want people to hear. And if there is often because we have a lot of we have between 60 and 90,000 people that come. If there is a challenge, I'd rather apologize to somebody later and deal with it. But I do think sometimes you decide which which border are you going to take them going to allow people to say, Oh, I don't want to, we're just going to stick that or do you sort of have them come in. And a lot of times, since there was very little, what I would call sort of visual sexual content of an adult nature, I felt that we were able to do that because there was nothing necessarily objectionable. In that way, that might be apparent. And that we always have staff over there who talk about this. So it was a decision that we made. So I just want to thank Nancy and Becky both for the work on this exhibit and for being here today. And thank you all for coming. And for those of you who are on one with us, as I say, this will conclude our online program. Now for the rest of you, if you haven't seen the exhibit, we'll please come. We'll do a tour of the exhibition. We'll start in the exhibition gallery. And then we'll go up to the mansion. So if you can join us, please do. And hopefully our lively discussion will continue.