 go ahead and get started. And as you can, as our audience members can tell, they'll keep coming in, they'll keep pouring in. But you can tell we've got two wonderful guests today. I am thrilled and just honored that we are ending this women's work series on such a high note with a conversation with two women who also happen to be very close, long time friends whose work and writing and curated shows were at the center of second way feminism and the feminist art movement who helped found groundbreaking institutions in the early 70s, like the Artist and Residency AIR Gallery in New York in 1972, which was the first nonprofit artist directed and artist maintained gallery for women artists in the US. And the magazine heresies a feminist publication on art and politics, which was a journal dedicated to creating a living record of the conversations and issues in the 70s, 80s and 90s. And it initiated a public discourse and incredibly necessary public discourse on sexuality, race, politics, violence against women, among many other issues. They both have built international reputations and continue to exert considerable influence on the art world and on their own communities as artists, authors and activists. I'm so thrilled and so grateful to be able to welcome Lucy LaParde and Harmony Hammond as our guest speakers today. Next slide, please. So I am Chris Morris and I am the senior field director for the Los Angeles office of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. I also happen to be the manager of the National Trust where women made history initiative. And for those of you who may not be familiar with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, we are the nation's only nonprofit advocacy organization dedicated to saving historic places. But our work goes far beyond the act of preserving a physical structure or historic interior or a designed landscape. We believe that these places are meaningful and powerful because of their connections to people and the stories that they can tell us, the lessons that they can teach us in the many ways in which we all continue to be inspired by both their struggles and their successes. Next slide, please. At its heart, the where women made history initiative is a manifestation of the National Trust's commitment to tell a more truthful and more equitable national story. And as the last two and a half years have brought into focus the myriad racial inequities and injustices across our country, so too have they revealed the deep inequities that sadly continue to be faced by women, particularly women of color, indigenous and LGBTQ women. But by bringing respect and recognition to women's achievements, honoring the many ways in which they have changed their own communities and changed the world and supporting their place-based work in their own communities, we move closer to a reality in which women's contributions are understood as equal and are valued as such. Next slide, please. I know everyone is anxious to dive into our conversation with Lucy in harmony as am I, but I'm afraid we have to do just a few quick logistics first, so so bear with me. Today's virtual program is brought to you by where women made history in concert with the women's work exhibition at Lindhurst, which will be part of the focus of our conversation today. Lindhurst is a national trust historic site located in Territown, New York, and if you are in the New York area and you have the ability to visit the Hudson Valley before September 26 in the exhibition closes, I cannot recommend strongly enough that you make the trip to Territown to see both the stunning Lindhurst mansion and the women's work exhibition there, which was curated by Rebecca Hart, Nancy Carlisle, the senior curator of collections at Historic New England and Howard's are the director of Lindhurst women's work brings together over 125 pieces of artwork and domestic objects spanning 300 years of women's creative production, and it tracks the deep pervasive and continuing influence of the domestic craft tradition and the practices in contemporary women artists. Today's event will consist entirely of a conversation with Lucy Lafart and Harmony Hammond, but we will take questions from the audience throughout the webinar. So please send us your questions directly via the Q&A function in Zoom, and you're welcome to submit questions at any point, but we will be waiting until the Q&A section closer to the end to answer the audience questions, but please do put them in there throughout. Also note that there is a closed captioning function is enabled for this webinar for anyone who would like to take advantage of that feature. And last but not least, please note that this web presentation is being recorded. So following the program, we'll send out a recording of today's webinar series directly to the email you used to register, and you can find all of the webinars in this series on savingwithplaces.org in a link that is being provided in the chat right now. So now that we've taken care of the logistics, it's time to turn our attention to our featured speakers today in our conversation with Lucy, Arlapard, and Harmony Hammond. Lucy Arlapard is a writer, activist, and sometimes curator, author of 20, I think maybe more than sometimes, author of 25 books on Contemporary Art and Cultural Criticism, including From the Center, Feminist Essays on Women Art, Eva Hess, Mixed Blessings, New Art in a Multicultural America, The Lure of the Local, Senses of Place in a Multicentral Society, and more recently, Undermining, A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics and Art in the Changing West, and Pueblo Chico, Lands and Lives in Galasteo since 1814. You're essentially your town's local historian. She has co-founded various artists and feminist and activist organizations and publications, and she lives off the grid in rural Galasteo, New Mexico, where for 25 years, she has edited the monthly community newsletter of Puente de Galasteo. And Harmony Hammond is a leading figure in the development of the feminist art movement in New York in the early 1970s. She was a co-founder of AIR, the First Women's Cooperative Gallery in New York in 1972, and Heresies in 1976, a feminist publication on art and politics. Hammond's early feminist work combined gender politics with post-minimal concerns of material and process, frequently occupying a space between painting and sculpture, a focus that continues in her work to this day. Her work is represented by Alexander Gray Associates in New York City, and she will have a solo exhibition there in April of 2023. Her other upcoming exhibitions include Queer Threads at the San Jose Museum of Quilt and Textile starting in May of 2023 and Braided Histories at the LA County Museum of Art, which I'm very excited to see, which opens in September, September 17th of 2023, and then we'll be traveling to the National Gallery of Art in March of 2024. So please, everyone, join me in welcoming Lucy R. LePard and Harmony Hammond. Lucy and Harmony, thank you so much for being a part of this conversation about women's work, the exhibition, as well as women's work within the larger sphere of women's artistic production. Now, I know that two of you have been friends for decades, and slightly more recently, you've been neighbors in Gallisteo. Can you start by telling us a little bit about your friendship? How did the two of you come to know each other? And I'm very curious to know what has this friendship meant to you in your life and your professional work? Jump in, Lucy, go ahead. Either one of you, go right ahead. Oh, yeah, okay. I met Harmony, I think in 1970, and I never buy artists' work, first thing too many of my friends are artists, maybe too much friction and so forth, but also I just never had the money, and people would give me things now and then, which was nice, but I did buy a piece of Harmony's very early on and was a bag. Is that the, that isn't the same one that was in this show? Oh, it's a different one. Yeah. Anyway, which I gave to a museum eventually because my house is 16 by 24 feet, so Harmony's is quite a bit bigger. As artists need that. But anyway, then we became friends through the feminist movement and so forth. And then when Harmony of course came to New Mexico, I think she was saying that earlier, she was living in New Mexico from the 80s, early 80s, 84 or something like that. And then I was coming back and forth. I first came to New Mexico in 1972 and loved it, but didn't see how I could make a living here, which is one of the major problems about this very poor state. And anyway, and finally Harmony, I was down here hiking nearby looking at Petroglyphs at Rockard and Harmony said, take a look at this place, I think even buying and I went by and I looked at it and I thought this whole town looked so foreign to me. It's gentrified a lot since then, but I walked across the bridge to the other side of the creek, which is where I live now. And I thought, wow, this is really interesting and loved Harmony's place, which is terrific. And ended up by the minute when my mother died and had some money for it the first time, I bought some land right across the creek from Harmony. And then before that I had visited Judy Chicago who was living here because her husband, Donald Woodman was one of Agnes Martin's, so was Agnes Martin's eminuences at that point. So anyway, feminists brought me to Gallisteria. Well, what about you, Harmony? Well, I would just add on to that because we do go back and, you know, relationships that go back like that over time are so important because we kind of share a lot and we share histories and activism and, you know, projects together. And that's always so valuable because you don't have to always explain yourself to the other person. They kind of know where you're coming from. I just want to elaborate, though, on what Lucy mentioned about coming to my studio and buying a bag of mine, a piece of mine. This was really important because at that time, which was around, I don't know, 1971 or something like that. And it was the beginning of the feminist art movement within the larger feminist movement, within the kind of political and, you know, many movements, liberation movements that were happening at the time. But I had heard about this art critic named Lucy LePard who was going around looking at work by women. She was climbing the stairs of lofts and looking at work by women and was beginning to curate an exhibition. I don't know if that's the show that the 25 women artists that was shown at the Aldridge then or not may have been a different one. But anyway, I had heard about this. So somebody gave me her phone number. I called her up. And I was too late for her to consider my work for the one of the very first exhibitions of women's art, contemporary women's art, or maybe the first. But she came anyway. And she came, but she came with her son, Ethan, in tow. And I had my daughter, Tanya, who was born in 1970 around the corner in a crib. And she did, we talked about the work. We actually talked about the work and what it meant, you know, and how, what the piece was about, the content, in other words. And then, miraculously, bought this piece. And that, of course, was wonderful because it was the first piece that I ever sold in New York. But what also was really remarkable about our first meeting and my first studio visit by a critic was that we were both there as women, as mothers, and art professionals. And one did not rule out the other. And so I always think of it in those terms as being just so important for that reason alone. And then, as Lucy said, you know, we've been worked together on many projects, especially Heresy's magazine, both of us being co-founders with 18 other feminists in New York. And we also worked on two or three issues, I think two issues together as co-editors of the issue. And then just many projects in New York and in New Mexico. And also, we were both in the fire department. Harmony was a fire fighter for 10 years. And I've been in the fire department for 26 years now, but I'm not a firefighter. I'm just in the bake sale part of it. But she's hung in there. And I was just a volunteer firefighter for 10 years. But yeah, that's part of our community work. Yes. Well, now I think it's so wonderful, the relationship, like essentially the lifelong relationship that two of you had. And it seems like these relationships are so important in the way that you have both influenced each other, bring each other into the work. Because, like you said, you kind of recognize where each other is coming from almost instantly. Can I add something just that I was going to say when Harmony talked about was we were both there with our kids. That was a period when if a curator, a critic, or a collector came to a woman artist's studio, you hid every single evidence of having a child or a husband or anything, but the art to show you were actually a professional and actually serious. You need a baby. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Don't want to recognize that you actually have other roles to play in life other than just produce art. And that was really something. I mean, somebody who didn't like me much when I had a baby said to me, well, I wish I had a chance to do everything. And doing everything as every professional who's had kids, especially as single mothers, which we both basically were, it isn't easy. No, it's not. And that's that's rather amazing that you both like were so, I mean, not that it was it seems like it was sort of out of a necessity, but it was also there was absolutely nothing wrong with still is never has been never will be anything wrong with having your children involved in your life and your work. I mean, that's just sort of and that gets in, believe me. And Chris, you know, along these same lines and what Lucy just mentioned, the what was in the air at that time in New York, but I think all across the country was, you know, if you worked with fabrics or any kind of work that, well, first of all, you were a woman artist, that was a big problem. But then if you did work that, you know, focused on women's experiences in the world, and especially if you use tools, art making tools like a sewing machine, you put that away as well. So it's really hard today, when we look at the work of women, you know, who are sewing and weaving and doing a range of materials, work range of work with different materials and techniques and tools that are, for instance, in this wonderful exhibition, but there was a radicality to it at that time early on, because it was such a no no, it's really hard to convey what it was like then. And those of us, and Lucy and I aren't the only ones, of course, but there were women across the country, California, New York, but a lot of places in between as well, that, you know, when you started, you had to put that sewing machine away if you were using that as a tool in your art making. Right. But interesting, I'm sorry, go ahead, Carmen, you want to finish? No, I'm done. Yeah. Interestingly, I did a show called, I curated it, my first show called Accentric Abstraction in 1966, and the person, Eva Hesse was in it, Bruce Naumann, people use Louise Bourgeois, but the interesting thing was, is the only person who was using all out textiles was a man, was Franklin Conviner, who lived above me in the loft on the Bowery at that point. So it was, textiles were beginning to really interest her in January too. Well, and to the point that you made, Harmony, that you both made about sort of the radicality of that approach, I wanted to ask you Harmony in particular, but both of you honestly, like, I mean, Harmony, you especially have been known since the early 70s for producing those sculptural works and that were really centered on intentionally the heritage of kind of traditional craft or women's crafts. And you also do that through both your curatorial practice and your activism. So can you talk a little bit about how you used the traditional craft media and processes to imbue your own work with meaning? And then also would love to know how your understanding and use of those materials and practices and techniques have changed over time since you continue to be very actively producing artwork now, 50 years later. Well, first of all, they haven't really changed. I mean, I do work in a variety of formats and materials. But basically, I can say that most of my work for, you know, 50s plus years comes out of post minimal concerns with materials and process to which I bring an agenda and sometimes a queer content. It's what I call or refer to as material engagement. But what happened in the early 70s, I had recently moved from Minneapolis where I had done large-hearted, geometric-hearted shaped canvases because I thought that's what you were supposed to do. It's what was being shown in New York. They were really good, but they really weren't my work yet. And then I had traveled in the summer and for the first time was exposed to art by non-Western cultures, which of course I never got when I was in college. So when I get to New York, I move there in the fall of 69. And I'm going to make this very quick because this is usually something I talk about in, you know, visiting artists' lectures for several hours, and we can't do that here. So I'm just going to go really fast through some things here. But when I got to New York, I was basically making pattern paintings, mostly on paper. And the patterns I was painting were lifted from textiles primarily. So I was struggling along with that. There was no P&D movement or anything like that. At the same time, I was meeting with an art consciousness raising group. The feminist art movement was kind of, you know, blossoming all around. I was contributing to it. It was affecting me. And of course I was talking to other women artists. So I and many other feminist artists at that time, we basically made a conscious decision to abandon the male-dominated side of painting, where we really were not welcome. And we decided to consciously use materials, techniques, formal strategies that were associated with women's traditional creativity. And sometimes I would say those of non-western cultures as well. And so I started, so instead of work, you know, painting patterns that I lifted from textiles, I just moved from textiles to fabric, to the fabric itself, to cloth. And these early pieces like the bag, which is in the exhibition, and these presences were all made out of fabrics that were given to me, rags really, that were given to me by women friends. So using the fabric, recycling it, fabric that was given to me by women versus going out and buying new fabric, was literally a way of putting my life in my art at the time. And so I and other artists who were working somewhat in the similar way, there was an intentionality about what we were doing. We knew it was radical and we knew damn well what we were doing. In my case, notions of layering, connecting, building whole forms, the bag that's in women's work came off the wall into space. So these presences I thought of as gendered and larger than life size for the most part. And they were very much about women occupying space, taking space and holding it and occupying it. And the word presence was, which was a no-no at that time, was very consciously chosen by me. So that was the earliest work. And I continued to work with fabrics that people gave me, old worn out clothing, bed sheets, blankets. I mean, I come from a lower middle class background of hand-me-downs and stuff. So this was kind of normal really. And a tradition of women working with leftover scraps of fabric. Or as I think maybe Lucy will talk about later, making something out of nothing with what is at hand. It's literally handy work. So I continue to work that way. And then I also kind of enlarge where I'm getting my fabric in that my first loft was down in Soho just a couple blocks from Lucy's. And it was previously a garment district in Manhattan. And you could still, the dumpsters were full of end cuts of bolts of knit fabric because there were a lot of garment factories still there. And of course those, the workers in those factories were primarily women. But I would then get that knit fabric. And that's when I made these, what I call floor pieces, which kind of occupy as to the presence as a space between painting and sculpture. We were all experimenting. It was a time of post-minimal interest in materials and process and experimentation. And you just called it one thing one day and another thing the next day. But we women who chose to reference women's traditional creativity, we brought a gendered content, like I said, to that way of working. So the floor pieces, like the bag in the exhibition, reference something that had a function, but they are now non-functional as art. So they kind of perform a bag and perform braided rugs. They reference braided rugs. But they also, I think of them actually more as floor paintings. And in fact, I would say all my sculpture, I think of more as painting because that's my background. And I think of painting as an additive process. But anyway, these floor paintings or floor pieces use braided rugs, literally, they're grounded, painting off the wall. And they're also, the rugs are a conceptual grounding or base for the pieces as well. So it's visual and it's conceptual. And then I jump ahead, we're just going to go through years very quickly here. And I start taking the fabric and making what I call wrap sculptures around wooden armatures that reference gendered bodies with the wooden armature being the skeleton, the fabric, wrapped fabric being flesh, and then there'd be a skin of acrylic paint or perhaps latex rubber on them. And I must say all of this, if you notice, there's what are the threads here? Layering, connecting, building from the inside out. What was an early women's movement phrase? The personal is political. It starts here, it moves out. And then I began to expand more with different materials, because I feel that one way to bring content into basically abstract work, which is what I do, is through materials, adding other objects, mixed media, adding other objects or materials, combining it with paint, making what I call uneasy juxtaposition. So I started using fabric, quilts, domestic linens, as well as things like human hair, straw, and building materials, like well, straw could be a building material, but also things like corrugated, roofing tin and linoleum and things like that. And so they became these kind of mixed media, often quite large, installational paintings, which brought in a lot of different materials and a sense of narrative. In more recent years, and we don't have the best images of these here, I realize, but I continue that kind of concern with bringing content into abstraction. And I'm not, I don't rely so much on bringing in other materials anymore, although I do paint on burlap. The canvas I use sometimes are recycled Aikido mats, Aikido being a Japanese martial art I study, coffee burlap, coffee sacks, and I use grommets a lot. So there are very select materials that I use, and it's basically, again, that space between painting and sculpture. And I try to get the meaning, the social political meaning in the paint itself as a material, equal to anything else. And I'll just say, basically, it's all about the surface and what's underneath, what's buried, what's hidden, and what has agency, what begins to visually assert itself up through the surface. And you can talk about that in relation to any group of people that have a history that's been buried or erased or minimized. And that's just all I want to say for now. Sorry to get that wrong. No, that was fantastic. And thank you. I knew that your work was very much grounded in your sort of personal experiences and the materials and the places that were at hand to you. But I did not appreciate just how deeply personal these works were. And Lucy, I am very curious to hear from you as somebody who was perhaps one of the first, if not the first critics who was looking at these pieces, both harmonies and others. What was your response to this in terms of, I know you've, I've read where you've said that sort of even a mediocre work by a woman artist is you find more engaging, more moving, more powerful than mediocre work by men because it connects with you. So talk to us a little bit about your response to some of these early pieces by Harmony and others and how they resonated with you or not. Well, one of the things, we started the ad hoc women artists committee to protest the Whitney Museum in 1970. And I had been pushing off feminism. I didn't want to be called a woman. I wanted to be one of the boys. And then when I got back, Faith Ringgold, Poppy Johnson, and Brenda Miller, and I started this ad hoc women artists committee and so forth. And then women started gathering in consciousness raising groups. And one of the things that stuck out for me in the consciousness raising was we'd go around the circle and say, talk about your work. And people would say, oh, I do big geometric paintings. And this goes back to what Harmony was like. And I do this in the art world kind of stuff. And then they'd say, and in my own time, we went to sometimes I make these little collages. And sometimes they were cloth or sometimes they had something to do, you often had to do with with the person was political. But I always thought that the political as personal is equally important. Because our lives, when we look back at our influences and so on, it's our families, our ancestry, the stories we heard our grandmothers tell us and so forth, that really made as much difference. And that connected us to this kind of work. And they were early in the Aldrich show that they had in 1971, which I didn't I that was people who had not had a solo show. They for some reason, people been saying it's a solo museum show. But that's not true. It was it was there were so many women I knew whose work I was seeing and I loved. And I had to cut it down somehow. So it was people who had never had a solo show gallery or any other other kind of thing. And in that show, Howard Dean of Pindell made a soft grid, a stuffed soft grid, I did a stuff, a soft sculpture show for a moment at one point right in there. And then Jackie Windsor did a similar, you know, messed up grid with with a little rope knots in it and so forth. And and that was those were really important works for me because I mean, anything soft, I mean, Oldenburg, of course, had already done all the sculpture stuff. But Patty did the sewing, his then wife did the sewing. And in this case, this was this was not what was going down. And also scale, I think made a big difference. I mean, when we were we were in the art world. And so people didn't do little tiny things for most of the time, maybe at home, they did. But by the time you got to showing it, you made it something bigger and had presence like harmony says, and presence was really important for women. If people had all made little tiny things that they might have liked it done, they would nobody would have paid attention. And I tried to do some articles for our forum at one point in the early 70s. And the editor said, we don't want any feature ads. I mean, I, anyway, what we went through and some of that stuff was kind of amazing. I look, I have always liked a lot of different kinds of art. So it wasn't like this was the only kind of art. I'm not an artist. I wait for artists to do something. And then I can write about it. And I keep saying, well, somebody do something like this. Oh, good, they've done it. Now I can write about it. So well, I think you both, you both made very well the point that it is it is difficult for those of us who didn't experience it to kind of comprehend how radical these steps were, particularly just like you were saying, harmony, the claiming of space, the sort of the assertion of a feminine point of view, the assertion of just femininity and domesticity into the art space. And I want to get your sort of thoughts on, you know, as you were mentioning to Lucy that it's not as though it was only women who were practicing in these materials or using these media and even more so today. And we see that these what we call these kind of traditional craft techniques, which like quilting, sewing, ceramic painting that are all expressed in various ways through the women's work show are really being used for a whole host of expressive purposes. And, you know, regardless of some of the artists actual gender or their sexuality or cultural identity, and they're using them to express a whole range of issues, whether that's their familial and ancestral connections, their cultural heritage, laying bare the oppression of capitalism or colonialism or carceral system, all of these things appear in the women's work exist in the women's work exhibition. So do you feel that in contemporary art that these clear connections between the domestic crafts and the feminine gender have either been broken or perhaps made more irrelevant in contemporary art practice where they have been adopted by so many different people? Or do you feel like there's still a lot of value in continuing to understand women that are artwork that draws on these traditions as in some way coded this as feminine or gendered in its practice, since so many people are practicing that way now. I think the fact of the exhibition itself answers that question like, yes, it's still relevant. The work does. So, you know, the range of work, contemporary work, I'm going to say, there have been other shows that have dealt with, you know, work done in the home, work done in the domestic environment, the traditional arts and so forth, but no other exhibit than I know of anyway has brought the two together, the traditional art craft objects, whatever you want to call them, and the contemporary work that references them. And the fact that what we were doing in the early 70s was saying that those traditional craft artworks were important enough that we could use them as sources of inspirations and references in our work. We were saying they were important then. And that's what's still happening today with all the work by Younger, which is almost all the artists in the show than me, but that's what that work says. It doesn't even for a woman to a contemporary woman artist to or any artist even to reference traditional creativity by women is de facto saying that is important. It is of merit to reference. So it is, the show resounds with the answer. Yes, it's relevant, but there have always been some men working with stitching, whether they did it themselves or they didn't. I mean, there were, you know, Samaras, Ellen Shields, even Robert Mapplethorpe back then, there was a show in the early 70s called Soft Disculture, I believe. I mean, there have been different shows, but they, the men at that time weren't dismissed if they worked with fabric or soft materials or sewing, whether they did it or not. But women were, because it was a way that you could dismiss that work by women. And much of it, of course, done in the domestic environment. But I also want to make a point that it was really interesting how all this work and interest with the women's traditional arts, a different say in California from California and New York as important to say, women's house was, remains is, we never have houses in New York. We never would have done a woman house. It just wouldn't have happened that way. And big vacant Victorian sitting around to practicing professional artists, Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro. And then a lot of younger women who were getting turned on to feminism as they were getting turned on to art. I know this is simplistic, but they were merging as artists and feminists. In New York, you had this unruly and artistic group. We didn't have one programmatic identification, you know, a definition of feminism or feminist art. And for the most part, it was, we were all practicing professional artists. We self identified that way already. And that made a difference. It made a difference. And it made a difference so that we were very aware when we referenced that we were, we were out there trying to get our work shown in the New York art world. And, you know, just being ignored, basically. So we just had, we just took it into our own hands. Well, one of the things that was interesting about this whole movement is it was out of the house, it was getting these things out of the house. But it's funded in the Linder show. It's lovely to see them back in the house. You know, those, those pieces that fit so well. I mean, you have to, I had to keep looking at the catalog and say, is this older or new? You know, and then Cindy Kerman's riotous Madame Pompadour thing. That's just, just great. But anyway, and then Judy's dinner party, of course, really was the major piece that took all these ideas and the china painting and the embroidery and everything and gave it a really grand scale. So scale is always scale and context as well as the content was there in the artist's work. But the scale and context, context, yeah, were something that made it more acceptable to the art world. Can I read a little bit of this thing? Please. I wrote this was, I did something in heresies in 1978. And here's the lovely cover of the women's traditional arts. That is beautiful. And that when my writing was in 78, there was a book called Making Something from, you know, I think, I think they're gonna, no, they're gonna go back and show your, and show that the article that you sent in. Oh, that's okay. You don't have to bother with that. But it was a book called Making Something from Nothing, which was by a man and a woman. And the man's name was first in the, in everything except the title page the woman finally got because nobody would notice it then. But on the cover the man was the lily. So I said, does it do the the book said, you know, you can have such fun. It says, go so experiment, dare, improvise, enjoy every minute and maybe you'll discover as we did that once you start making something from nothing, you find you can't stop. And what's more, you don't want to stop. Now that's the story of every artist. So that was a quote from the book. And so I said, that despite the tone and emphasis on enjoyment, unpopular in serious circles, this sport sounds very much fine or high art. Why then are its products not art? Lack of quality will be the first answer offered and derivative of second, even though both would equally apply to most of the more sophisticated works seen in galleries and museums. If art is popularly defined as unique and provocative object of beauty and imagination, the work of many of the best contemporary fine artists must be disqualified along with that of many craftspeople. And in the eyes of the broad audience, many of the talented hobbyists work would qualify. And let's see, go back. So I won't try to answer the these weighted questions about what is high art, what is craft and so forth. Because we have finally begun to sort of get over that stuff. But I said simply offer them as a way of thinking about some of the less obvious aspects of art making. And it goes on and on. I mean, it's a long, heavy article. But it was fun to think about it in that context of an actual book that was popular. Well, this theme of professionalism is something that has come out throughout the series and certainly is kind of underlying everything about the women's work exhibition, sort of the recognition that there is that all of these represent a professional, a certain level of skill in the creation of the project, the products, but also the constant fight for women who are functioning in the production of art or even in just the production of objects to be recognized as a professional or professional artist. And this has come up as we've talked about artists from this century, as well as artists from the 17th and 18th century. And particularly photographers, people like Alice Austin, who fought her entire life to be recognized as a professional photographer and never was at least not until customously. So really that that idea of this moving this out of the realm of hobby and craft, which I know you've also addressed, but thinking about this is sort of women creating artwork as a part of their professional achievements. And I wanted to kind of raise with you, I'm so glad, Harmony, you said what you said about recognizing that the answer to this question is kind of a resounding yes, from the exhibition, because that's really what it was intended. It was intended in some ways as a direct response to Linda Nocklin's article to sort of say absolutely, of course, there are great women artists, there have always been great women artists and look at this array of them right here. And intentionally positioning it as a celebration of three centuries of women's artistic achievement and craft as opposed to a focus on women's historical sort of marginalization, both systematically and institutionally, although that certainly still exists, I don't think anybody is naive enough to think that it doesn't. Do you feel like one of these approaches is more effective or more relevant? Or do we really need to keep talking about this in both senses, as both a recognition and celebration, but also really being mindful of the barriers that still exist? I don't think they're mutually exclusive. I mean, I think both exist, frankly, because I go back to the work that's in the exhibition, it's there for both of those reasons. I also want to make the observation that this particular exhibition of the historical works and the contemporary works is very focused. It seems to me that the curatorial focus was about choices were based on materials, like kind materials or techniques, and that if one were just looking at creative at the domestic environment, art made in the home, historically or something, there are other kinds of works, contemporary works, which could be realistic painting about that, painting a pile of laundry, painting the dirty dishes in the sink, things like that. But this exhibition approaches creativity in the domestic environment, but from a starting point of materials and techniques. And that's what brings the show together. That's what holds all these pieces together. And what I see is a wonderful conversation, very rich. And also the cross cultural aspect, which Harris says, we did our dandest, we did a racism issue and a whole lot of stuff, but we did our dandest, but it was never good enough. And it really wasn't. That's not just a critique from women of color. We realized later that we had not really gotten it there. But I think one of the major in this article I wrote went on and on about this, but it was class. That's something that Americans don't like to talk about class, period. And we don't even have the vocabulary to talk about class. We did an issue called Mother's Mags and Movie Stores that was about, in heresies, and it was about class. And I remember the collective we sat around a table to start thinking about it, and everybody wanted to be working class. Oh, yes, my grandmother there is a farmer. Well, did you show them the farm? And so forth. I mean, we went through all this political questioning and stuff about our backgrounds and everything. But that is something that class was one of the main reasons that this kind of work was not respected. And that just should be brought up. And then the quilting, of course, has been so important. And the marvelous quilts, these Ben things and all everything before and after and the Aboriginal artists doing things. And really showed that this was great art. I mean, there was no question that these things weren't just playing with a subject or whatever. They were absolutely amazing art. And Navajo rugs, which were shown once at the Whitney, under the auspices of a couple of male artists who like the Navajo rugs never was mentioned that the women were making those rugs. There was also a major quilt show. Remember, Lucy, there was a major quilt show at the Whitney. And we all, I mean, it was in the 70s. When was it? I don't know the date off him, but it was like in the 70s or something like that. And it was just, they were hung on the wall as pictorial objects. I had a quote, my grandmother's crazy quilt was on the wall. Well, and that issue of recognition and representation is also a theme that goes throughout this exhibition. In the catalogue, you may have seen that the curator from the New England Historical Society, I mean, there was this conversation about, and particularly the one of the curators, Howard Zarr at Lindhurst said, he thought it would be easiest to find the historical objects and to get those in the show. And it turned out that actually was one of the most difficult aspects of the show, because there is still, for a whole host of reasons, sort of this stigma associated with recognizing these as kind of second tier or lesser works simply because they were produced by women. So that still seems to be applying even as we look back at sort of some of the pieces from our recent history, even though maybe some of that has been challenged and broken down as we look at contemporary artwork. And I was really surprised to hear that how much resistance there is to recognizing the role that women played in producing the historical pieces. Yeah, I was surprised by that too. So I wanted to ask, this may be putting you both on the spot a little bit. I don't know if you've given this a whole lot of thought, but if you had the ability to add an artwork to this exhibition, if you could put your curatorial hats on for a moment, which I know you both wear quite well, if you could add an artwork to this exhibition and it could be historical or contemporary, what would it be? And why would you put it in the show? Well, I had a little list of artists that now can't find it. I mean, there are there are many an artist who could have been in there. I don't have any one particular piece. Do you agree? Well, I too, because we know that we know that everybody would curate the show differently. We would all curate the show slightly differently with many of the same artists, but other artists that we know. And I think if there was one person, and I immediately came up with a number of women who were very active in the 70s and kind of 70s feminist art movement who were working with fabrics and basketry and, you know, hair quilts and different things like that. But I think if there's just one artist that I would like to mention is Ann Wilson. And that is because Ann Wilson was painting on quilts and quilting paintings in the late 50s before the feminist art movement. And it was very much in recognition of the quilts themselves. She was using old, they were they were torn, they were, you know, that they were they were damaged and she was painting on them. And recently, there was the Whitney Museum owns a very beautiful one and was in that crafting, knowing crafting show that the Whitney Museum recently. But I felt because it was pre feminist, it's her work, I would have put it in the exhibition, I really would have. Lucy, you don't want to, you don't want to offer up a piece or an artist. Lucy, come on. I don't ever choose one thing about anything. This is true. You always take a very multi layered. I live a chaotic multi life. I just want to give a little side agenda quickly. You briefly saw a piece of mine with a quilt in the middle of it. And that actually was a quilt that Ann Wilson left after she was visiting in New Mexico and camping here because she's a friend of mine. And she left this dirty old quilt here, which I then stretched on a canvas and partially painted somewhat similarly to the way she had done much earlier on. But that particular piece, there it is, also has, of course, the corrugated roofing tent on the sides and the bottom and text. And I only use text in work when there's a story to tell. And the story to tell here is when I moved from New York to New Mexico, a woman, a young woman who had been an intern at AIR gallery wrote me because I had a character called Chicken Lady that was in some of my works on paper that had been shown at AIR. And she told me in her letter that there was a real Chicken Lady who lived near Milford Connecticut along the waterfront. And did my Chicken Lady share any of the characteristics of this Chicken Lady in Milford Connecticut, who was a real outsider woman, a survivor. She camped on the land along the river that the state was trying to take from her to make into a park. But she said that land belonged to her. And apparently she lived in a trailer and tents and had chickens and dogs around and was very weathered, didn't like people, you know, didn't like people at all. And of course, I had never heard of this Chicken Lady, but I could relate to her because I felt that my friend Ann Wilson is a bit of a Chicken Lady, a survivor, a difficult person who doesn't, and I am. And perhaps we are all, many of us, are Chicken Ladies in that we, we, you know, do we fit into societal roles for women or not. That's what this woman, I have to look her name up, I think it was Marion, you know, she was doing it her way. Right. So that's the story there. The text is from the letter the young intern sent me and it's around a quilt that Ann Wilson left me. That's fantastic. I did not realize that that was, that you combined your, your work with her pieces. That's, that's a wonderful story. Now speaking of picking up on exactly something that you just said, well, perhaps, Armini, I have a question from the audience that I would love to share with both of you and it is very much directed at both of you. So it says both of you are amazing and full of wisdom and energy. Very true. Thank you for your inspiration and dedication. As I am now in my third act, and they define that as being aged 60 of four or five acts, I experience a dismissal and erasure of my presence as an older woman. I would love to hear from both of you. How do we address the rampant ageism in this country as artists and as women? I recently got a letter from somebody in England who said, or someplace abroad, are you hearing me? Yes. Who said, we were going to ask you to do this text, but we heard that you were elderly and semi-retired. And I went elderly. I'm old. I'm 85, but I'm not elderly. I don't mind being called an elder, but I definitely don't want to be. And I'm not semi-retired. Thank you very much. Right. The presumption that means you're no longer working, right? Yeah, that was just classic. I mean, you know, what made, I mean, if they'd looked at, looked me up, I'm still writing my ass off. So how did you respond to that? I just told them I'm old. I'm not elderly. And I'm not retired. Any, Tara, how are you going? Well, I just, you know, it's like there's this best, I mean, it's a good question because certainly, ageism exists, you know, how, you have to just be like strong and continue doing your work. Do you just do your work? The art world is like, it comes and it goes. And it's like, you might be lucky to have attention and you might not be. But you just do your work for the reasons you do your work. But there is this vast and what I call the vast territory of mid-career. And it's a much bigger territory for women than men, okay? Why, why, why is that harmony? You can get lost there. So that's all I can say is I can identify that place. But, you know, I'm a worker. I like working. So I just work. Just let it roll off your back. And I can also say there are, you know, some galleries, I'm lucky to be represented by one of them, but there are other galleries as well, which are specifically looking to artists who are mid-career and older and who have so there are a few places that are looking that way. But I understand where the question comes from. It exists. Go ahead, Lucy. We couldn't quite hear you. Please. No, I was just saying a large probably majority of our close friends across these five decades have suddenly gotten more successful now. I mean, I think Cindy Vicunia has been a close friend of mine for decades. And suddenly she got a golden lion at Venice Biennale. I mean, who knew? I mean, you know, and then so many people and harmony included finally got a gallery who appreciated what she was doing and made her as famous as she is now, although she was always famous in the other range. But, you know, it's just I'm constantly writing notes to old friends saying congratulations better late than never. Exactly. Well, and I think it's true that if the recognition comes at all, it tends to come later in life or with some artists even posthumously, unfortunately. And so thinking about I mean, I really truly inspiring that what you all are both continuing to do both in the art world and as community activists. And I have a couple more questions, but we're going to have to wrap up. I'm so sorry. But I really wanted to know from your perspective, thinking about this or thinking about this level of recognition. I mean, we've seen some change. I hesitate to put too much emphasis on it, but we see some change in the last decade with the mention several sort of major solo and group shows that are dedicated to artwork by women, including shows for black women, Latino women, indigenous women. And then there's also a growing number of women who are now at the helm at major art institutions. So we're seeing change, hopefully within the system. I know we feels like we're on a treadmill asking this question, but do you feel like we've perhaps finally maybe reached a tipping point in terms of the level of recognition and institutional change? Or from your perspective, are there just fundamental barriers, things that absolutely are going to have to be changed within the system in order for women and women of color, LGBTQ women to ever achieve something approaching parody in terms of both the representation and valuation of their artwork? Well, McCall Hebron has done this gallery tally thing. And I have said that we had made more strides than came up with those statistics, which was kind of sad. And then prices are far lower than men's. I mean, there's a whole lot left to do. I would add to that. First of all, the answer is no, we have not reached a tipping point because I mean, there has been change. Surely, I can say that of the 20 women that formed AIR Gallery in 1972, if they're still living, are still making art. And a generation before me that probably wouldn't have been true. How many of us would have continued to make art to be artists? It was just there was so much stacked against us. And many of us have, some have become more famous than others, but we have continued to be artists. And that's a big change. But the other thing I want to mention is, I think with these curators and museum directors and these exhibits, for me, I come back to this, I think there's still a place for women's exhibitions, like this show, but I also strongly believe that all art by whomever, all art participates in multiple narratives. And therefore, that art should be shown in different contexts in the women's work show. But maybe it's a show about American painting, maybe it's about works from the south or the southwest, or maybe it's a material based show, or a concept based show. It could be gender, it could be sexuality. But the work always participates in multiple narratives, mine and everybody else's. And I think it's important that women's work gets discussed in all of these different realms. And the main thing is, while there are more museum, like there's a, as Lucy said, a lot of museum shows, Cecilia also had a show with the Guggenheim just now. I mean, and she's not the only woman. And so this is great. What we need also, though, are for works by women to go into museum collections, because that's where they get protected, hopefully, eventually, re-exhibited and written about. Right. So the next thing is really getting them into those museum collections. And it's happening, but it's slow because the museums are so far behind. You know, they're very slow in the 70s correctly. And when they say they didn't collect the 70s correctly, what do they mean? Women and artists of color. Yes. And it's, to that point, Harmony, there was a, you may be familiar, a 2019 study, I think it was 18 U.S. galleries, 87% of their collections were still men, 85% of them white men. So you are 100% right about them needing to diversify their collections and their collecting priorities. So I want to close on this. We have another really, had so many good questions in the Q&A, but I have a last question that I want to pose to both of you. And then, so Amanda Malstrom asks, how do you feel about the term, quote, unquote, woman artist? Is it one to avoid or one to embrace and reclaim? That's for you, Harmony. Well, for me, I've never avoided labels because labels are only limiting if you let them be. They can tell you something. They don't tell you everything, but they can give you a clue. And so I accept labels. I choose my labels and I try to define them on my own terms, but they're not fixed. They can move, they change with time and context, but I try to not let them be limiting. And like I said, that's where this, the work participating in multiple narratives come in so that a label, woman, lesbian art, abstract art, queer abstraction, none of them have to be limited and narrow. That's me. Oh, I love that. And I think that is a the perfect place to end. I could keep talking to you both for another hour or two or five, but I know we don't have that kind of time. So, but I just want to thank you both for spending your time with us today and sharing your wisdom and your experience with us. I think we, I certainly have learned a lot and I know our audience has as well. So I have a couple of little outro things here. Rhonda, if you can bring those up. So if you've enjoyed today's program, I encourage you to seek out our other two events in this series, preserving the places where women made art and a discussion between women's work curator Becky Hart and artists Daisy Quesada-Irenia, Nafis White, and Beatrice Glow. And of course, please take advantage of the wide array of programming that will be available as a part of our annual past-forward conference, which I believe this entire series will also be available through past-forward. Our live virtual conference will be November 1st through 4th on 2022 this year with the on-demand and pre-conference workshops beginning in October. Early bird registration is open now through September 6th or sorry, 26th. Next slide, please. So again, thank you all to everyone who was able to attend this today and hear from Harmony and Lucy. I'm so grateful to both of you for joining us today and sharing a little bit of insight into your long, long careers. And I also want to thank the staff at Forum and Lindhurst who helped make this event series possible. If you have any questions following this webinar, please don't hesitate to contact this at the email you see on the screen forum at savingplaces.org. Thank you again. Thank you so much Harmony and Lucy and everyone have a wonderful day. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Bye-bye.