 Next on the agenda, I'm going to introduce Dr. Aruna de Souza who will be leading a panel discussion. Aruna is a writer based in Western Massachusetts. Her writings on art, feminism, culture, diaspora, and food have appeared in Book Forum, Art in America, Time Out New York, and The Wall Street Journal. She is currently working on a volume of Linda Nocklin's collected essays to be published by Thames and Hudson and is a member of the advisory board and a frequent contributor to Four Columns Magazine, online magazine. Please join me in welcoming Aruna de Souza. Sorry, I had just the greatest good luck of being able to chat with Janet Henry and Haridina Pindel backstage and I didn't want to come out. In 1980, the artists Anamandhita Zarina and Kazuko Miyamoto, simply known as Kazuko, organized dialectics of isolation, an exhibition of third world women artists of the United States at AIR Gallery. The gallery, Artists in Residence Gallery, which functioned as an artist collective with a cooperative feminist structure, had been criticized by some for its too narrow focus on white feminism. This show, which included the work of eight artists, Judith Baca, I'm showing you the layout of the catalog, Beverly Buchanan, Janet Henry, Senka Nengudi, Lydia Okamura, Howardina Pindel, Selena Whitefeather, and Zarina. This show was an important counter argument to AIR's programming. The show followed on the heels of an issue of heresies published in 1979 devoted to the theme of third world women and involving some of the same cast of characters. Zarina served on the editorial collective for this issue and Howardina Pindel contributed an essay on art criticism. The work of Baca, Buchanan, and Mandieta appeared in its pages, along with those of many other artists, writers, and cultural producers whose work was taking on the multiple oppressions of race, class, sexuality, and gender. Jane quick to see Smith, Naima Shabazz, Adrian Piper, Valerie Harris, Betty Sarr, Audre Lorde, and many others contributed. Like AIR, heresies had a collective structure, a board that oversaw and contributed to its publishing program, and editorial correct collectives for each themed issue. And like AIR had become under increasing fire for its too narrow focus on white liberal feminism. I want to talk briefly about this moment and the emergence of something called US third world feminism in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I'm interested in the ways it opened up a language for speaking to and about the limitations placed on the lives of women of color in the US. At the same time as forcing a conversation about the limitations of the largely white, largely middle class feminist movements from its earliest moments. We may talk in the 21st century of intersectional feminism, or at least about a need for it. And surely Kimberly Crenshaw's use of the term has been a hugely important reminder of the blind spots that mainstream and radical feminist thinking still retain when it comes to the way different oppressions overlap and reinforce each other. But the fact is that historically feminism was always intersectional, at least as it was practiced by feminists of color in the US. The term third world was coined in the 1950s to describe countries that fell outside the Cold War binary of the US NATO alliance on the one hand, the first world. And the communist bloc, USSR, China, Cuba, and their allies, the second world. The third world, largely but not exclusively composed of developing countries in the global south, was thus a kind of third term that broke through and worked around the political polls that were reshaping nation states and geopolitical boundaries in the wake of World War II and the breakup or breakdown of European empires. US third world feminism, in turn, had emerged in the maelstrom of organizing around civil rights, anti-war, black, Chicano, Asian, Native American, student, women's, and gay rights movements in the 1960s and 70s. It adopted third world as a radically transnational gesture that framed liberation in the US as a process of decolonization, linked to global anti-imperialist struggles, such as the South African anti-apartheid movement, independence movements in the global south, and anti-poverty activism. By theorizing the existence of the third world within the first, third world feminists were able to critique the class and race privilege of western feminism and frame their understanding of oppression and inequality as a continued legacy of colonialism and its violences. Francis Beale and Janice Mericatani had used the term as early as 1970 and 71, respectively, to describe a grassroots phenomenon whereby women of color were gathering in spite of differences in historical relations to power, color, culture, gender, and sexual orientation. In 1970, Chicano feminist Velia Hancock wrote that, quote, white women focus on the maleness of our present social system, as if a female-dominated white America would be better for women, for people of color of either gender. Toni Morrison wrote in her 1973 book, Sula, that women of color must understand that they are, quote, neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them. So they had to set about creating something else to be. In 1981, Chela Sandoval began formally theorizing the term with a groundbreaking paper at that New Year's National Women's Studies Association conference. That same month, Cherry Marenga and Gloria Anzaldúa published the anthology A Bridge Called My Back, one of the foundational books of the movement, composed of texts written over the previous decade. Among the contributors to A Bridge Called My Back were the Kohambi River Collective, which emerged in 1974 as an offshoot of the National Black Feminist Organization, thanks to the efforts of Barbara Smith, Demita Frazier, Beverly Smith, and others. The groups saw themselves quite explicitly as black feminists, but described a form of black feminism that saw its concerns as inextricably linked to those of women of the third world. In their famous statement of 1977, they write, the most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice, based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As black women, we see black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face. The statement goes on to clarify the types of solidarity they might forge with other women of color. As you might recognize in this statement, the notion of third world is not a matter of geography, but one rather of uneven development within the so-called first world of the United States. They write, the inclusiveness of our politics makes us concerned with any situation that impinges on the lives of women, third world, and working people. We are, of course, particularly committed to working on those struggles in which race, sex, and class are simultaneous factors in oppression. We might, for example, become involved in workplace organizing at a factory that employs third world women or pick at a hospital that is cutting back on already inadequate healthcare to a third world community or set up a rape crisis center in a black neighborhood. Organizing around welfare and day care concerns might also be a focus. The work to be done and the countless issues that this work represents merely reflects the pervasiveness of our oppression. The potential messiness of this form of coalition building was part of its strength. If, as Audre Lorde wrote in 1980, quote, when white feminists call for unity, they are misnaming a deeper and real need for homogeneity, U.S. third world feminism assumed and relied on a heterogeneous, even contradictory or conflicting set of approaches because it was always understood as a tactical form of coalition building rather than an identity politics, per se. In The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House, Lorde describes such ideological differences among U.S. third world feminists as, quote, a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativities spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways to actively be in the world generate as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters. The challenges involved in building such coalitions were not insignificant. Cherry Miranda in a text titled La Guera from 1980 and included in Bridge Called My Back wrote of the difficulties of forming a workable solidarity movement as follows. In this country, lesbianism is a poverty, as is being brown, as is being a woman, as is being just plain poor. The danger lies in ranking the oppressions. The danger lies in failing to acknowledge the oppression. The danger lies in attempting to deal with the oppression purely from a theoretical base. As one would expect from a movement based on the acknowledgement of intersecting forms of oppression, the issues taken on by U.S. Third World feminism were wide ranging. To offer just one example, the Third World Women's Alliance had begun publication of the newspaper Triple Jeopardy in the early 1970s linking racism, imperialism and sexism to domestic worker and welfare rights, the political prisoner movement, the sterilization of black and Puerto Rican women, reproductive rights and Palestine. Such global thinking was fundamental to a legitimately feminist politics, not a watering down or a distraction as some feminists might have it. In the words of Barbara Smith, the reason racism is a feminist issue is easily explained by the inherent definition of feminism. Feminism is the political theory and practice to free all women, women of color, working class women, poor women, physically challenged women, lesbians, old women, as well as white economically privileged heterosexual women. Anything less than this is not feminism, but merely female self-aggrandizement. Yeah, I get that just kills me. That quotation is just fantastic. At the same time, other feminists including Doris Davenport in an essay in A Bridge Called My Back pointed out that women's oppression was itself a form of colonization by white men, so that even a feminism that focused on the concerns of white women should be properly imagined as a decolonizing process. It is in this context that we might consider the use of the term in the dialectics of isolation show, the use of the term third world women, and in the issue of heresies under consideration. Mandietta makes clear her interests in the geopolitical underpinnings of the term U.S. third world feminism in her introduction. There is a certain time in history when people take consciousness of themselves and ask questions about who they are. After World War II, the label third world came into being in reference to the people of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The movement of unaligned nations was founded in 1961 with a meeting which took place in Belgrade. Their aims are to end colonialism, racism, and exploitation. We of the third world in the United States, we of the third world in the United States, have the same concerns as the people of the unaligned nations. The white population of the U.S., diverse but of basic European stock, exterminated the indigenous civilization and put aside the black as well as the other non-white cultures to create a homogenous, male-dominated culture above the internal divergency. In aligning the U.S. the project of U.S. third world feminism with a transnational movement, Mandietta was clear that U.S. feminism without the third world qualifier was blind to its own race and class specificity. She goes on to write that during the mid to late 60s as women in the U.S. politicized themselves and came together in the feminist movement with the purpose to end the domination and exploitation by white male culture, they failed to remember us. American feminism as it stands is basically a white middle-class movement. Howard Dina-Pindel's artist statement in the catalog echoes this charge. As a black American woman, I draw on my experience as I have lived it and not as others wish to perceive my living it as fictionalized in the media and so-called history. Black Americans, all non-white Americans, face racism projected onto them by white males and females. The white feminist who wishes equality for herself too often remains a racist in her equality. Her racism unnoticed by colleagues who may also carry the same poison. The exhibition is called Dialectics of Isolation and Mandietta and her, I should say that I've now just more than once referred to the exhibition as if Mandietta was the sole person in charge but obviously there were co-curators involved too and she wrote the introduction and in that introduction she alludes to the productive space created from exclusion. This exhibition points not necessarily to the injustice or incapacity of a society that has not been willing to include us but more towards a personal will to continue to be other. In the editorial statement of the third world women issue of heresies the same construction of otherness as a productive category is in play. And here's a quotation. To describe who we are is exciting. We are painters, poets, educators, multimedia artists, students, shipbuilders, sculptors, playwrights, photographers, socialists, craftswomen, wives, mothers and lesbians. In the beginning we were Asian American, black, Jamaican, Ecuadorian, Indian from New Delhi and Chicana. Foreign born first generation, second generation and here forever. We are all of these and this is extremely hard to define. The phrase third world has its roots in the post-World War II economic policies of the United Nations but today it is a euphemism. We use it knowing it implies people of color, non-white and most of all other third world women are other than the majority in the power holding class. And we have concerns other than those of white feminists, white artists and men. And I just want to give you a sense of what's included in the issue. There's a mixture of poetry, of various artwork, and it's a transcription of a talk that she gave on a panel about art criticism that took place at Rutgers and involved Rosyn Kraus, Donald Cuspett, Leon Golub and others. And I believe she was the only person of color on that panel. A reproduction of Barbara Buchanan alongside a short essay by Michelle Cliff on granite, against granite, sorry. Susanna Cabanas' poetry facing a photograph of one of Anna Mandetta's silhouettes. And this, which we'll talk about in a few moments with Janet Henry, action against racism in the arts, which was a moment at which black artists organized against particularly, I don't know, controversial isn't the right word. I would say virulently racist, but that may be begging the question. Exhibition that took place at Artist Space in 1979. And we'll talk about this layout in the conversation with Janet, who was key in organizing, and then a census to measure the audience. And of course this issue had come about because of some fairly direct and pointed criticism by the Kohambi River Collective about an earlier issue of heresies that had come out on the question of lesbianism that included almost no voices or no voices of women of color. And so this was very much part of a response to a very deep-seated criticism of the heresies collective and of their focus on whiteness. The editorial statement to this issue is fascinating for its narration of the process of putting the issue together and the honesty with which it names the challenges of coalition politics. They write, it was frightening when we spoke of not always understanding each other, not trusting each other and valuing different ideas and ways of being. With all the sameness of our double racial slash sexual oppression, our differences frequently did get in the way. We had a lot to learn about each other, our varying class identifications, cultural history, symbols and tones of our lifestyles, customs and prejudices. It was too much to learn even in almost two years of working together. We still do not always understand each other in terms of who our cultures, lifestyles and oppressions have made us be. But in working together we had to acknowledge the personal power inherent in who we are. Likewise, if these were the challenges that the group faced working with each other, there was an equally straightforward description of the problem with working with the heresies collective itself, a group that was composed largely but not exclusively of white women whose work was being identified by many feminists of color as focusing too exclusively on a white liberal form of feminism. Another issue that plagued us throughout the year and a half was our relationship with the heresies collective. It vacillated from our being vaguely aware of their presence while we were engrossed in our work to reactions of anger and suspicion because of unclear or double messages that we felt were racist and paternalistic. Interestingly enough, we all recognize these incidents when they happened. Since there are no third world women on the heresies collective, our editorial group did not have a liaison who is knowledgeable or sensitive to the third world women's issues. Communications were frequently awkward, confusing and presumptuous. Some writers, artists and activists would not submit their work viewing the heresies collective as racist and calling the collective was using us, making no real efforts to correct the ongoing situation. When the decisions were being made about our efforts and issues without any consultation with us, it was enraging and exploitative. We found ourselves without the resources, organizations, connections or the finances to do anything about it. Too often we had come to a reassessment of why we were here in the first place. I want to end right now, and hopefully Howard Dina and Janet are ready to come out and we can have a bit of a conversation about their activities in relation to both of these moments. Thanks. So Howard Dina is asking, do I want her to start first? Yes. Howard Dina, I was hoping you were one of the founding members of ARR Gallery and you told me in the back that you actually came up with the name for ARR Gallery, which is pretty great. And so I was hoping that you would talk a little bit about how you negotiated being the only woman of color, the only black woman involved from the earliest moments in what was predominantly a white space and how that jibed with your politics. Okay, can you hear me? Yes. Good. Okay. It's kind of complicated. I had what I call a blue chip education where I was always the only person of color. I was used to in quotes being in that environment and trying to adjust to how to survive. Some of you may know, I was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. I was there for 12 years and I started off as an exhibition assistant. Again, I was in an all-white environment until Kenison came along. The same thing with graduate school. William Williams came my second year and I think it was one other gentleman of color. So the art world, according to a woman who was working in the Affirmative Action Office where I teach, I still teach at Stony Brook University, she said as an Affirmative Action Officer the worst departments to integrate were the art departments. And I wasn't surprised. When I came to New York, I ended up with this sort of fancy job, which meant to some people I was kind of a wolf in a sheep's clothing. I saw the world through... Well, I'm glad I had my feet in both worlds as an artist because when someone in the museum world referred to something as quality, I knew what that meant. Okay? Now... I need to read this. Whatever. Okay, one of the problems I had with Air... In fact, there's one woman who is still a member of Air or is an associate who whenever there was a discussion and my name would come up, she would say she doesn't know she's black. And this is a woman who was one of the founding members. And I thought, well, should I say back to her? You don't know you're Jewish? You know, I wouldn't even dream of that. But anyway, I found during this time that there were separations that had to do with class and money that most of the women in the gallery were married and were not holding jobs because their husbands were paying the bills. So there was a certain kind of resentment on my part that I was expect to do a lot that only someone with free time thought of time to do. Howard, can I just interrupt in case for people who might not know one of the rules of AIR Gallery was that everyone who showed at the gallery would contribute financially to it as well? Financially, but then it was more time than financial. Okay, this is when we were on Worcester Street. And, okay, it led to a very interesting situation. At the modern, we were being picketed we, i.e., then we were being picketed by a number of groups. There was something called, oh, God, what was the name of that group? There was the artist, artwork was coalition. There was another one called with a G. I can't remember the name. But gag, got it, right? There was gag. And then a number of women artists, white women artists were outside and they called me upstairs in my office and said, you must come down and pick it with us. If I can't afford to lose my job, period. Now, it's that I never picketed them. I was on the picket line for the two strikes in terms of helping to unionize the museum. So, and the first time I was out was because they got rid of all of the women who were about to be tenured. Yeah, and so that led to, or actually becoming, then it was called pastimoma. Anyhow, it was kind of an awkward position, you know, being the only one. And my friendship with Anna Vendietta was a breath of fresh air. And when I left the gallery, it made me feel good that she, you know, eventually she was there and did the dialect, dialect of isolation. And it's the first place that showed the video that you see in the show, Free White in 21. And the original one was on a regular monitor with a metronome, so that you would be kind of hypnotized, the same would go back and forth. But then I found I had to replace metronomes because things can get broken or stolen. I like the big format on the wall, so I'm happy with that. Let's see. There were two things that I... Okay, one of the things I found awkward was that the white women felt, one, we are in charge here, we're white and we're in charge here, if they included women of color. Also, there was an exhibition on Madison Avenue that was 50-50, 50% men and 50% women, but they were all white. So I said to one of the white women, you know, didn't you notice? There were no women of color. He said, oh, but we're women. Okay. Then I started hearing things from other women of color, artists who were running into these sorts of things, such as referring to feminism as imperial feminism. And then recently, with the Trump dynasty, we now hear of plastic feminism. Yeah, it's pretty bad. Anyhow, I'm going to look through my notes. Just to tell you a little bit about free white and 21, I had an all-female crew. Some were European. The main person was Latina. And at first, the reaction was negative. It was included in a festival, and the basic feedback was it's too divisive. Then I noticed, as things started to move along a little bit, not much, that if I was in a show, all white show, I would be on the column in the middle of the room to see if there's anything else there. Anyhow, I wanted to praise the following people and organizations. Kinkala the House was a pioneer that would be Corinne Jennings and Joe Older Street. They were a pioneer also in terms of having integrated exhibitions, when the white art world did not want any one of color in their exhibitions, and at that point, long ago they didn't want any white women either. I also want to thank Camille Billips and Hatch, Hatch Billips' collection. They documented, they archived, the archive will be at Emory down in Atlanta. Their publication, Artists Is Influence, just everything they've done, they have documented things that they have gotten lost. And why I'm glad about their documenting is in the digital age, we lose things because the equipment keeps changing so that the companies can make more money. So that nice box of discs that I had or the frobbies are obsolete. Anything you say is gone. I also want to thank Franklin Furnace, Martha Wilson was the first organization that was willing to show my tape Free White in 21. No questions asked, you showed it. Now let's see, and also, of course, Linda Good Bryant, just above Midtown. She, I remember the work I remember the most was David Hammond's Snowball in a Little Refrigerator. Anyway. One thing I recommend that everyone do, and this I think changes people's heads in terms of their thinking of themselves as white or black or whatever. Have your DNA done. I'm serious. I'm serious. I'm doing a piece about my family DNA. Unfortunately, the way the chemistry is set up, only a woman can find out her mother's line. But from my DNA, I can't find out about my father. I have to have a brother or a male relative on my father's side, but he died in 98. We had already thrown out the toothbrush, the hairbrush, so I don't know about my father's side. But if I can remember some of the things on my mother's side, the first DNA from my mother was a woman who died 30,000 years ago in Uganda. Then we have, I wrote a few of them, Eskimo, Zulu, Portuguese, Ethiopian, Nigerian, Yoruba. Let's see. I'm trying to think. There were a whole bunch of them. I did Portuguese, German, Scandinavian, Somalia, Sudan, Libya. I mean, Eastern Europe. I mean, if you're feeling really prejudiced, get your DNA done, you'll never feel like that ever again. Thanks for doing it. Janet, I would like to, I'm just putting this up for a second. You don't have to talk about this first. But we were talking earlier and you were, you have been involved in so much organizing over the years. You were involved in WAC, you were involved in just above Midtown, you were involved in protests against particular sort of moments in the white art world. And I was hoping that you could talk a little bit about both about how you fell into those things as you described it, but also about how that was your practice as an artist. Okay, well, I wouldn't use the word organize. I more instigated, I was the, not the guinea pig, but I was the person that like opened the door and saw whatever was there and blew a fuse and went back and told everybody. And that's essentially how I got involved in, I guess I knew being involved in these kind of things, knowing what you can contribute and what you can't, and I knew I could voice it, but for doing anything effectively you need to have a range of capabilities, a range of perspectives, most of all forethought, and different people contribute that. And so when I got involved I mean, I guess the first thing that I got involved was that Donald Newman showed, I'm going to say it, nigger drawings, and I got the card and I thought, oh, somebody's doing something with that word, so I want to go see the show, walk in and there's a bunch of gestural charcoal drawings that were pretty good, and so I went up to the receptionist who was Cindy Sherman and said, what's going on here? And she said, well, he got the charcoal all over his hands and so she gave me some photographs and I left there discombobulated and I went up to just above Midtown when it was on 57th Street and Linda said I couldn't get a complete sentence out, I was so upset and she said, okay, I finally explained what was going on and from there it went, you know, the ripple effect just went out and the idea, I think people identified a bunch of things. Organizations that supposedly catered to artists of color didn't get a lot of funding for any number of reasons, but mostly because they didn't start out with the kind of support, financial support that a lot of these organizations, the ones that catered to the I guess white audience, white artists did, so things were underfunded, artists of color were underserved. There was this thing about isolating yourself, like Howard Ennis said, if you want to feel prejudice, just do your DNA. Well, people didn't know about, I guess they didn't know about DNA at that time and didn't feel compelled to find out about anything beyond, people beyond who they knew and what they knew already. So doing a show called R.I.P. didn't occur to them that it would, what effect it would have, what it implied, what it reflected. And the artist his response to our protest, our indignation showed more that it was an opportunistic what he did was to get attention. It wasn't thoughtful. It didn't reflect the fact that he, it just didn't take, it didn't have any thought at all and I think that's what people, people were reacting to this on not just on a visceral level, but you know, have some respect for me. Show me that I, that you have the decency to consider my myself, my person, my ancestry, my culture and not do things like that. Like to this day, I mean I'll let out the N word, but I won't say the C word. C-R and I won't say it because I just don't, I know too many people that I don't feel that way around about and I won't use it and I would expect white people to have the same respect for me. So I mean that's how I got involved and like I said I was I'd go, I'd identify these things or I'd be invited and I'd take part in them and find out, discover things as I went along, things that were encouraging, things that were productive and also things that were blatantly self-referential and I found that there's this thing what someone explained to me is that when you achieve agency, it's really you're really loath to give it up. So the idea of whacking this instance with white women, they got their you know we have this organization, it's ours and what do you mean we have to consider you. Actually one woman asked me once, why are you so preoccupied with race? I mean why aren't, why isn't being a woman the first thing on your plate? And I said well when I walk in a door this is what they see so what, I mean that's what I have to address first and I still don't think she got it she was she's a white woman who was who had discovered recently that she had Native American ancestry and was starting to celebrate that and so celebrates the wrong word right? So it was part of her persona or her identity but it wasn't something that she had to address you know initially or it wasn't the first thing that people identified when she walked into her room so being involved in these things I've been involved, I won't take credit for organizing anything because people who did, they see me though choking me. And I don't like doing that, I mean I contributed to what I could and as far as informing my work I have this thing about not being self-conscious about the art, making art the art I make the way I conceive of it so I think more it's sorry for the word, inculcated what I do is a part of me comes out naturally and I mean whatever whatever frame of mind I'm in whatever frame of reference that's what comes out and in retrospect I'll see things but I think the art that I admire, the creative people I admire are able to do things that speak to a range of our existence time and culture but it's not it is subtle, it is poignant, it's not the hammer over the head kind of thing. Thank you both for this, thanks so much. Can I say one thing? Yes. If you want to get your DNA done go online National Geographic the Genome Project and also Google DNA testing. It's not cheap I think National Geographic is now up around 150 bucks but you have to go to a couple of companies because you don't get your full I mean I have New Delhi Makanazi, Sephardim and Palestinian.