Woman House

As stated on Womanhouse.net:

“Womanhouse (30 January – 28 February 1972) is remembered for its site-specific domestic installations in which artists responded to every room of a Los Angeles house they collectively renovated and occupied. [Judy] Chicago, [Miriam] Schapiro, their CalArts students, and women artists from the local community all participated. Their efforts yielded early examples of installation art, pedagogical strategies like consciousness raising, and a number of performance pieces including Faith Wilding’s Waiting, and Chicago’s Cock and Cunt Play”.

On the opening of Woman House only women were permitted to view the work. After this first day, all members of the public were allowed to enter.

The program that birthed Woman House was The Feminist Art Program that began in the California Institute of the Arts in 1971. The program was led by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro and its members included the CalArts students as well as local artists from the community.

The Feminist Art Program was without appropriate space at the start of the school year which set the path that the program would tread to create an “Ideological and symbolic conflation of women and houses”. 

What interested us (being H.E.R Collective) was the process of the work as well as the final building of Woman House. Students would sit in a circle and discuss different topics in this safe space. This was intended to nourish the students and provide growth to promote a more “womb-like” atmosphere. Self-perception and reflection was key to this experience to also help prompt further ideas for Woman House. 

The problems that Schapiro and Chicago felt the students had revolved around their status as women. This included:

1. A lack of assertiveness and ambition
2. unwillingness to push themselves beyond limits
3. unfamiliarity with art-making processes and tools

The aim was that by teaching women to use tools and to construct to a good standard they could “restructure their personalities to be consistent with their artistic goals”.

Schapiro and Chicago believed that:

 “society fails women by not demanding excellence from them”.

The overarching goal of this program and of Woman House was to create an all female space that promoted more inclusion of female artists and to expose the Cal Arts students to already “established” female artists not limited to Schapiro and Chicago.

Before even installing any of their own ideas of the design of the house, actual work needed to be undertaken to restore the structure of the house. The students had to build the shell to house their work before they could inhabit it. The women undertook tasks such as cleaning, painting, wallpapering, installing lights etc. throughout the course of the project; Even electrical wiring was needed to be installed which was completed by the group. Although this could be empowering, many students were not used to the 8 hour days that came with Woman House or to the fact that a lot of the Manual labour took place in the winter with no hot water or heating. It has been said that many women came to resent the work and to the administrators. To tackle this negativity, the group held meetings where these concerns could be raised and resolved through group consciousness. 

𝕆𝕦𝕣 𝕥𝕒𝕜𝕖-𝕒𝕨𝕒𝕪 𝕗𝕣𝕠𝕞 𝕎𝕠𝕞𝕒𝕟 ℍ𝕠𝕦𝕤𝕖

Annabel suggested we look at woman house not just for the end result but by the processes in which the house was made. The conversations the students had regarding the issues and how to develop their practice were of the same importance as the final result of the house itself. This alongside the initial and final renovation of the space all form a wider context that Woman House is centered within: This is what Uncovering H.E.R also hopes to achieve. 

These paralleling dialogues are what we need to include in our work to allow for a more rounded and successful practice. 

𝕀𝕞𝕒𝕘𝕖𝕤

All images taken from womanhouse.net

As one woman visitor to my room commented, “This is exactly where women have always been—in between the sheets and on the shelf.”  It is time now to come out of the closet.
– Sandy Orgel

The Dining Room represented a greater collaborative effort than any other room in the house. Seven women painted walls, ceilings, mural, molding, sewed curtains, tablecloth, plates to hold the food; stitched and fashioned the chandelier, baked bread dough and constructed the table. Seven women behaving as adults and pretending like little girls that this giant dollhouse room was real…

The soft skin of a kitchen pink
Is openers, strainers, blenders
Is cups, pots and hot ovens
Is boxes, cans and glass packages
Is faucets and nippled knobs
A toaster, juicer and waffler
All pink skinned
How would you like your eggs done
this morning?
– Robin Weltsch

 

Come in, east…please put on the apron strings and experience the heart of the home with me.
The outside is no longer with you, you are now embraced by my nurturing pink womb, giving life—sustaining milk from my breasts.  The umbilical cord has been cut through, and you must hold on to the apron strings real tight or you might (gasp)…have to rely on yourself…tisk, tisk!
I must work harder to sustain life for you, to meet your biological needs, feed your habits with habits…I am a habit to you!  I am not a habit!  Release me, let me go, you don’t know me, you don’t own me.  I am a human being, not just a source of cheap labor for lazy people.
I want to undo these apron strings, to see what the rest of the world is doing, to see if I can help…to see myself once again.  I want to travel, to see wonders I only dream of daily…to see wonders I only dream of daily, right here in the heart of the home façade.
-Susan Frazier

Menstruation is something women either hide, are very matter-of-fact about, or are ashamed of.  Until I was 32 years old, I never had a serious discussion with my female friends about menstruation.  The bathroom is an image of women’s hidden secret, covered over with a veil of gauze, very, very white and clean and deodorized—deodorized, except for the blood, the only thing that cannot be covered up.  However we feel about our own menstruation is how we feel about seeing its image in front of us.
– Judy Chicago

 

When I was young I had a belief that the White Knight would come and carry me off to eternal protected bliss.  I lived with this fantasy and did not think too far beyond a dreamy white wedding day.  My piece deals with the not so dreamy reality that, for most women, lies beyond that wedding day.  The bride is portrayed as an offering—encased in gaiety, in lace, in flowers, in dreamy sky blue.  As the bride descends the stairs the blue slowly changes to gray and the bride’s failure to look clearly at where she is going leaves her up against the wall.
– Kathy Huberland

The nursery is the place where we spend much of our very early life, the environment in which most of our early learning and experiencing takes place.  It is the room which occupies much of the mother’s time both in planning before her child is born and in caring for the child after it is born.  I created a room with giant furniture and toys in order to recapture the childhood feeling of being so small in such a big room.  I also looked at the room from the viewpoint of a woman considering what the ideal living space might be for a child.  I have made the room as androgynous as possible because my early memories are of having no sex and being able to do all the things that boys and girls do.
– Shawnee Wollenman

Our female ancestors first build themselves and their families round-shaped shelters.  These were protective environments, often woven out of grasses, braches or weeds.  I think of my environment as linked in form and feeling with those primitive womb-shelters, but with the added freedom of not being functional.
– Faith Wilding

Stacks of shoes have been one of women’s most popular obsessions.  There are all kinds of shoes for all kinds of special occasions—and there are so many special occasions!  
The process of creating this shoe-filled environment was itself obsessive.  I collected hundreds of shoes and painted or treated each shoe individually.  For example, a pair of spike heels is decorated with real spikes, driven all around the bottom of the shoe.
-Beth Bachenheimer

A wish for otherness.  A space in which you are surrounded by an entirely different world aura, transcending the established plane.
– Judy Huddleston

The Red Moon Room painting is about the night, the rising moon, the blood-red moon, about rolling hills and purple and pink and red and green and blue.  When the painting was finished I realized that the room also is the dark side of myself, midnight moon blood red dark purple Mira, the pointing and pointy Mira of the awry perspective who sometimes feels only she really owns the moon.
-Mira Schor

Even though the bathroom can be a refuge and a private place, I have always been afraid there.  It is not a rational fear.
It may stem from the fear I had in childhood of being sucked down the drain with the water, the ritual of confronting my nakedness, staring at my face in the mirror, the fear of being intruded upon.  I wanted to convey the idea of vulnerability.  The woman in the tub is made completely of loose sand.  Sand is able to take a shape and retain its vulnerability at the same time.  By the end of the show she was eroded by fingerprints.
-Robin Schiff

To make a painting that is a room,
To make a room that is a painting,
Color on the floor, on the walls,
on the furniture, on the ceiling,
To fill the room with color
as the sun fills the room with light.
-Robin Mitchell

She cannot take a bath
The tub is lined with fur
200 plastic lipsticks
painted repeated colors
that will not
stain her lips.
Her panties have been sprayed
Bras have been colored
The room and all that entered
have been painted
lipstick red.
Stage lights go on
setting the room ablaze
her hair is red
her lips are red
her gos is red
She is hot
The cameras roll.
She has a name
She is a woman
and for a moment
she is everything
yet it is so absurd
this stage.
-Camille Grey

The idea for my room began with a dream:
I dreamed I had a new bedroom.  People came to visit me there, it seemed like a nice place.  But when I was alone again, I discovered a secret room where only I could go—fantasy became reality there and everything was beautiful.  Compared to this inner room, the outside room was dull and drab.  Later I realized that the inner room represented the art that never gets made, the richness that most people, especially women, keep locked inside themselves.  Then I saw that the secret room was a trap as well as a sanctuary, and that’s why, when I’m inside the room I built, it is both beautiful and frightening.
– Janice Lester

Lea’s room is a room of lush beauty and suffocating oppression.  The strong, pungent smell of magnolia, the pinkness of the wallpaper roses, the hats with veils to soften an aging face all create this feeling of oppression and decadence.  Enmeshed in this suffocating environment was the courtesan Lea, a woman desperately trying to save her fading beauty.  Her beauty was her life.  Beauty made her pleasing to the gentlemen, obtained her favors, gave her wealth and friendship.  
The performance piece done in this room, in which a woman incessantly applies layer after layer of makeup, portrays the pain:  the pain of again, of losing beauty, pain of competition with other women.  We wanted to deal with the way women are intimidated by the culture to constantly maintain their beauty and the feeling of desperation and helplessness once this beauty is lost.
– Karen LeCoq
– Nancy Youdelman

Sherry Brody and Miriam Schapiro
All of my work is inspired by a sense of intimacy.  I choose to make my art out of a need to express strong female feelings.  All of my life I have sewn objects.  Beginning with real clothing, I eventually formalized my work so that soft sculpture emerged from sewn garments.  The Peignoir Dress reflects this transformation.  The Lingerie Pillows and the Pilllowquilt represent my interest in using fabrics in a more direct way.  I want people to approach my art on a very sensual plane.
– Sherry Brody

 

 

 

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NECCO WAFERS
Christine Rush
I wanted to create a fantasy sky and a fantasy ground in the garden.  I used colors, pastels, that were totally in contrast to the real organic colors of the garden.  I painted the ground with turquoise, pinks, blues, pale greens, yellows and lavender.  I made some fanciful clouds that were exactly like drawings I had done of clouds when I was a young child.  I wanted the ground to sort of float in the garden and seem unreal.
-Christine Rush

I chose animals as my subject matter because I identify with the quality of vulnerability in animals.  In this world they are weak, unprotected; they can easily relate to this state of existence.  I wanted to deal specifically with prehistoric animals…dead skeletal forms.  The picture I want to create is of walking through a dimly lit, remote jungle about 50 million years ago, discovering large pearly white bones of magnificent creatures.  The skeletons lie there exposed, open, sad.  Strange tropical plant life offsets the browns of old decaying plants.  In the evening, the jungle is quiet with the exception of a trickling waterfall.
– Paula Longendyke