My tentative and sometimes bold steps into the outer edges of what was the contemporary art world of NYC in the late 70s and early 80s need some prefacing before I dive in fully, so I ask your patience as I take some of the narrative back in time, pre-NYC.
The month before I drove my mother’s 67 Dodge Dart up the highway to Halifax and grad school, I was invited by a dear friend, D, then a lover, to join him in Algeria, where he was teaching technical English to young men. D, an American from St. Louis who I had met in college and then re-met in NYC, was making enough money to generously pay my way. I departed NYC on July 4, 1976, witnessing the fireworks display of the bicentennial from above (the best place to view what felt like an obscene celebration to me). When I arrived in the Algiers airport, I was interrogated in a private room for over an hour. The officials badgered me with questions in Arabic and French and were clearly bewildered that someone who looked like me was American, spoke French, and knew no Arabic other than “salaam.” I learned later that they may have assumed that I was a terrorist from an Arabic-speaking country or, at least, figured that I was up to no good. Thankfully, my ignorance of whatever fabrications they were saying in Arabic protected me, and I was allowed to leave. A relieved D was able to find me in the sea of people waiting for loved ones (this was way before cell phones). The chaotic airport, overflowing with unfamiliar smells, colors, textures, and faces, both visible and obscured by veils and chadors, hinted at some of the lush havoc that I was about to experience.
D had found us a lovely room in the Hotel St. George, high on a hill overlooking the Algiers harbor and beautiful gardens. It had been Eisenhower’s North African headquarters during World War Two. After a year of living in a tiny, ground-floor NYC apartment with a thick security grill on the grimy windows, I felt like I had been transported to a luxurious sultan’s palace. Every public space felt sacred, due to the beautiful Islamic tile work that covered everything. Our room gave me a view of palatial gardens framed by the exquisite, turquoise blue of the Mediterranean Sea in the distance. Every morning, after D left for work, I would sit on the balcony writing or drawing in a small pad, while savoring a cafe au lait with my petit dejeuner. I would gaze out at the view, knowing that I was only seeing the surface of things, and wondered how I had gotten so lucky to be in such a beautiful place. I had not yet read Franz Fanon or watched the film, Battle of Algiers, nor did I know much about the brutal impact of colonization and war on this beleaguered country, so everything was colored by the delusions of a tourist mindset.
This scanned slide from 1976 does not do justice to the experience of sitting on that balcony in Algiers.
Soon after my arrival, D and his Algerian friends shared some stories about the legacy of trauma inflicted by the French, how their bombing campaigns destroyed peaceful communities, and how their cruel regime had eliminated a whole generation of men, creating a complex reactionary response in the society as a whole. I began to think more deeply about where I had landed. My month-long experience of Algeria, infused with the fragrances of jasmine, the flavors of the souk, began to shift my perspective on the history of imperialism and what it meant to be a woman in a society now fluctuating between some kind of socialist ideology informing their modernization and a version of fundamentalist Islam.
Postcard of one entrance to the Hotel St.Georges, Algiers, 1976
In some ways, I was like a bird in a gilded cage, given that leaving the hotel unveiled and unescorted meant that I might be followed and unabashedly stared at, as if I was walking naked through the streets. If we walked past a cafe filled with men, and they were always filled with men, they would fall silent, their eyes glued in my direction. D, who was posing as my husband, said that the male public couldn’t distinguish between an educated, professional woman and a sex worker (the only females who had chosen to have an unveiled public presence). There was a new law in Algeria to help boost tourism, specifically to protect foreign women (those who looked visibly white) but I did not look foreign or white, so I was approached and propositioned daily, even within the hotel. After a few weeks of this, I was ready to get a veil so that I could explore the city with more anonymity and safety, but instead we borrowed a car and traveled to other parts of the coast.
Taken somewhere in downtown Algiers - the scanning app I used on this slide makes it very textured.
I became very curious about the roles of women in this country; where did women find their power in this society? I discovered that there were festivities where the genders were strictly divided and women could be seen to have some agency. One day while wandering through the hotel lobby with my Pentax camera around my neck, I was unexpectedly invited to document the all-women’s party to honor the circumcision of a little boy. Their female photographer was a no-show and they offered me free film in exchange for this task. I was more than eager to enter and document this ritual space. Aside from the sadness and pain I saw in the face of the brocade-wearing, little boy, I saw women displaying their love of fashion, decoration, and sensuality openly. There was an all-female band playing with abandon, and the dancing was bold, sultry, and joyful - all of this powerful feminine energy was hidden from the public realm.
Sadly this is the only image of the women at the circumcision party that remains in my archive. I gave the best ones away to the family at the Hotel St. George.
During a field trip into the Atlas Mountains, D and I went hiking down into a fertile valley. As we walked on old stone and dusty paths, my nose intrigued by the fragrances of this very different ecosystem, D was calling out the name of one of his students, hoping that a local farmer would hear him and direct us to this student’s home. The community in this area was Kabyle or Berber, speaking a very different language from the Arabic and French I’d been hearing in coastal towns and cities and living within a different cultural history. After hearing D’s persistent call, a farmer invited us to visit him in his olive orchard, and served us a very refreshing snack: fermented goat’s milk, dates, and a kind of pita bread. I was then invited to join the women in their quarters where I found myself in a clay-walled room that was filled by a giant loom. They made welcoming gestures and as I watched them, the loom danced under their fingers. The shelves were densely packed with stunning, embroidered garments and rugs. We shared many smiles since we had no language in common. I was excited to see that their creative force was so engaged, and sad that I could not tell them that.
In several Algiers nightclubs, where D’s friends could either be found playing in the band or schmoozing on the sidelines, I saw women dancers expressing their emotions through movement and song in ways that shifted my perspective. I could not see them as victims or objects as they stood proudly in their art forms. It may have been projection on my part, but every time I saw women occupying creative space during this short visit, I found the experience uplifting.
I was not able to study and research the roles of women in this Islamic and quasi-socialist country more thoroughly during my month’s stay (no computers or smart phones back then) but the resonance of that visit stuck with me during my graduate school years and beyond. The questions that I began to ask with more urgency were: was wearing a veil offering these women more power than my western mind could see? What kinds of metaphorical veils were we western women wearing without realizing it? Where were women able to claim their voices and agency and where and when did we give our power away, and to whom and why?
At NSCAD, in a seminar talk that I led, I offered these questions in the context of my experiences of Algeria and compared them to the challenges that women creatives face in Canada and the USA. As a result of my repeated public engagement with the theme of women’s voices, the faculty invited Martha Wilson, founder of the Franklin Furnace (an alternative art space in NYC) and performance artist, to lead a “women in art” program for the summer 1978 session. I was asked to be her teaching assistant. Visiting artists who came for that program, most of whom I had the delight to chauffeur to campus, included Judy Pfaff, Donna Henes, Jacki Apple, Lauren Ewing, Rita Myers, Dara Birnbaum, the late Diane Torr, and many others. Martha put together a reading list of the sparse literature on the topic at the time, and some of those articles and journals became manifestos for me. Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics was particularly resonant, as was Carol Duncan’s article in ArtForum: “When Greatness was a Box of Wheaties” - a critique of the notion of genius and the creative deadening that can occur when one’s work becomes commodified within the art market. Of course, Linda Nochlin’s essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” was also on the list, but I had already read and absorbed that content; it had definitely fueled some of the fierceness that I carried into grad school.
I had had the great good fortune of having Nochlin’s thesis expanded upon in a slide lecture by the late May Stevens in the summer of 1975, at the P’town Workshop. May shared the work of dozens of women artists (mostly ancestors) that had never been discussed in my art history classes in college. Seeing this work was a revelation that helped me contextualize the challenges that the guest artists who Martha Wilson brought to NSCAD had faced in order to choose an artist’s path and to get their work seen. Some of these artists were openly gay at a time when the art world offered only cautious acceptance of such a choice. A few of them were exploring collaborative work in a culture that only recognized the individual, male “genius,” and, as a result, their work was often dismissed as inherently weak (why else would you need to involve others?). To top off all of these hurdles and insults, the subject matter of these artists was often scorned as women’s work, either because of the form or the content. Unless they had someone strongly advocating for their work’s visibility, it often remained sequestered and unheralded as having value.
Knowing a bit of their histories and the resilience that they developed in light of the constant sexism somehow gave me strength. As mentioned in my last post, a few of them welcomed me when I arrived in NYC, offering me connections for work, invitations to openings, and an opportunity to exhibit my work. Without these women who helped me get grounded in the next chapter, I might have flailed about quite a bit more.
From the beginning of 1970s, when the feminist art movement began to ignite many of us with its courage and radical determination for social justice, reproductive rights, and so much more, there were many raw and sharp edges, and some reactive stances. We had not yet had the chance to deeply examine our long legacies of trauma from being gaslit, put down, abused, and accused of being crazy. As a result, some of the early feminist art groups struggled with conflict or had members who had no mindfulness of their competitive and opportunistic behaviors. In other words, internalized patriarchal values were still running our nervous systems and our ambitions. It was a very bumpy time, and while some of my peers built healthy containers and collaborations, many of us did not until we had a sufficient tool kit to look at our trauma and how it was riding us.
As we consider how much consciousness raising and risk taking has been necessary in the last five decades to publicly recognize the exploitation of women’s bodies and minds in so many aspects of daily life and enact legislation to protect us, it is quite mind-boggling and enraging that so much that was fought for steadfastly is being unraveled state by state. We were warned that our work would never be done while patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy maintain the status quo. As I continue to blog this fractured memoir, I hope to offer examples of the intergenerational movements forming in many parts of the world, so that readers will be inspired to use a wide variety of creative tools to organize.
Next post will focus on my initial steps in the NY art world, at least I hope that’s what my muses have in mind for tomorrow’s writing session.