Creating an opening Sabra Moore remembers the women’s art movement
SABRA MOORE REMEMBERS THE WOMEN’S ART MOVEMENT
we don’t often think of an art exhibit as providing the impetus for social justice movements. But when New York’s Museum of Modern Art opened An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture in 1984 — the first major international survey at the museum in many years — the matter of who was included and who was not launched a protest that led directly to the formation of the radical feminist art-activist group Guerrilla Girls, lighting a fire that still burns. In the exhibition, which marked the inaugural show of MoMA’s newly renovated and expanded museum, only 14 of the 165 artists represented — less than 8 percent — were women. The show’s curator Kynaston McShine told The New York Times that anyone who wasn’t selected for the exhibit ‘‘will have to think about their work,” implying that if you were excluded, it was because you weren’t good enough — though considering the number of male versus female artists, it seemed that talent actually mattered less than gender.
Artist, activist, and author Sabra Moore, then a member of the Women’s Caucus for Art, helped to organize a response. “Someone acquired the elegant little aluminum badge that MoMA planned to distribute — a thin rectangular pin divided in the center by a horizontal line that read: ‘The Museum of Modern Art/OPENS,’ ” writes Moore in her new book Openings: A Memoir of the Women’s Art Movement, New York City 1970-1992 (New Village Press). “We decided to add a line below: ‘OPENS/But Not to Women Artists.’ ”Although MoMA confiscated the pins from marchers protesting outside, the group persisted, printing flyers that listed their demands of the museum: Exhibit women’s work from the permanent collection, feature women’s work in loan exhibits, and establish a policy to acquire more work from female artists. In her memoir Moore recounts how she told a friend at the time, “We need to do this for the issue of fairness and to change how people perceive culture.”
Openings stands as a historical document of the women’s art movement but is not an art history book. It’s an engaging, intimate look at the movement from the inside out. “It took me about seven years to write this memoir,” Moore told Pasatiempo. “I wrote it out of
frustration with the way our period of art history was being described. When you’re writing from art history, I feel the way a lot of it is written is really narrow. When you write a memoir, you’re writing a story.”
Moore, an Abiquiú-based artist, took part in the protest movements of the 1960s while living in New York and was integral to the women’s art movement in the decades that followed. She was a member of the Heresies Collective, a feminist art group that published the influential journal Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics. Other members of the collective included Mary Beth Edelson, an artist and leader in the Women’s Action Coalition in the early 1990s; artist and writer May Stevens; artist Harmony Hammond, a founding member of Heresies and the co-founder of New York’s A.I.R Gallery; and art historian and activist Lucy Lippard. Like Moore, Stevens, Hammond, and Lippard all eventually settled in New Mexico and figure in Moore’s history. “I picked a few people who kind of fit into the dominant story,” she said. “But I realized I like reading memoirs about people I don’t know. Once I figured out how I wanted to write it and what my obligation was, I decided I wanted to tell the story I experienced, and everyone who was in it is in it. People who might be well known but who weren’t activists with us aren’t in it. There were really wonderful artists who didn’t ever feel the need to work with other women.” Because of Moore’s avid journaling, she was able to piece together a detailed description of this major movement using her own analyses of events she witnessed and details of conversations.
In the early 1970s, Moore worked in a women’s services clinic, sponsored by a group called Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion, which brought back memories of her own experience as a patient in Guinea, West Africa, where she was in the Peace Corps working as a teacher. There, she witnessed a young woman’s death during childbirth. Moore herself nearly died from the hemorrhaging that resulted from an incomplete illegal abortion. This episode, like many in the book, uses the personal to mirror a more universal experience of women, as draconian laws lead to unnecessary death. Her not-uncommon experience impacted her work in the New York clinic, where, she writes, “I doubt that the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion had foreseen the dynamics of hiring feminists who had endured illegal abortions to staff the new clinic alongside male doctors . ... Suddenly, the doctors were being required to speak gently to a woman in crisis and be assisted by a group of newly trained paraprofessionals, each with a passionate identification with the patient on the table before them.”
Although anecdotal, Moore’s story of the movement is chronological, and her accounts serve a purpose beyond mere storytelling. They send a message, revealing instances of sexism and misogyny in the art world that make plain the need for a collective of activist organizations: Women in the Arts (WIA), Women’s Action Coalition (WAC), and the Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) among them. The impact and drive of the movement is also attested to by the book’s profuse illustrations, a visual narrative that runs along the bottom of each page showing the purview of Heresies, including some of its covers, snapshots of artists involved, exhibition announcements, protest flyers, paintings, prints, sculpture, installation work, and all other manner of art. When the MoMA show opened, the response by the WCA was to create a two-page listing of 400 prominent women artists from the past decade, including Lippard, who had experience with protesting the Whitney Museum of American Art in the 1960s.
Within this drive to legitimize and cement the role of women artists in the canon of art history and promote awareness of women’s issues, Moore paints an eclectic, engaging picture of her own struggles as an artist. The personal as entry into a sphere of larger universal concerns is one of
Openings’ strengths, humanizing the many voices of the movement. Photographer, writer, and activist Margaret Randall writes in her foreword that “Moore always understood that lives feed the work — especially lives that are vastly different from one another in terms of race, culture, and class.”
Moore, whose clear-eyed perspective is enlivened by humor and a matter-of-fact presentation, writes of her own chronicle, “I hand you vignettes.” The episodes she describes sometimes sting with their descriptions of the callous disregard of the male-dominated art world. Statements often made by men reveal a cultural bias in which women and minority artists who went unrecognized for their achievements only had themselves to blame, echoing the sentiments of McShine. Moore writes that “the arguments about poor quality or relevance had long been the excuse for the absence of women’s art in museums.” She told
Pasatiempo, “Affirming who you are on the planet matters. It affects what you make. There’s a difference between that and the hierarchy that actually exists. If you say that some art has universal value but others don’t, then that’s a problem, right?”