Timeline of Artists Exhibitionsand Events
1970: A full page ad in the October 1970 Artforum announced feminist artist Judy Chicago's name change from Judy Gerowitz. The ad said she made the change to divest "herself of all names imposed upon her through male social dominance..."
1970: America's first feminist art education program took place at California State University, Fresno in California in 1970 when fifteen female students and instructor Judy Chicago helped pioneer key strategies of the early feminist art movement, including collaboration, the use of “female technologies” like costume, performance, and video, and early forms of media critique.
1971: Judy Chicago, with abstract painter Miriam Schapiro, cofounded the landmark Feminist Art Program at California Institute of the Arts, north of Los Angeles, which was the only such department in a major art school.
1971: An early feminist art coalition, WEB (West-East Bag), was founded in 1971 by Lucy Lippard, Judy Chicago, and Miriam Schapiro, to jump-start the new movement and stimulate cadres in North America and beyond. It advocated a shifting “center,” and its newsletter was produced each month by a group in a different region. (It continued successfully through the mid-seventies.)
1973: Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Rape Scene), 1973. After the brutal rape and murder of a student on campus at the University of Iowa, Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, who was also a student there, staged this performance. Viewers were invited to Mendieta's apartment where they saw Mendieta tied to a table surrounded by broken dishes and her body exposed and covered in fake blood from the waist down.
1973: The Woman's Building which included the Feminist Studio Workshop was founded by Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, art historian Arlene Raven, and Judy Chicago, in Los Angeles. Inspired by a Woman’s Building at the 1893 Universal Exposition in Chicago, at its core was a two-year graduate art program, the Feminist Studio Workshop (FSW). “We had a theory of feminist education,” Raven has said, “which was a transition from a situation of oppression—where women related to one another through competition, isolation, and silence—to one of support, a process evolved through criticism, and self-criticism.”
1973: Sheila Levrant de Bretteville created a poster/wallwork titled Pink; she handed out pieces of pink paper to friends and to women on the street, asking them to describe what this color, somewhat maligned for its associations with femininity, meant to them. She assembled the results on a poster in a quilt-like format, including blank spaces for audience response. De Bretteville, a mother and wife as well as a noted graphic designer, remarked that the visual structure also expressed "the way I felt my day was broken up into three-hour segments, as much as its form was influenced by notions of de-centering, and the revaluing of women's work, such as quilting."
1974: Mother Art, which consisted of Feminist Studio Workshop students, was founded in 1974, in part to show that feminists—at the time predominantly young single women—could be wives and mothers, too.
1974: Tomie Arai and the Cityarts Workshop created the mural known as the Wall of Respect for Women in New York City.
1975: Carolee Schneemann performed Interior Scroll, a Fluxus-influenced piece featuring her use of text and body. In her performance, Schneemann entered wrapped in a sheet, under which she wore an apron. She disrobed and then got on a table where she outlined her body with dark paint. Several times, she would take "action poses", similar to those in figure drawing classes. Concurrently, she read from her book Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter. Following this, she dropped the book and slowly extracted from her vagina a scroll from which she read.
1977: In Lysistrata Numbah! using Aristophanes’s play Lysistrata in which women refuse to have sex until a war was over,
1977: For the piece Three Weeks in May Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz posted huge maps in a downtown mall and marked them with occurrences of rapes across the city the night before, alongside locations of rape crisis centers and battered women's shelters. The event combined a performance piece on the steps of Los Angeles City Hall with self-defense classes for women in an attempt to highlight sexual violence against women.
1978: Suzanne Lacy's piece In Mourning and in Rage (1978) addressed the coverage given to the Hillside Strangler, a mass killer terrorizing women in the Hollywood Hills; the murders had been granted salacious attention by the media.
1978: Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz founded Ariadne: A Social Art Network. The group organized the ten-day event From Reverence to Rape to Respect (1978) in Las Vegas. One memorable installation there equated bejeweled sheep carcasses in headdresses with feathered Vegas showgirls.
1978: For the event Take Back the Night (1978), the group Araidne organized a nighttime parade in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, notorious for vice and corruption. Centrally featured was a float carrying a carved Madonna in front; on its verso side was a devilish three-headed lamb carcass from whose belly pornographic texts spewed.
1979: The Dinner Party, an installation artwork by feminist artist Judy Chicago depicting place settings for 39 mythical and historical famous women, which was produced from 1974 to 1979 as a collaboration, was first exhibited in 1979.
( I love the Dinner Party, my favourite pieces are Jane Austin : The ceramic has been curled and layered to resemble an underskirt but there's no knickers benieth. And Boudicia where the Plate resembles a Shield. )
