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Hertz 2003: 78

677

Nancy Chunn quoted in Hertz, Richard. Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia. Ojai: Minneola Press, 2003, ,p. 78.

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The Art of Feminism and Women of the LA Avant Garde, circa 1975 Female avant garde artists were few in comparison to the men so numerously discussed here. Jay DeFeo (1929-1989) and Joan Brown (1938-1990) were major figures, but they were mostly based in San Francisco. CalArts broke significant ground in hiring some women faculty in the earliest years, and more aggressively in the late 1970s. Conceptualist and minimalist photographer Judy Fiskin was among this early cohort. "One thing I look back at now and wonder about, " Fiskin recalls, "is why did I think I could do this? Because there were no women the field!" She had taken a MA from UCLA but "therwe wer no women artists on teh UCLA arts faculty; I was at Berkeley before that: there were no women on the Berkeley facluty, and there were no women artists...basically." (Interview with Author 14 June 2006)

Following the practice of creating alternative art spaces was the effort headed by an artist who named herself after a different city, Judy Chicago (1939-). Teaching at CalArts, Chicago decided that women's work would never be equally valued in male-dominated institutions, so she quit in 1973 to founded Feminist Studio Workshop (FSW) and Womanspace Gallery in the former building of Otis College of Art and Design, near MacArthur Park. The named their new site the Women's Building (named in honor of the Women's Building at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair). Women in in Design Poster 1975

As women were still at the periphery of the avant garde, Los Angeles remained at the periphery of New York, despite its eruption as a center of artistic production. As Fiskin recalls, even by the 1970s "New York was teh center and we were the periphery. Even to say that we were the periphery was stretching it [laughs]. Chicago wan't anywhere either. There's the periphery and the non-existent. I think we existed between the periphery and the non-existent. Even Baldesssari had to show in Europe before he could show in New York. New York was it, and we weren't New York." It was Baldessari over anyone else who gave the LA avant garde its entree to New York success. He was "like a virtual employment agency. He could just place them in galleries in New York when they got out of school....And he was telling everyone that they had to go to New York." (Fiskin interview) “More than anyone else, remembers Nancy Chunn, "[Baldessari] had connections with all of the European artists; no one hit LA without coming up to CalArts.”Note