Hear Them Roar

A major section of the show is given over to Chicago; seven of her pieces are included, and one of them was done collaboratively with her husband, Donald Woodman. Chicago gained lasting fame for her installation "The Dinner Party," a gigantic dinner table set with ceramic plates and textile accessories meant to represent important women from history. The imagery on the plates and in the textiles was based on vaginal shapes meant to oppose the phallic forms so common in art. The use of female-associated crafts, such as ceramics and textiles, was an aspect of Chicago's installation that had a wide influence on future artists. The Chicago pieces in Upstarts and Matriarchs, such as "Study for Im/balance of Power," deal with her current interest, the Holocaust, which she represents through a feminist prism.

Another big part of the show is dedicated to Ukeles, with documentary photos that record two of her influential performance pieces. In "Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside," from 1976, Ukeles washed the front steps of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut; in the other, "I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day," she recorded the activities of 300 maintenance workers at New York's Whitney Museum of Art. "I Make Maintenance Art" includes color photographs, drawings with collage, text pages, a notebook, the announcement, labels and a button -- all done by Ukeles. The Ukeles pieces are installed in the atrium space down the hall from the Singer Gallery proper (the atrium has recently been named the Cooper Balcony in honor of donors).

Hannah Wilke's two photomontages also address political issues conceptually. Though she is best known for outrageous images of female genitalia, Wilke's pieces here are pretty tame -- but that doesn't mean they aren't provocative. This is especially true of "Marxism and Art: Beware of Fascist Feminism," an offset poster with a self-portrait of Wilke in the middle. For the photo, Wilke has covered her body with little models of vulvas that she's made of chewing gum.

Chicago, Ukeles and Wilke make the point that early feminist art was postmodern because it was chiefly reliant on content as opposed to form. Not unrelated to this postmodern aspect of the works is the renewed interest among feminists in representational imagery instead of abstraction. This was an important polemic for feminists, many of whom argued that abstraction was a male concept. This idea, like a lot of early feminist concepts, was brilliant strategically: By embracing representational imagery, a generation of feminist artists was able to figuratively bury the previous generation of women artists, who were dyed-in-the-wool abstractionists.

Another giant of this art movement is Miriam Schapiro, and several of her insightful works based on the needle arts were lent to the show by the Missoula Art Museum in Montana. Though Schapiro is a Matriarch, the works here were done in the late 1990s. She was formerly an abstract expressionist, oddly enough, but now makes prints based on lace doilies, collars and bonnets, as in "Anonymous Was a Woman II: Deer." The original needleworks were traditionally made by women, and they make direct references to women's place in the domestic realm. Though they are meticulously representational in their depiction of the lace, the prints also function as abstract pattern pieces that have tremendous iconic power. Elaine Reichek's pieces are similar; her fabric-based prints incorporate embroidery and look like needlepoint samplers.

Using what could be called "women's work" for inspiration -- as Chicago, Schapiro and Reichek do -- is a trend that has inspired many others. Think how often current work with feminist themes includes the use of fibers or ceramics, or both.

Standouts in the pioneer group also include the Nancy Grossman portraits of figures masked with underwear, but I could happily live without her sculpture of a man with a gun coming out of his face. Nancy Spero, Ida Applebroog, Audrey Flack and Joyce Kozloff are among the other history-making feminists in the show.

In addition to a roster of nationally known artists, Zalkind included two painters from Colorado: Margaretta Gilboy and Sandra Wittow. Both have long and distinguished art careers, and both paint in a contemporary-realist style. Gilboy's "Aspects of the Divine" places painted images of two eroticized female dancers side by side. In Wittow's "Innocence Lost," there's a series of separate images -- a couple of broken eggs, a couple of rosebuds and one of a pair of bronze baby shoes, among other things -- that are assembled to create a narrative about sexual reproduction.

Looking back at the way feminism revolutionized contemporary art, it's hard to imagine that only thirty years ago women were systematically barred from participating in the art world. Today, many top players in contemporary art, not to mention the art majors at colleges and universities, are women.

In the 1970s, when so many of these artists began to embrace feminism, it would have been impossible to imagine a show like this one. The fiery female artists in Upstarts and Matriarchs would never have put up with a man at the helm. Zalkind was clearly aware of this, and he suggests that there should be a another, bigger show presented at a major institution with a woman curator. Maybe I'm being a sexist here since I'm also a man, but I think Zalkind did a great job.