the Woman's Building

The Woman’s Building History: Terry Wolverton

Terry spent thirteen years working and creating at the Woman's Building where, in addition to producing performance and literary art, she was also instrumental in the Lesbian Art Project, the Incest Awareness Project, the Great American Lesbian Art Show (GALAS), and a White Women's Anti-Racism Consciousness-Raising Group. For a time, she served as Woman's Building's Executive Director.

See also: terrywolverton.xbuild.com/

This video was commissioned by Otis College of Art and Design for the exhibition "Doin' It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman's Building" (1973-1991) in the Ben Maltz Gallery, October 1 January 28, 2012 and is part of an ongoing series of oral histories about the Woman's Building partially funded by the Getty Foundation.
The exhibition is part of a "Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A.1945-1980," a Fall 2011 citywide initiative sponsored by the Getty Foundation.

The Woman's Building History: Vanalyne Green

Vanalyne Green is an artist, writer and teacher interested in the legacy of Second Wave Feminism in current thinking around affect, citizenship as a visceral reality, curatorial practices, social geographies, and spectacular ways of representing the pedestrian.

Her video art has screened extensively, including the Whitney Biennial, the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the Videotheque de Paris, the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, the Guggenheim Museum and many other museums, universities and film festivals. Her writing is included in Feedback: The Video Data Bank, Video Art, and Artist Interviews, M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists' Writings, Theory, and Criticism, the upcoming What do Artists Know? edited by James Elkins, Learning through Digital Media: Experiments in Technology and Pedagogy, edited by R. Trebor Scholz, and Parallax, among other books and journals.
This video was commissioned by Otis College of Art and Design for the exhibition "Doin' It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman's Building" (1973-1991) in the Ben Maltz Gallery, October 1 January 28, 2012 and is part of an ongoing series of oral histories about the Woman's Building partially funded by the Getty Foundation.
The exhibition is part of a "Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A.1945-1980," a Fall 2011 citywide initiative sponsored by the Getty Foundation.

The Woman’s Building History: Waitresses

This performance art group created work that humorously addressed the issue of women and work. In the late 1970s, they performed all over Los Angeles in restaurants, public sites, and the DooDah Parade in Pasadena. The Waitresses interviewed are: Anne Gauldin, Denise Yarfitz, Jerri Allyn, Leslie Belt.

This video was commissioned by Otis College of Art and Design for the exhibition "Doin' It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman's Building" (1973-1991) in the Ben Maltz Gallery, October 1 January 28, 2012 and is part of an ongoing series of oral histories about the Woman's Building partially funded by the Getty Foundation.
The exhibition is part of a "Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A.1945-1980," a Fall 2011 citywide initiative sponsored by the Getty Foundation.

The Woman’s Building History: Barbara T. Smith

Barbara T. Smith is one of the pioneers of performance and body art. Along with such artists as Nancy Buchanan, Chris Burden, Allan Kaprow, Suzanne Lacy, and Paul McCarthy, Smith redefined the nature of art by creating durational performances in which she used her own body often at some personal risk. Beginning in 1968, Smith was foregrounding her own corporeal and gendered experience in experimental performances such as "Ritual Meal" and "Feed Me". In the 21st Century Odyssey, Smith embarked upon a journey quest for spiritual transformation thus reinscribing the tourist landscape. Her lifelong commitment to alternative spirituality as in "Celebration of the Holy Squash" anticipates many contemporary artists who incorporate spiritual practices in art making.

This video was commissioned by Otis College of Art and Design for the exhibition "Doin' It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman's Building" (1973-1991) in the Ben Maltz Gallery, October 1 January 28, 2012 and is part of an ongoing series of oral histories about the Woman's Building partially funded by the Getty Foundation.
The exhibition is part of a "Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A.1945-1980," a Fall 2011 citywide initiative sponsored by the Getty Foundation.

The Woman’s Building History: Bruria Finkel

Bruria Finkel creates works of art in a variety of media. These take the form of both temporary and permanent installations. She has participated in over 59 solo and group exhibitions in the United States and Europe. Her work is also found in many private and public collections, including the archives of the Smithsonian America Art Museum, the Luce Foundation, the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., Phoenix Museum of Art and Rutgers University.

Finkel is one of the pioneers of the Los Angeles feminist art movement. She not only helped found the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists (LACWA) to protest gender discrimination at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1968 but also served as a board member of the groundbreaking alternative institution, Womanspace, in 1970.

This video shown as part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time 2011-2012: Doin' It in Public: Art and Feminism at the Woman's Building Ben Maltz Gallery October 1, 2011 -- January 28, 2012

The Woman’s Building History: Gilah Yelin Hirsch

Professor Hirsch is a painting instructor at California State University Dominguez Hills and has been teaching at the university level since 1968. She received her BA degree, Magna Cum Laude, at the University of California Berkeley majoring in Art History and Pictorial Arts with minors in English and Psychology. She received her MFA degree in Pictorial Arts at the University of California Los Angeles. As an artist, Professor Hirsch has had paintings, prints, photographs and videos exhibited in over forty solo exhibitions and over one hundred thirty group exhibitions since 1969.

As a writer, Professor Hirsch has had over a dozen articles published since 1972 on diverse subjects in books, journals, magazines and newspapers, and has often participated in prose and poetry readings at literary events.

In the realm of psychology Professor Hirsch has evolved several innovative psychotherapeutic practices in creativity enhancement as well as a system of behavioral therapy, "Creative Behavior: A Value Based Incremental System of Behavioral Change", which she has practiced with clients and has taught to other therapists.

The Woman’s Building History: Joyce Kozloff

Born in Somerville, New Jersey, Joyce Kozloff is known for paintings with flat, colorful, abstract patterning and for repetitive geometric forms that produce strong variations of line, shape, and color. In the 1980s, she did numerous site-specific works with tiles and mosaics including the "New England Decorative Arts" for the Harvard Square Subway Station in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and two works for One Penn Plaza in Philadelphia.
A later project involved a series of thirty-two watercolors; each twenty-two inches square titled Patterns of Desire.

Kozloff earned her BFA degree at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh in 1964, and her MFA from Columbia University in 1967. She also studied at the Art Students League in New York City; Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey' and the University of Florence in Italy.

She has held teaching positions including elementary, high school and college classes. Her first one-person show was in New York in 1970 at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. It was during this time, she began her pattern pieces, which were initially inspired by the decoration she saw on Mexican Cathedrals.

Interviewer: Anne Swartz
Videographer: Julie Martin

This video was commissioned by Otis College of Art and Design for the exhibition "Doin' It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman's Building" (1973-1991) in the Ben Maltz Gallery, October 1 January 28, 2012 and is part of an ongoing series of oral histories about the Woman's Building partially funded by the Getty Foundation.
The exhibition is part of a "Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A.1945-1980," a Fall 2011 citywide initiative sponsored by the Getty Foundation.

The Woman’s Building History: June Wayne

June Wayne was involved in the Feminist Art Movement in California in the 1970s. Perhaps her biggest contribution to the movement was in education, as Wayne taught a series of professionalization seminars entitled "Joan of Art" to young women artists beginning around 1971. Wayne's seminars covered various topics related to being a professional artist, such as pricing work and approaching galleries. They also encouraged giving back to the feminist community since graduates of Wayne's seminars were required to then teach the seminars to other women. Artist Faith Wilding wrote in 1977 that upon interviewing many of Wayne's former students, "all agreed that it had made a tremendous difference in their professional lives and careers, that in fact, it had been the turning point for some of them in making the step from amateur to professional." Along with fellow artists Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Ruth Weisberg, and others, Wayne was a founding member of the Los Angeles Council of Women in the Arts, which sought the equal representation of women artists in museum exhibitions. She was also part of the selection committee for the exhibition Contemporary Issues: Works on Paper by Women, which opened at the Los Angeles Woman's Building in 1977 and featured the works of over 200 women artists. This video was shown at Otis in the exhibition “Doin' It in Public: Art and Feminism at the Woman's Building.”

The exhibition is part of a "Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A.1945-1980," an unprecedented collaboration of more than fifty cultural institutions across Southern California, which are coming together to tell the story of the birth of the LA art scene. Initiated through grants from the Getty Foundation, Pacific Standard Time will take place for six months beginning October 2011.

This video is part of an ongoing series of oral histories about the Woman's Building (partially funded by the Getty Foundation).
The exhibition is part of a "Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A.1945-1980," a Fall 2011 citywide initiative sponsored by the Getty Foundation.