Written by Mitigating Methodologies & Kitchen Tables: An Introduction to WAJ’s Oral Histories Archives Project
It has been over fifty years since Linda Nochlin first published her groundbreaking 1971 essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Despite the paradigm shift precipitated by Nochlin’s work, her primary thesis remains astoundingly urgent. Veiled beneath Nochlin’s incisive, dry humor is an impassioned call for a methodological shift in art historical research to redress the social and institutional inequalities that plague women’s participation within the art world. Nochlin tasked us, as art historians of the early twenty-first century, to continue our trumpet call to action and to rectify the “Why” at the outset of her essay’s title and center of inquiry.
Less than a decade after Nochlin’s proposal, Woman’s Art Journal (WAJ) sets out to explore possible answers and recalibrate the absence of critical writing on women artists. Dr. Else Honig Fine proposed a new feminist publication at the Women’s Caucus for Art’s 1979 meeting in Washington, D.C. The next year, in 1980, she founded WAJ. As editor and publisher for twenty-six years, Fine directed every aspect of the journal, with the full assistance and partnership of Margaret Barlow. From its inception, WAJ proved vital to the academic community as a then-rare venue to publish burgeoning research on women artists. Louise Nevelson’s pioneering sculptural assemblages enriched the journal’s inaugural cover, setting the tone for the issue’s articles and book reviews on such vital subjects as sexuality and maternity in the nineteenth and twentieth century, topics then at the margins of art historical research. WAJ quickly became—and has remained—an invaluable resource for art historians, curators, and artists in this field. Now in its forty-sixth year, WAJ, the longest-lived feminist art publication, continues its legacy. From a modest yet ambitious US-based magazine, whose editorial cut-and-paste mock-ups graced the so-called “kitchen table,” to its later affiliation, in 1986, with Rutgers University under Dr. Joan Marter, the journal has continued to expand internationally with a robust online presence and active engagement with the global academic community. While our community and reach has grown, WAJ’s editors strive to continue the intimacy of intergenerational knowledge-sharing that sparked the journal’s first issue.
WAJ UnBoxxed, the journal’s oral histories archives project, edited by Dr. Helena Shaskevich, is born from the belief in the profound value of women artists’ untold stories and archives. Like so many feminist initiatives before it, UnBoxxed stems from a coupling of frustration and aspiration—the continued lack of institutional support for women artists that has promulgated a still naïve but sheer force of will and compulsion to rectify some of these issues. More than that, however, the initiative centers a resounding optimism in building community. UnBoxxed features archive-focused and directed dialogues between scholars and women artists, drawing attention to those artists exhibiting between the 1960s and 1990s. The series builds scholarship on a generation of artists whose position and place explore what it means to be an artist and make art in the immediate aftermath of second-wave feminism’s emergence into public consciousness. While the initiative exudes a sense of historic monumentality by giving prominence to artists who paved the way, many of their private archives remain in precarious states. Without institutional support, such fundamental archival materials are at risk of being forgotten and discarded. The collection of interviews in Unboxxed also feature the ephemera and materials—photographs, sketchbooks, notes, and letters—which provide an unfiltered glimpse into the corresponding artist’s life and career. The project’s tone elides formality, returning to the generative site of the humble kitchen table as a gathering place for intergenerational intimacy, as artists unbox precious and personal materials and share their experiences with us as feminist scholars and as readers.