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Featured image on the WAJ homepage: Libbie Mark, detail of Collage Painting #23 (1962), acrylic polymer latex, paper, string, and other mixed media collage on paper, varnished and mounted on Masonite, 11 7/8” x 17 7/8”. LMPF Inv. no. 34JM. Courtesy Berry Campbell, New York. Photo credit: Roz Akin.
One hundred years after the publication of André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, the irrefutably patriarchal international art movement continues to invite admonition from feminist art historians. As the Woman’s Art Journal has focused on art-historical discoveries since our very first issues from the 1980s, perhaps there is no better act bringing to light Surrealism’s untold feminist narratives than Julia Skelly’s presentation on Kati Horna’s “alchemical” photographs. Made in Mexico City, Horna’s illuminating series of dolls and masks, like Remedios Varo’s knitting women and Leonora Carrington’s kitchens and spells, serve not only as sites of transformation but games of magic and witchcraft. On our cover, Horna’s tremendous 1957 triple portrait, portraying Varo enveloped in Carrington’s handmade mask, is characterized by Skelly as the “three witches of Surrealism,” a new conceptualization offering the powerful prospect of changing identities. Several women featured in WAJ’s Fall/Winter issue share an interest in Mexico and its artists, and others determine to advocate for women’s rights as well as cultural and personal autonomy.
Drawing on the folk magic of Mexico’s brujería (witchcraft) to protect feminist artists and women under patriarchy, Mónica Mayer has fostered a unique artistic practice through her vast social networks and collaborative praxis attuned to Mexican traditions and sensibilities. Bárbara Tyner’s stirring article on Mayer presents the chronological span of the artist’s career bookended by her signature performance, El tendedero (The Clothesline) of 1978, still reactivated globally, and her most recent, riveting photography series, inter-Pelacíon of 2024. Mayer’s deeply-rooted grip on feminist art in Mexico is constantly tested by the judicial structures that normalize misogyny and feminicidio/feminicide. On El tendedero’s benign yet ruthless nature, Tyner writes that it is, as Breton described Frida Kahlo, “Un listón alrededor de una bomba” ([A] ribbon tied around a bomb).
Tamara Trodd turns to archival sketchbooks to reconstruct the feminist histories and criticisms in the US and UK surrounding British artist Helen Chadwick’s singular installation, Of Mutability (The Oval Court), in 1986 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. Chadwick’s career, technical processes of photocopy collage, and poetic influences are grounded in pleasure and materiality of the naked body, aligned by Trodd to “goddess” imagery of the 1970s and ‘80s. Both Mayer and Chadwick responded to Frida Kahlo’s discourses on the body and pain. Horna’s artisanal masks, Mayer’s homemade tendederos, and Chadwick’s xeroxed goddesses embody the principal characteristic of change, generating polyvalent mutations not only in the sexed female body but in feminist movements.
Not unlike Chadwick’s cut-paper shards and fragments, the collage paintings of postwar artist Libbie Mark offer new constructive exercises and formal discoveries that contribute to the rich histories of collage. Mark painted on the margins of Abstract Expressionism, and her venues for creating and exhibiting her work were limited initially by the demands of family life on Long Island. Jillian Russo frames Mark’s history and visual relationships within the durable networks of women artists in New York and Massachusetts, building her friendships and associations with Betty Holliday Deckoff, Grace Hartigan, Helen Frankenthaler, and others. Eventually studying with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, Mark’s vibrant paintings and collages were her personal response to the color and spatial complexes of Abstract Expressionism, a movement that was shared by other women, and one uniquely developed by Mark until her early death from cancer.
WAJ’s stellar lineup of book reviews was rigorously developed and guided by book reviews editor Alison Poe, supported by contributing editor Erin Devine. Em Kapp brings to life an exhibition catalogue tracing modernism’s indebtedness to the objects, techniques, and materialities making up the vital field of textiles—inspired by the woven histories and studies of queerness, Indigeneity, labor, disability, and technology. Discussions on nature, the body, color, and selfhood, comprising the thematic sections of an ambitious exhibition catalogue on women’s portraits and figuration at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, are framed by Gabrielle Stecher in the broader context of contemporary politics and the engagement of gender, race, ageism, and sexuality that bear on the subject. Sally Brown brings insight, humor, and uplifting prose to her comparative review of two uniquely challenging approaches to autobiography, memoir, and storytelling, manifested in the advocacy and activism of their fearless authors, the eco-feminist Betsy Damon and the groundbreaking curator Lucy Lippard.
Julia Alting reflects upon the mechanics of feminist and queer curator and podcaster Helen Molesworth’s non-hierarchal and nonlinear art criticisms, a “thinking-as-writing” across generations, kinship, and time, explored over her scintillating thirty-year career. Discerning the multifarious roles and theoretical positions of the female gaze in fashion magazines fixated on the “woman-child” trope, Debbie McCarthy’s review explores the social and sexual nuances of identity formation caught between childhood and womanhood as conceived and manipulated by the fashion industry. Enhancing her feature article in this issue on Kati Horna, Julia Skelly presents a major book on twentieth-century women photographers in Mexico that foregrounds Indigenous and Afro-Mexican subjects. Staying true to the feminist principle (espoused by our board members Mary Garrard and Norma Broude) that alternate forms of women’s agency are worthy of study, Funda Karayel attends to the trailblazing Black art space, JAM, founded by visionary Linda Goode Bryant. Michelle Donnelly investigates postwar graphic arts in The Contemporaries, an innovative woman-run printmaking workshop-gallery, eventually merged with Pratt Institute, led by the enterprising Margaret Lowengrund. Lily Scott engages the complex arguments on Marie Laurencin’s sapphic modernist aesthetic in early twentieth-century Paris.
Joan Marter and Aliza Rachel Edelman
Editors, Woman’s Art Journal
Parallel Perspectives
p. 2
By Joan Marter and Aliza Edelman
Portraits, Issues and Insights
p. 3
Dolls, Masks, and Witches: Kati Horna’s Alchemical Photography
By Julia Skelly
p. 14
More Than El Tendedero: A Reckoning of Mónica Mayer’s Half-Century in a Hurricane
By Bárbara Tyner
p. 25
Helen Chadwick’s Of Mutability: Visual Pleasure and Goddess Imagery in British and American Feminist Art and Theory of the 1970s and 1980s
By Tamara Trodd
p. 37
Interplay: Libbie Mark’s Collage Paintings and Women Artists’ Networks
By Jillian Russo
Reviews
p. 47
Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction
Edited by Lynne Cooke
Reviewed by Em Kapp
p. 50
Women Painting Women
Edited by Andrea Karnes
Reviewed by Gabrielle Stecher
p. 53
Water Talks: Empowering Communities to Know, Restore, and Preserve Their Waters
By Betsy Damon;
Stuff: Instead of a Memoir
By Lucy R. Lippard
Reviewed by Sally Jane Brown
p. 55
Open Questions: Thirty Years of Writing About Art
By Helen Molesworth, edited by Donna Wingate
Reviewed by Julia Alting
p. 58
Picturing the Woman-Child: Fashion, Feminism, and the Female Gaze
By Morna Laing
Reviewed by Debbie McCarthy
p. 60
Women Photographers and Mexican Modernity: Framing the Twentieth Century
Edited by Julia R. Brown, Radmila Stefkova, and Tamara R. Williams
Reviewed by Julia Skelly
p. 65
Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces
Edited by Thomas (T.) Jean Lax and Lilia Rocio Taboada, in collaboration with Linda Goode Bryant
Reviewed by Funda Karayel
p. 66
A Model Workshop: Margaret Lowengrund and The Contemporaries
Edited by Lauren Rosenblum and Christina Weyl
Reviewed by Michelle Donnelly
p. 69
Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris
Edited by Simonetta Fraquelli and Cindy Kang
Reviewed by Lily F. Scott
Color Plates