A candid and generous color-illustrated account of women artists creating politically and personally effective art works, exhibitions, and actions over two tumultuous decades This abundantly illustrated personal narrative takes readers through twenty-two years of activism in the women's art movements in New York City during a period of great cultural change. Author Sabra Moore vividly recounts life in this era of social upheaval in which women artists responded to war, racial tension and reconciliation, cultural and aesthetic inequality, and struggles for reproductive freedom. We learn intimately how she and fellow women artists found ways to create politically and personally effective art works, exhibitions, actions, and institutions. The book features Moore's involvement in pivotal art organizations of this time and her own development as an artist, counterbalanced with her connections to family in rural East Texas and friends in New Mexico. Moore was a member of the Heresies Collective, an influential feminist activist group, became editor of their art and politics journal Heresies, and was president of the NYC/Women's Caucus for Art. She helped coordinate and curate many of the earliest large-scale exhibitions of women artists in NYC, including Views by Women Artists (1982), and the collaborative shows Reconstruction Project and Connections Project/Conexus. Moore was a principle organizer of the 1984 demonstration against MoMA over their lack of inclusion of women artists and was a member of various groundbreaking collaborative arts groups in the 1970s, including Atlantic Gallery and WAR (Women Artists in Revolution). While Openings is an historical narrative of women artists' actions, organizations, and ideas, it also candidly describes their periods of challenge, including the death of sculptor Ana Mendieta and the indictment of her husband and the author's own attempted murder by her former art teacher. The book is illustrated throughout by a treasure of 950 color and black & white images of the art from this momentous period: a valuable collection that is concurrently being archived by Barnard College along with papers, letters, show cards, posters, original artworks, and other documents. This eye-opening book includes forewords by renowned art critic Lucy Lippard and poet/activist Margaret Randall.
Sabra Moore is an artist, writer, and activist. After moving to New York City in 1966, she became an integral creative force within the feminist art movement. Lucy R. Lippard is a contemporary art historian, curator, writer, and activist. As a critic, Lippard is best known for her study of conceptual art in Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 and for her writing on feminist art and politically engaged art. She has published more than twenty books, organized some fifty exhibitions, authored numerous articles, and co-founded Heresies: A Journal of Art and Politics, as well as the artist's-book center, Printed Matter. She has helped form numerous political and cultural groups, including the Ad Hoc Women's Art Committee and the Art Workers Coalition. She played a key role in the development of Conceptual Art in New York in the 1960s and 1970s and in the Feminist Art movement. In more recent years she has focused her work on the landscape, culture, and art of the American Southwest, where she moved in the 1990s. Her many honors include the Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award. Margaret Randall is a feminist poet, essayist, and oral historian with a long history of social activism (in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua, as well as the United States). More than 200 published books reflect her personal experience and generational struggles. She has also translated much poetry by others. In Mexico, she co-founded El Corno Emplumado, a bilingual journal that published more than 700 writers from 35 countries. Returning to the US in 1984, the government ordered her deported, claiming her writing subversive. She won her case in 1989. Among her recent awards are the Poet of Two Hemisphere Prize (Quito, Ecuador 2019) and the 2020 George Garrett Award given by AWP.
