National WCA’s From the Center: Now! Juried by Lucy Lippard

The Nanny Question. Three-part series of 14W"x11"H photocollages.
The toys in the foreground live vastly better lifestyles than the children of the imported nannies and maids forced to leave their own children behind to care for the children of the affluent. When young people of any class aren't able spend time with their mothers, what kind of society are we creating?  (Concept and foreground photos by Shizue Seigel; background photos (by permission) by Flickr photographers Greg Anslow, Iman al-Dabbagh, Amaryllis Torres, Dale Charles, and Sonny Angulo.

I was thrilled and honored that the reknowned Lucy Lippard selected these three pieces for the National Women’s Caucus for Art 2010 From the Center: Now! exhibition at the Woman Made Gallery in Chicago early this year. http://womanmade.org/show.html?type=group&gallery=fromthecenter2010&pic=1

Lucy Lippard is an internationally known writer, activist, and curator from the United States. She was an early champion of feminist art, and among the first writers to books on contemporary art including From the Center and The Pink Glass Swan, and the recipient of the 1968 Guggenheim Fellowship, the Frank Mather Award for Criticism from the College Art Association, and two National Endowment of the Arts grants in criticism. She has written art criticism for Art in America, The Village Voice, In These Times, and Z Magazine. In 2007 Lippard received the Women’s Caucus for Art’s Life Time Achievement Award.

Lucy Lippard’s Juror's Statement
"Jurying is a painful process, almost as much so for the juror as for the juried. After the initial selections, the remaining decision can be really hard to make.... I also enjoyed reviewing such a vastly varied group of works demonstrating that feminist art and ideas are alive and well.

Interestingly these works radiate not much further from the center than they did in the early 1970s. There is more polish and perhaps less passion than in the wild and woolly early days of the Women’s Art Movement.... At the level of social justice, a huge amount of progress has been made and a huge amount of progress remains to be made.

Of course every jurying process is immensely personal, and because of my own work, I tend to select pieces dealing fairly directly with content. A number of artists courageously confronted child abuse and domestic violence, cultural differences, family traumas. I was struck by a certain melancholy, balanced by an assertive independence and a welcome sense of humor. Another thread, so to speak, was the number of pieces on clothing, specifically dresses. How many of us wear dresses on a regular basis? Not me, for sure. Yet these dresses seem to represent fantasies. They are for little girls and sexy sirens, representing our childhoods (happy and unhappy) and the dreams of glamour and success that remain intertwined in the female image, often seen through a lens of irony or disillusion.

Given the fact that so many of the leading eco-artists are women, there were fewer images than I had hoped for dealing with environmental and political issues, which affect us as women as much as more intimate issues. (I’ve always agreed that the personal is political, but the political is also personal.) Overt Lesbian images also seem to have fallen by the wayside since the 1970s, despite the fact that Queer theory has grandly expanded that field.I was given, of course, no names and no information whatsoever about the artists, so I have to hope that I’ve included some younger women whose feminism (or not) can be expressed in ways less visible to me in my own seventies. Not surprisingly, the videos were less reminiscent of feminist classics; this is a medium that has come into its own more recently. Nor was there any way for me to tell if any of the art selected was collaborative, a process I consider deeply feminist, brought home in the recent debut of The Heretics -- a film on the Heresies Collective, which provided many of my own epiphanies, a major inspiration to risk more, to support rather than to compete with other women, and to respect the power of more than one.” -Lucy R. Lippard