By Dena Beard

There was no outright feminist noise when I arrived at SAIC, just an intimation of feminist presence, what with the dean being Carol Becker, a feminist critic, and SAIC’s significant number of feminists on the faculty. But I’d been living in a false universe, a women’s college, for four years previously, and SAIC felt strange to me, like I had suddenly, quite rashly, re-entered the patriarchy. There is no way to know for certain what types of implements the school is wielding over its female constituents causing me to feel this way; there was simply the suggestion.
Of course, when I began my undergraduate career at a women’s college there was an air of displacement there as well, but this soon evolved into an air of security, empowerment, and self-respect. This “feminist” tone at the women’s college materialized into a desire for female comradeship, where it’s easy to talk about the effects of concentrating on our work when it’s lined with cadences of sexual desire, sexual expulsion, and simply, sexism. I took this comradeship for granted, and after that, SAIC has been an uncomfortable transition between a wom-en’s college and the art world, compelling me to re-evaluate feminism, ad hoc.

The Female, The Feminist?
At SAIC, there are always people standing around the elevators looking to be in need of provocation. I impromptu asked some of these women if they felt discouraged from considering their work feminist. “I don’t think feminism is important any more,” one student quipped, convincing me that the discouragement had really worked. Three more students had no comprehension of the term at all. I wanted to be annoyed at this but I felt instead a vague chagrin that the vocabulary of feminism had not transcended the ’70s to be a regular part of vocabulary for the 60 percent female student body at SAIC.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines feminism as “advocacy of women’s rights and sexual equality.” In my book, there are two conditions for living in a predisposed “state of feminism.” 1. When women and men have equality in institutions. 2. When a woman’s voice is present in positions of power.

The Paradox of Representation
Turning to the art world to evaluate the first condition, I did a poll of 15 top commercial galleries in the Chicago area. It turned out that 104 of the 269 of their represented artists were women, coming to a surprising 38 percent. This is a tentative suggestion that women’s art might be slowly reaching parity with male art in gallery presence (though measuring the differences in commercial value of the artwork was beyond the scope of this article). Even so, this is far from equality.

The Prejudices of Power
The second condition demonstrates the lack of equality even more so. For example, the directors of the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Field Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Guggenheim are all male, as are the head art critics at The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, the New Yorker, Time, and The Nation as is the editor of ArtForum. The American art world is dominated by, and criticized by, men.

Feminism at SAIC
SAIC seems to be in a state of amnesia in regards to the conditions of women in art. Perhaps this is symptomatic. After all, Time Magazine declared that feminism was dead in 1998, stating: “If feminism of the ’60s and ’70s was steeped in research and obsessed with social change, feminism today is wed to the culture of celebrity and self-obsession” (from “Who Put the Me in Feminism,” Time Magazine, no. 25, June 29, 1998). Time reduces the rich history of the women’s movement down to a narcissistic remnant of its previous glory. Yet SAIC is more tolerant of its constituents than Time because it has, in its statement of objectives, put emp-hasis on animating communities as integral sources of artistic excellence. This, I would argue, distinguishes SAIC as an avant-garde institution, capable of graduating feminists who can continue to change society.
One of the most notable of those graduates is Nancy Spero, SAIC class of ’49, whose recent media attention has nearly paralleled that of her husband Leon Golub. In a 1996 interview with Amy Schlegel in The Feminist Memoir Project, Spero recounts her frustration after picketing the 1969 Whitney Biennale, demanding that exhibition have more to show than the four percent representation by female artists:
“All these exchanges made me realize how women artists are excluded from public discourse. Earlier I had felt excluded, and had thought this was due to the nature of my work. ... My politics may have been part of it — but then I was beginning to see that ultimately I had been excluded by gender discrimination. It didn’t matter who I was. The other women on the picket did work that in no way resembled mine. What joined us under a kind of political umbrella was the exclusion of women artists.”
Spero’s work was included in both the 1985 and 1993 Whitney Biennales, a testament to her time and to her persistence in creating real change. These types of stories are not uncommon to SAIC faculty, staff, and alumni, and serve to educate the continuing feminist discussion. After all, not only are circumstances at SAIC symptomatic of the art world at large, these circumstances shape our own artistic experience.
“It’s quite a dramatic statement to say that we’re all post-feminist,” Liberal Arts and Performance instructor Terri Kapsalis states. “The women’s movement had its successes and failures. Its failures included its straight, white, middle-class leanings. Its successes include the advancements that allow many young women today to disregard its importance as a movement ... the fact that there are more choices and opportunities for many women now has made the importance of the women’s movement less obvious.”
Maud Lavin, a professor in the Art History department, observed that there are many students at SAIC looking for “courses that deal in a direct way with gender issues.” Jim Elkins, department chair for Art History, Theory and Criticism, commented that this was because of a lack of “gender scholars” at SAIC, though he notes there have been more in the past and will hopefully be more in the future. On that note, I would issue a challenge for SAIC to utilize feminism, to breach societal prejudices, and, by doing so, create community.