ARTICLES
The New York Feminist Art Institute
by Katie Cercone

Place of first publication
nparadoxa:  international feminist art journal: Incidental, volume 22 2008
www.ktpress.co.uk

DeKoonig, who led a collage workshop, May Stevens, who led a political activism workshop, and Louise Bourgeois, who frequently submitted work to the NYFAI’s salon exhibitions.

Students of the NYFAI came from all over, and ranged in age from 16 to 65. Some were married, some were in college, and some were college graduates already successful in the work world. Judith Chiti remembers her very first meeting candidly, “I walked in and there were 40 women sitting on the floor. But none of them were talking about their children or their husbands. This was such a profound relief that I was very impressed and very interested.” Chiti continued later in her interview discussing how despite the financial hardship she experienced working and raising a small child alone during her time with NYFAI, looking back she assesses, “It was probably the best time of my life,” if only because, “I believed we could change certain things, and I was part of it.”

Joan Arbeiter remarks that prior to taking classes and uncovering her artistic sense at the NYFAI, her husband used to comment on the strange arrangement of peas, carrots and potatoes Joan would make on the dinner plates of their New Jersey home. Joan later realized, “I was making compositions,” and eventually expanded the idea into a series of paintings. Joan reflects that prior to the NYFAI she was “still very involved in what [she] now would call ‘the 1950’s handbook,’ that caused her to espouse certain “notions, preconceptions and long-held and, frankly, half-baked, sexist ideas and theories.” Today she says of the NYFAI and the important changes it set in motion in her domestic and professional life, “It was a revolution.” Her initial puzzlement at a 1972 sculpture by Nancy Azara drew her to the NYFAI to study:

"I recall being both totally puzzled and blown away because it was sculpture – but it didn’t have any of the qualities I had associated with sculpture. It was a good size, over life-size, and it took up a lot of floor space, but it wasn’t one solid, tall, monolithic anything. It was lots of little pieces, different colors, pegged together with wooden pins. She later told me it was a self-portrait and a metaphor for the female condition, struggling to get up off the floor, struggling to put things together to make a bigger thing. In 1972, I hadn’t yet read the “new feminist handbook” to know that it was okay to do that, but I couldn’t articulate this at that time. However, I could see and feel that it worked."

At the NYFAI, many women developed their feminist consciousnesses as they began to sift through former values and adopt more enabling priorities. Judith Chiti articulates this process of unlearning culture in the curatorial statement for the Transformations art exhibition the NYFAI organized in 1981, saying, “the feminist movement of the past altered more than the artist’s consciousness; it altered her unconsciousness, her process of receiving and selecting the significant.” This show, held in the New York City Coliseum exhibition space, featured the work of 39 women artists from the institute and included paintings, prints, performance, sculpture and drawings that all embodied this sense of a new personal feminist perspective. As a composite, the Transformations exhibition generated a visual narrative timeline. Pieces were separated into what were at the time three broad periods: early 1970s, mid-1970s and late 1970s/early 1980s. The first group used methods and materials such as fabrics, fibers, glitter and hair traditionally associated with women’s work that were refashioned as personal and historical metaphor. Early 1970s feminist artistic intentions embraced matriarchs, goddesses, queens, and oracles, and moved from linear and rational to circular, anthropomorphic and natural concepts and values. Later works featured in the show began to question the existence of an intrinsic feminine or feminist art practice and moved toward an expanded, less certain, but nonetheless empowering conception of womanhood, one which continued to depolarize the personal/political and enabled female artists to conceive of themselves as artists and individuals with a shared collective history.

In her piece, Dialectic Triangulation: A Visual Philosophy (1970), Agnes Denes reflected on the passage of time through her own symbolic system featuring precise, map-like technical designs. In her presentation Streams of Consciousness (year?), urban shaman Donna Henes used ultra violet light and fluorescent ribbon to circumvent conventional western medical models and revisit