and respect each other’s differences, and channel these new awarenesses into their art. “We listened, we drew, we learned, we made art, and we healed,” remembers Nancy.

Even so, another member Barbara Hammer felt that the NYFAI didn’t explicitly make a focus of lesbian sexuality. Within a 1980s context Hammer’s concern was somewhat radical, and in hindsight she observed very critically the absence of “classes about lesbian art-making, lesbian dreams, lesbian sexuality in art . . . all those things that are crucial . . . . The lesbian part of me didn’t feel celebrated in any form.” She was also the only woman interviewed to bring up issues of class, saying, “We weren’t aware of class the way we are today. Even if the board was diversified towards the end of the NYFAI experience, all of us were racist and classist, it’s institutionalized in us.” Although NYFAI members may have overlooked their own social and political privileges as largely white, middle-class, American women, what 1970s feminist art did do was plant seeds that created a larger platform for addressing various forms of oppression and how they are interrelated. Feminist identity politics in the US have become a useful vocabulary for many individuals and groups.

The curriculum over the course of the NYFAI’s ten-year lifespan involved a number of workshops and around eight to a dozen classes per semester, some held in industrial locations such as the old Port Authority bus terminal in Manhattan. Students were offered courses as diverse and special as “Visual Diaries,” “Map Making,” “Life Patterns,” and “The Architecture of the Self: Models of Home,” in addition to more conventional media-based courses on painting, sculpture and art history. At the NYFAI, students focused on their whole selves, the goal was rarely painting the perfect image but rather reclaiming a particular sense of agency and ability in a culture which was critiqued for its masculine privilege. Miriam Schapiro expressed this in the interview she gave regarding her own experiences at the NYFAI: “Feminism is when you know who you are and who you want to be, and you know how to speak and you know that you can speak well, people can understand what you are saying, and you know that you want to talk.”

Helen Stockton, the institute’s oldest student at the age of 65 in 1979 remarked that the NYFAI kept her from censoring herself, “Why make art unless making art for myself?” and she reflected that NYFAI gave her a much freeing, “permission to be mediocre.” Nancy Azara recalls the growth she saw many women go through in her popular visual diaries course, remembering how as the students opened up and explored core emotional issues in their visual diaries, often, they would “begin to become more assertive in their personal life.” At the NYFAI women refined their own sense of feminism through the development of a personal visual vocabulary and a new way of relating and operating in the world on their own terms. For many women who walked through its doors, the NYFAI was in this sense thoroughly therapeutic.

And yet as a holistic feminist training program NYFAI offered much more than emotional catharsis. NYFAI students were hardly off the hook in terms of producing exceptional, quality work. Elke Solomon, who taught painting at the NYFAI remarks of her teaching ethics, “It became a very safe atmosphere, and a very permissive atmosphere, not-with-standing what a bitch I was. I’m really very tough. I don’t like frou-frou. I don’t believe in non-critical stuff, and I don’t believe in people saying, ‘it’s beautiful.’”

The NYFAI was further distinguished by the way it synthesized a West Coast approach to feminist art/processes which made it comparable to feminist programs established a decade earlier at California State University Fresno and California Institute of the Arts but combined this with an East Coast approach to getting women into galleries. At the NYFAI, scant attention was paid to the importance of grades, credits and similar gauges of academic success at an accredited university; instead energy was redirected to assist women to show their work successfully in the public sphere. With the help of artist collective galleries such as A.I.R., Soho20 and Ceres Gallery, a non-profit gallery founded in 1984 by NYFAI members ¬¬¬¬Darla Bjork, Rhonda Schaller, and Polly Lai that was housed right in the school’s building, the NYFAI began to realize its vision of showcasing women’s art to the public in legitimate gallery settings. “The very labeling