of themselves and the exhibiting of their work – as women – was the beginning of a new feminist iconoclasm,” remarks Judith Chiti in her statement for the Transformations catalog.

NYFAI had a two-way vision, on the one hand it connected its members back to their creativity and on the other it connected their creativity back to the public. Elke Solomon, who worked as an art historian and curator before coming to the NYFAI remarked that, “NYFAI had to do with permission in making art.” Women under NYFAI’s roof felt free to do work that was not shaped by the expectations of male faculty, male students, or the suffocating presence of a purportedly universal artistic canon that had marginalized the contribution of women to art and culture. They were free of what Judith Chiti identified as “the sexist tradition of expectation, sensibility and scholarship” upheld by the art world and culture at large. Barbara Hammer adds that the real strength of the NYFAI was that, “It was where [the women] could feel that they were artists, and they could get validation for their art, rather than having to compete in the larger system which is male dominated.” At the NYFAI, women developed a new relationship to their work in which they came to understand their creative expression as women as deeply meaningful.

Today, through gains achieved by renegade women artists in the 1970s many women feel free to work alone and/or collaboratively with men and women, and they are able to earn greater recognition and in larger numbers than ever before. After the institute’s disbanding, many of its members continued on in their art careers toward successful ends.

A considerable number of faculty, students and affiliates of NYFAI, by now most well into their 60’s and sometimes facing ageism, continue to make art, publish and teach from a feminist perspective. Former NYFAI faculty member Louise Fishman shows her abstract oil paintings in New York City at the Cheim & Reid Gallery. Leila Daw, who was the only female faculty member in the fine arts department of Southern Illinois University in the 1970’s, retired in 1990 and currently installs public sculpture in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Melissa Meyer, who shows at Elizabeth Harris in NYC, has been on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts in New York since 1993. Harmony Hammond, who in addition to serving as a faculty member of the NYFAI was a cofounder of Heresies, teaches at the University of Arizona and published Lesbian Art in America, A Contemporary History in 2002, a text that attempts to curtail the erasure of homosexual identity in the arts by exploring what it is to "see" and represent as a gendered, lesbian subject. Julia Cameron, whose spiritually based philosophy for artists has gained extensive notoriety in The Artists Way (1997), a book she co-authored, contributed to the NYFAI through a workshop on journaling, one of the foundational components of her creative philosophy.

Former faculty member Jewell Gomez, widely known for her novel The Gilda Stories, won the Lambda Book Award for Lesbian Fiction and Lesbian Science Fiction in 1992 and continues to write novels, poetry and plays from her home in San Francisco. Faith Ringgold, who led a mask making workshop at NYFAI and through her activist work played an instrumental role exposing art institutions that neglected the work of women and people of color in the 1960’s and 1970’s, shows her paintings and quilt-based works at ACA Gallery and has written and illustrated eleven children's books to date. Her most popular, Tar Beach, was the recipient of numerous awards including a Caldecott Honor. Elke Solomon currently teaches in the fine arts department of Parsons New School in New York and had her first Manhattan solo exhibition, “Body Talk” at the A.I.R. Gallery in 1995. Agnes Denes, shortly after being featured in the NYFAI’s Transformations exhibition, made a bold gesture in environmental art when she planted “Wheatfield,” a two-acre field of wheat in a vacant lot of downtown Manhattan. The project, for which Denes aimed to comment on "human values and misplaced priorities," yielded 1,000 lbs. of wheat which would travel to 28 cities worldwide. She has subsequently published four books, shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, and participated in three Venice Biennales. Founder Nancy Azara continues to sculpt, lecture, and give workshops and classes on using guided meditations in art, an issue she expands upon in Spirit Taking Form: Making a Spiritual Practice of Making Art, published in 2002.