A Mea Culpa to Women Artists

The Boston Museum of Fine Arts dedicates a floor to women’s art. An entire wing of the Brooklyn Museum exhibits feminist art only. At the Baltimore Museum of Art, a year-long program of exhibitions, programs, and acquisitions by female-identified artists is mounted. New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) showcases printmaker and found artist Betye Saar’s 1969 autobiographical work, “Black Girl’s Window.”

These are just a few museums in the U.S. committed to correcting past omissions in terms of acquiring, exhibiting, and honoring women artists. Each was opened last year and each fell victim to anticipated large scale viewing because of shut downs in the face of Covid-19.

They were joined by other excited institutions, galleries, and university-based arts venues across the country who worked collaboratively with the Feminist Art Coalition, a grassroots organization, to present a series of concurrent events including exhibitions, performances, and lectures to ensure that women are recognized at the museum level.

Internationally, museums including Madrid’s Prado, were also slated to be recognized as they commemorated women’s achievement in art. The historical inequality pervasive in the male-dominated art world was obvious for years at the Prado, but for its 200th anniversary the museum featured two overlooked 16th century female painters. Elsewhere in Europe, last year saw major exhibits of women’s art.

All that activity reflected progress, but there are still issues to be addressed when it comes to women in the arts. Just two years ago 96 percent of artwork sold at auction was by male artists and only 30 percent of artists represented by commercial galleries in the U.S. were women. A survey of permanent collections in 18 major art museums in America conducted at the same time found that out of over 10,000 artists, 87 percent were male and 85 percent were white. Only 27 women out of 318 artists are represented in the 9th edition of Janson’s Basic History of Western Art, up from zero in the 1980s.

Against that backdrop, the work of the Boston Museums of Fine Art (MFA) in recognizing women’s overlooked place in art, and its public mea culpa, was significant. Its extensive third-floor exhibition of women’s art, “Women Take the Floor,” offered a stellar showcase of women’s art that sought to “acknowledge and remedy the systemic gender discrimination found in museums, galleries, the academy and the marketplace, including the MFA’s inconsistent history in supporting women’s art.”

The various exhibit spaces included paintings, sculpture, prints, photography, jewelry, textiles, ceramics and furniture, all created by women artists, some recognized and others whose work has been obscured.  Exhibits themes ranged from Women Depicting Women, Women on the Move: Art and Design, Beyond the Loom: Fiber as Sculpture, Women Publish Women: The Print Boom, and Women of Action.

“Our goal was to celebrate the strength and diversity of work by women artists while also shining a light on the ongoing struggle that many continue to face today. This is a first step,” Nonie Gadsden, a senior curator who led a cross-departmental team of curators in organizing “Women Take the Floor,” said.

Also noteworthy was the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) exhibitions, programs and acquisitions by female-identifying artists that took place throughout 2020 in conjunction with the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage in America. “2020 Vision” encompassed 16 solo exhibitions and seven thematic shows. The “2020 Vision” project was part of the museum’s ongoing commitment to addressing race and gender diversity gaps within the museum field, and to represent fully and deeply the spectrum of individuals that have shaped the trajectory of art. 

The recognition of women artists didn’t take place in a vacuum.  Advocates, activists and feminist art critics worked for decades to make it happen. None is more respected than the late Linda Nochlin whose pioneering essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Female Artists?” published in 1971 was groundbreaking.

Then there are the Guerilla Girls, a group of feminist activist artists who wear gorilla masks and remain anonymous as they work internationally mounting street projects, postering and stickering wherever they find discrimination, gender and ethnic bias, and corruption.  Last year, with help from Art in Ad Places, they placed a poster on a phone booth in front of MoMA in New York calling out the museum for its ties to sex offender the late Jeffrey Epstein and other big donors. They’ve also reframed Linda Nochlin’s critical question. “Why haven’t more women been considered great artists throughout western history?”

Susan Fisher Sterling, director of the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) in Washington, DC, founded more than 30 years ago, may have the answer. “Museums, in general, mirror the power structures in our society, structures that in the arts privilege the history of white men’s accomplishments.” NMWA is the only major museum in the world solely dedicated to celebrating the achievements of women in the visual, performing, and literary arts. The museum honors women artists of the past, promotes women artists in the present, and assures the place of women artists in the future.

Let’s hope that these important exhibitions can be viewed and appreciated post pandemic. Surely, women artists have been invisible far too long to be brought down by a nasty virus.

Surviving the Fire Within

Some of us have heartburn. Others feel nauseous or sick to their stomach. A few experience a chronic pain in the neck, while sleep escapes us and night terrors abound. We are irritable and angry, sad and scared, quietly terrified, and decidedly depressed. We weep easily and work to keep anxiety at bay. 

These are just a few of the somatic and psychological symptoms our shared stress serves up as we try to survive in an era of Covid isolation, massive political crime and corruption, the unimaginable possibility of living in a dictatorship, and natural and man made disasters, all of which suggest a doomsday future and an atmosphere of lonely despair.

I simply cannot fathom losing one’s home and possessions under an ominous orange sky amid encroaching showers of sparks, on top of our shared calamities.  I can’t imagine living in Beirut, or a refugee camp that disappears overnight, or a detention center defined by inhumane loneliness. It’s hardly bearable to forego seeing one’s children or hugging a friend, or losing one.

Nor can I begin to know what it feels like to be a doctor, nurse, or other healthcare provider, hospital worker, ambulance driver, EMT, “essential worker” putting herself on the front lines day after day after exhausting day. What does it feel like to watch a person die alone, with only your gloved hand to hold? What goes through your head when you drive a refrigerator truck to a funeral home?

Moving stories of courage, creative interventions, and acts of love, even among strangers, abound to counteract these experiences of human suffering.  We need that antidote. That’s why it is important that we share the stories of both those who succumb and those who remain strong, and that we put a human face on this time of trauma and tragedy.

We need to know what the lost child looked like, what the grieving spouse said, what the lover feels. Their lost loved ones are not simply statistics. They were real people with real life stories whose pain in this moment is more than anyone should have to bear.  Like the fallen on 9-11, their lives had meaning, promise, hope. In their memory, we need to offer acts of kindness every day, and to receive such acts with grace. It’s also why we need to share our own emotional suffering with those who can offer us solace and validate the normalcy of our emotions in this oh, so trying time.

It would not be quite so difficult if it were not for the fact that thousands of lives were needlessly lost, if we were not a leaderless nation on the brink of collapse, if there were less hatred and violence in our midst, if the natural world were not screaming for help, if we had reason to believe that current events were a bizarre anomaly, a blip on the screen, a fluke. But sadly, the convergence of events feels like foreshadowing. It’s a clarion call, and if we don’t respond quickly and appropriately, there will be no turning back, no end of suffering, no metaphorical blue skies, no more time.

Still, if we are to defeat the fires, real and symbolic, destroying our world, and overcome the fires burning like brazen acid within our breasts such that they rob us of peace of mind and threaten our remnants of hope, we must carry on, together and alone. Each of us is called upon to rise every morning, to give solace where it is needed, to ask for help when that is needed as well. We must do what we can to save each other from the flames of despair, whether that be carrying water from the well, climbing the mountain of Martin Luther King, Jr, caressing a frightened child, cooking for the homeless, casting our vote no matter the obstacles,  marching and making good trouble in memory of John Lewis, in short, being fully human in a seemingly inhumane and inhospitable world.

Although things have never seemed as bad as they are now in this confluence of tragedies, we have come through hard times before. We have survived them, flawed and tattered, but ultimately and fragilily intact.  Now we are called upon to do more than survive. We are called to rebuild, restore, re-imagine, not just in the space we occupy, but in all the spaces of the world.

We must understand that we are all part of the Family of Humankind, and that it falls to our generations and to each of us to care about that family, to honor and respect it, to join in its hope and possibility, to open doors to our shared future as we close the portals of past pain and degradation.

It starts now, for time is running out, and “if not us, who? If not now, when?”

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Elayne Clift writes from Saxtons River, Vt.  www.elayne-clift.com

When Do I Get to Feel Good About My Heritage and My Home?

When I was a pre-teen growing up in small-town New Jersey I loved the fact that I was a first-generation American. My parents, with their families, had fled anti-Semitic pogroms in Russian Ukraine as small children, and all of them had built new lives in America. It seemed dramatic to have a family history of hardship and courage, a unique culture, special food, and a language I could neither speak nor understand except for a few words. I liked knowing that I had Russian roots, with its great writers, composers and ballerinas as well as a mysterious history.

But I was robbed of that sense of pride as a result of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who rabidly tried to destroy communism in 1950s America, even where it didn’t exist. McCarthy viciously accused politicians, actors, journalists, teachers and others of subversion or treason without evidence.  Ordinary people across the country began to fear him and what came to be called the Second Red Scare. My father was one of them.  “Don’t let on about Russia!” he warned. “Just keep quiet about it.” And so I never talked about my heritage again.

Some years later while in high school I went through a period when I was proudly Jewish. I read the Old Testament from cover to cover and fasted on Yom Kippur, holiest of days as we solemnly embraced the Jewish new year at the mournful sound of the Shofar being blown. I read Jewish writers and wept at Holocaust stories. The young rabbi in our small town was a lovely man who with his family represented modern Jewish life to me. He also understood my desire to celebrate my Jewish identity in the days before girls had bat mitzvahs, a coming of age ceremony at age 13, enjoyed by boys at their bar mitzvahs. And so, reading from the story of Esther, he devoted one March Friday evening to a confirmation service for me.

During this time, I felt enormously proud of Israel for creating a post-Holocaust oasis for Diaspora Jews, and giving all Jews a homeland and sense of national pride. But as I grew into adulthood while Israel’s politics were becoming ominous, and as I learned more about the country’s history and came to understand its punishing behavior toward the Palestinian people who share its land, that feeling of pride began to slip away from me. I wondered and worried about things I read or overheard in conversations, both pro-Israel and against. How, I wondered, could a people who had suffered so much, visit such suffering upon others?

Then I grew older and became more deeply familiar with American history and its treatment of indigenous peoples, its slavery and continuing racism, its homophobia, misogyny, despicable corruption, incipient violence, false alters to self-righteousness and sharply dangerous shifts right such that today we can actually cage dying children. Now I find that I’ve lost virtually all sense of national pride. The truth is it’s hard to feel proud when you’re anxious and afraid, and when you’re more likely to shudder than to sing a country’s falsely premised praises.

As I write these words, cognizant of the adoration of the almighty dollar while the planet gasps for life, I find the platitudes of our political rhetoric not only hollow, but deeply shameful, especially now that we are on the cusp of actually losing our democracy to dictatorship as we quite possibly enter an era when we may be called upon to witness and engage in the utter abrogation of any national decency.

Joe McCarthy eventually got his comeuppance, the Soviet Union disbanded, the Berlin Wall fell, and the Cold War took a long break - until now. The Vietnam War ended finally, although it will never leave our consciousness as we continue to trudge on endlessly conducting untoward military action that robs so many of so much and keeps the world in danger.

In the 1990s my husband and I visited Israel. It was a conflicted journey.  As a Jew, there is no denying that the concept of an Israeli state gets inside you, and you feel a connection to the country when you stand on its land. At the same time, as a feminist, I had a really hard time reconciling the misogyny inherent in Jewish orthodoxy and seeing it at play. Further, and ever more vigorously I find myself, once again, feeling a sense of shame for my heritage, because of Israel’s political behavior toward other human beings, and the lack of response to that behavior by so many other Jews. I experience deep sadness, because others more powerful than I have rendered it impossible for me to embrace my Jewishness with as much love and pride as I once did.

Now the question for me is will I be doomed to forfeit yet again any pride I might have felt for my country and my heritage? Will I be expected to be quiet, to behave like a proper Jew, to be a good citizen? Or dare I believe that the dangerous path on which I find myself (along with others) will not leave me (or others), scarred as we continue moving forward, healing, and hopefully into a more enlightened, safer, caring world?  

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Elayne Clift writes from Saxtons River, Vt.  www.elayne-clift.com

From Shophouses to Strip Malls: America's Changing Economy

I grew up in a shophouse. I realized this after living in Thailand when I was teaching and traveling throughout Asia, where business-cum-home arrangements are ubiquitous.

My father, a haberdasher, owned a small, narrow store on Broad Street in the New Jersey town where I spent my childhood. It was called Tip Top Men’s Shop and it catered to the town’s gentry. My mother, father, two siblings and I lived in a railroad apartment above the store. The rooms lined up one in front of another along a claustrophobic corridor. There were two bedrooms so when my brother came along, he slept in the living room.  It was a convenient if cramped setup for my parents until they could afford to build a house, and it was fun for us kids, even though living in such small quarters drove my mother mad.  Also, we could have done without the Arrow Shirt boxes lining the living room.

My dad held all the franchises that upscale companies like Arrow Shirts offered to only one vendor in a town, so he had no competition to speak of, and having overstocked his store during the war years, he did well into the 50s.

But then things began to change. Franchises were extended to other stores and more importantly, box stores and discount merchandisers began to appear. Customer loyalty waned as a burgeoning bargain mentality developed. My father, driven out of business by these factors, ended up working as a floor salesman in one of those box stores, selling inferior off-the-rack suits and cheap shirts and ties. It was devastating for a man whose self-esteem derived from being his own boss.

By then we had moved to a three-bedroom house a mile from the center of town. And we, too, began bargain hunting and shopping in the stores that were rapidly displacing local merchants and changing the face of our familiar and beloved Broad Street.

It didn’t take long for those box stores to join forces as large and then larger shopping malls proliferated, becoming a developer’s dream. The first one in our area was the Cherry Hill Mall in south Jersey. Everyone flocked there on weekends, to window shop, meet friends and occasionally partake of sales.

Later, when I was living just outside Washington, DC, malls sprung up in Virginia and Maryland. Gradually, they became more upscale. Some of them were huge. Shaped like an elongated letter H, Macy’s might be at one end, Bloomingdales at the other, displacing the original Sears and Penney’s. In between these two giants, a plethora of small boutique shops offered a ridiculous amount of stuff that prospering suburbanites thought they couldn’t live without.

About this time, outlet malls began to dot the landscape, some becoming so popular that chain motels and restaurants built facilities nearby. Some of them were so big they actually had artificial ski slopes or water slides in them. In a booming economy, everyone and every business seemed to thrive.

But then things changed again.

Enter the Internet and the world of Amazon.com.  Soon, every store, big or small, was selling online. Customers loved it. UPS and FedEx loved it. Online businesses of all kinds proliferated, and profited.

What didn’t “profit” from this particular economic change was a semi-urban landscape increasingly dotted with deserted strip malls, empty box stores, and desolate super shopping venues. Who didn’t profit were all the people who lost their jobs.

Ironically, as I was contemplating writing this column, economist Paul Krugman wrote a piece in The New York Times on the topic of our changing economy. He noted that a magazine article had just appeared in which a photographic essay addressed “the decline of traditional retailers in the face of internet competition.  The pictures,” he wrote, “contrasting ‘zombie malls’ largely emptied of tenants with giant warehouses holding inventory for online sellers were striking.”  Krugman also highlighted Macy’s plans to close almost 70 stores and lay off 10,000 workers, while Sears, was doubtful that it could stay in business.

All of this brought my shophouse childhood back to me, with its pleasures of being a Broad Street kid watched over by the merchants between Curtis and Cooper Streets and the excitement of Christmas and Father’s Day shopping. But I also remembered what it was like when my father lost his business, his identity, and a good bit of his income. And I recalled what Broad Street looked like the last time I drove through my hometown – a shattering scene of tatoo parlors, bars, and vacant, decrepit buildings where once commerce and friendship flourished.

“Change is the only reality,” a Greek philosopher once said. I’ve lived long enough to realize the wisdom of those words. We live in an ever-changing world in so many ways, a world with new and often troubling landscapes in which the future is full of uncertainty. 

Witnessing those emerging landscapes, I’m very glad for my shophouse days.

The Fine Art of Listening

When I was a communications major in graduate school, “active listening” was a big piece of the curriculum. It seemed a light weight subject at the time. Later, when I taught listening skills to my own students, they too assumed it was a ho-hum ‘no brainer’ largely because the literature on paying attention to others - really hearing them - seemed to belabor the obvious: People need to be heard, validated and appreciated.

But the fact is that listening – giving our full attention to another - does not always come naturally. And the value of full attention, which leads to understanding and therefore appropriate response (which in some cases is no response, just listening), is often overlooked.

I was reminded of this on several occasions recently.  The first was when a young woman I know told me how much she appreciated the fact that I always listen to her. It was a simple statement of gratitude but one laden with meaning. What she was really saying was that she valued the fact that I took her feelings seriously and offered genuine support, which made her life easier and provided comfort in difficult circumstances. That was deeply important and helpful to her, and it was important to me too.  I felt the reward of knowing that by “simply” listening I had made someone’s journey a little bit easier.

That sense of easing someone’s journey through totally silent, wholehearted listening is part of an initiative called The Welcome Johnny and Jane Home Project launched by psychologist and writer Paula J. Caplan.  As Caplan explains, “Through free, voluntary, private, and respectful listening sessions, volunteer listeners help to reduce the common chasms between veterans and non-veterans through the simple act of a non-veteran listening to a veteran from any era. This helps veterans through the power of human connection.”

Listeners who volunteer to “Listen to a Veteran” are not therapists and they are not engaged in active listening that allows listeners to speak, Caplan explains. Except for speaking two sentences, one at the beginning and one sometime during the session, they do nothing but listen. “But they do so with 100% of their attention and their whole hearts. This model works beautifully,” says Caplan. And according to research conducted by Harvard University, veterans describe the listening sessions as helpful while listeners say it is wonderfully transformative for them.

"When I came back from Afghanistan, hearing the words “Thank You” from people who didn’t know what I did or saw was an empty gesture,” one Afghanistan army veteran reported. “More than anything, I wanted my community to listen to the stories of veterans like myself—to participate in that moral struggle, and gain a deeper awareness of the meaning of war. The Welcome Johnny and Jane Home Project understands the important role that civilians can perform simply by listening to veterans actively and without judgment, generating new opportunities for veterans to serve their communities by educating them about the nuanced reality of war." 

The third time I thought about the incredible importance and impact of active listening came from a training workshop that was part of a collaboration between two community-based theaters and a multi-generational performance project called Race Peace, developed in the south “to create a space where people form diverse backgrounds can safely and aggressively challenge the realities and myths of racism in America.” Race Peace also considers “how art can engage people in noteworthy dialogue about challenging social issues.”

Race Peace worked with Next Stage Arts Project (NSAP) and Sandglass Theater, community-based theaters in Putney, Vt., to conduct a training workshop that included Story Circles in which people sat in small groups and shared their stories. They were stories of humanity being stripped away. They were tales of wounding behavior. They revealed moments of humiliation and injustice. The participants, including actors, police officers, and a theater director among others, listened – really listened – to each other. They were, they said, deeply moved and changed by the experience, as were community members who saw their stories performed, by coincidence, the week of the Baltimore riots.

“The workshop made racism tangible,” Eric Bass, co-founder of Sandglass Theater, noted. “Real emotions were awakened, there was true honesty and bridges were built.”

“The training was unorthodox by law enforcement standards,” Brattleboro Police Chief Michael Fitzgerald said. “It was amazing what emerged when we examined personal prejudices.”

“When creative expression of the human experience is shared we are all present for each other in the moment. It’s extremely powerful,” adds Maria Basescu, executive director of Next Stage Arts Project.

These reactions from a variety of arenas testify to the importance and power of active listening in numerous contexts. I wish someone had shared them with me when I was a student, as I would like to have shared them with others when I was teaching.

Perhaps they have even more meaning in today’s world, where the need to listen to each other, to validate and bring comfort, grows ever more vital. Indeed, it seems fair to say, it has never been greater.