Women Artists on the Leading Edge
Women Artists on the Leading Edge
Visual Arts at Douglass College
How do students develop a personal style from their instruction in a visual arts program? Women Artists on the Leading Edge explores this question as it describes the emergence of an important group of young women artists from an innovative post-war visual arts program at Douglass College.
The women who studied with avant-garde artists at Douglas were among the first students in the nation to be introduced to performance art, conceptual art, Fluxus, and Pop Art. These young artists were among the first to experience new approaches to artmaking that rejected the predominant style of the 1950s: Abstract Expressionism. The New Art espoused by faculty including Robert Watts, Allan Kaprow, Roy Lichtenstein, Geoffrey Hendricks, and others advocated that art should be based on everyday life. The phrase “anything can be art” was frequently repeated in the creation of Happenings, multi-media installations, and video art. Experimental approaches to methods of creation using a remarkable range of materials were investigated by these young women. Interdisciplinary aspects of the Douglass curriculum became the basis for performances, videos, photography, and constructions. Sculpture was created using new technologies and industrial materials. The Douglass women artists included in this book were among the first to implement the message and direction of their instructors.
Ultimately, the artistic careers of these young women have reflected the successful interaction of students with a cutting-edge faculty. From this BA and MFA program in the Visual Arts emerged women such as Alice Aycock. Rita Myers, Joan Snyder, Mimi Smith, and Jackie Winsor, who went on to become lifelong innovators. Camaraderie was important among the Douglass art students, and many continue to be instructors within a close circle of associates from their college years. Even before the inception of the women’s art movement of the 1970s, these women students were encouraged to pursue professional careers, and to remain independent in their approach to making art. The message of the New Art was to relate one’s art production to life itself and to personal experiences. From these directions emerged a “proto-feminist” art of great originality identified with women’s issues. The legacy of these artists can be found in radical changes in art instruction since the 1950s, the promotion of non-hierarchical approaches to media, and acceptance of conceptual art as a viable art form.
Joan Marter’s Women Artists on the Leading Edge: Visual Arts at Douglass College is a significant account from an actual participant of the pioneering art program for women students developed at Rutgers after WW II. Inspired in part by the inventive curriculum initiated at Black Mountain College, as well as the avant-garde course taught by composer John Cage at the New School from 1956 to 1961, the multi-media agenda advanced at Douglass College (where many faculty were associated with Pop and Fluxus), was further underscored by an impressive roster of activist campus guests. Marter’s handsome book, including a set of outstanding interviews with notable Douglass alumnae such as Alice Aycock and Mimi Smith, appropriately redresses this historical imbalance, both detailing and celebrating the decisive role Douglass played as an incubator for artistic innovation by women.
Even before second-wave feminism became a recognized social and political movement in the early 1960s, professors at New Jersey's Douglass College for women recognized the need for art students to become acquainted with some of the most cutting-edge ideas of the time. At long last, the extraordinary history of how this college fostered the growth of such celebrated artists as Alice Aycock, Jackie Winsor, and Joan Snyder is being thoroughly recounted by esteemed art historian Joan Marter, who analyzes Douglass's important contributions to the arts at Rutgers University, where she taught from 1977 to 2016.
In Women Artists on the Leading Edge, Joan Marter tells the fascinating account of how Douglass College's visual artists' receptivity to the explosive spirit of experimentation in the 1950s and 1960s had a profound impact both on students and contemporary art. Inviting renowned artistic pioneers to teach, visit, or perform galvanized students' artistic ambitions. Dr. Marter's narrative about Douglass College, to which she made many contributions, is engrossing as cultural history. This book's recollections of creative growth by former students forms an institutional history of the confluence of interdisciplinary arts, feminist values, and innovative pedagogy in stimulating achievements by women
Part 1
Visual Arts Faculty at Douglas College
Interview with Geoffrey Hendricks
Interview with Roy Lichtenstein
Part 2
Alice Aycock
Loretta Dunkelman
Kirsten Kraa
Frances Tannenbaum Kuehn
Linda Lindroth
Marion Munk
Rita Myers
Mimi Smith
Joan Snyder
Ann Tsubota
Jackie Winsor
Interview with Alice Aycock
Interview with Letty Lou Eisenhauer
Interview with Mimi Smith
Part 3
The Women Artists Series at Douglass College
Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series at 21 Years
Exhibitions at the Walters Hall Art Gallery, Douglass College
Conclusion
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Index
