PREJUDICE BACK, CHICAGO CHARGES AT ARTS AWARDS

While the mood was high at Sunday’s celebration of women in the arts, Judy Chicago, America’s foremost feminist artist during an earlier era, sounded a note of grave concern.

“In the ‘60s and ‘70s, I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t be myself as a woman artist,” Chicago said at the fifth annual Vesta Awards. “Today I can. But that change is only significant if around us exists a historical context and base for the change. . . . Today that base is being eroded as fast as we built it.”

Added the artist later: “Women artists are experiencing the same level of discrimination in the ‘80s as they were in the ‘60s--as if there were no history behind us.”

Chicago made the remarks at the luncheon ceremony sponsored by the Woman’s Building arts center honoring 10 women who have contributed significantly to the arts in Southern California.

Receiving the awards, often to standing ovations from about 560 people gathered at the downtown Bonaventure Hotel, were:

Beatrice Woods (now 93) and Ruth Waddy, both for visual art; Carmen Zapata, founder and president of the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts, for theater; Ray Eames for design; Ruth Hirschman, general manager of KCRW radio, for media; Meredith MacRae, actress and talk-show host, for journalism (actor Greg Mullavey accepted his absent wife’s certificate); Phranc, a folk singer, for music; Cheri Gaulke for performance art; Lydia Takeshita, executive director of L.A. Artcore gallery, and Elyse Grinstein, co-founder of Gemini G.E.L. gallery, both for community support.

The awards ceremony, named after the Roman goddess of fire, also marked the 13th birthday of the downtown Woman’s Building, co-founded by graphic designer Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, art historian Arlene Raven and Chicago, best known for her 1979 ceramic work, the sexually connotative “Dinner Party.”

Chicago, who this month opened an exhibit in New York featuring a multimedia investigation of “male power, male violence and male despair,” said the only thing to do to combat the problem female artists face is “to keep on working in my studio.I’ve not swerved from my commitment to make my perceptions and experiences as a woman as central to my art as men’s have been” to theirs.

Research recently conducted by the Women’s Caucus for Art seems to confirm Chicago’s observations. The caucus, a nationwide advocacy group, has stated that though nationally 38% of professional artists are women, their work is shown in mainstream art institutions only 10% of the time. And a local caucus chapter has alleged that neither the County Museum of Art nor the Museum of Contemporary Art has ever had a major retrospective exhibit of a female artist’s work. Neither director from either institution denied those findings.

The statistics were compiled (though mostly unscientifically) in conjunction with last month’s Women Artists Visibility Event, a nationwide protest sponsored by the women’s caucus against sexual discrimination in the visual art world.

However, several women attending Sunday’s luncheon took a more hopeful attitude about the current scene than Chicago, although they spoke with guarded enthusiasm.

Vesta Award-winner Gaulke, local WAVE protest co-coordinator, said in an interview that she thought the protest was successful. “Change is slow to happen and I think the powers that be are probably as stubborn as they ever were, but as a result of WAVE, women are more empowered to believe in themselves and to organize and keep making their art and putting it out there in the face of apathy.”

Gaulke added that Mayor Bradley proclaimed Sept. 27 Women Artists Visibility Day.

Protest co-coordinator Carol Neiman noted that New York WAVE protesters have met with officials at the Whitney and Guggenheim museums to discuss their concerns and that locally, participants will meet with Museum of Contemporary Art Director Richard Koshalek on Nov. 19.

Neiman said County Museum of Art Director Earl A. (Rusty) Powell had not yet been called to arrange a similar meeting.

In addition, Terry Wolverton, Woman’s Building development director, sees positive changes in the nonprofit arts center. The institution nearly went out of business in 1981. However, in the last three years, Wolverton said, the center’s budget has more than doubled to $268,000.

This year’s awards event also drew about 45% more people (about 20% men) than last year.

“The Woman’s Building was founded with the initial anger of the feminist movement,” said Wolverton, who recently helped organize the center’s first exhibit curated by men. “We really saw ourselves as an alternative to the art world. Now we feel a viable part of the art world. We’re not over on the fringes sneering at everyone.”