California Grrrls

It’s after-hours at the San Jose Museum of Art, a renovated library building in the heart of this city’s old downtown, and JoAnne Northrup, the museum’s senior curator, finds a moment to talk about the exhibition filling the institution’s entire gallery space. “Parallels and Intersections: Art/Women/California, 1950-2000” is intended, she says, to be a landmark show of female artists who created landmarks in art history.

“There hasn’t been a major, comprehensive women’s art show since the one at LACMA in the mid-’70s, and that covered 1550 to 1950,” says Northrup, who served as organizing curator for the San Jose exhibition. “That show was extremely important, but it was 25 years ago, and it didn’t really discern important regional differences. California artists have been very often on the forefront and cutting edge of art making, and we recognized there was a void to be filled. This was a way of refining the idea of a women’s art show, narrowing it down to a region, to a fruitful time period.”

The show features 90 female artists who have lived and worked in California since 1950. There is sculpture by Los Angeles artists Betye Saar and Liz Larner. Conceptual artist Alexis Smith is included; Judy Dater’s extreme parodies on femininity hang near a monitor running a documentary on “The Dinner Party,” Judy Chicago’s multimedia celebration of the mythical and historical heroines of “herstory.”

Culled from more than 50 lenders by independent curators Diana Fuller and JoAnn Hanley, the exhibition has been broken into two parts: Media-based works went up first and will come down in October; paintings, sculpture and mixed-media works are on view until Nov. 3.

In essence, “Parallels and Intersections” explores the art created as women’s roles and consciousness shifted in the second half of the 20th century. In the book that accompanies the exhibition, Susan Landauer, the San Jose museum’s chief curator, calls it “subject matter that mainstream art history has neglected, not least of which is the effect of post-World War II sociopolitical conditions on the themes, issues and practices reflected by these artists.”

Fuller, a former San Francisco gallery owner and the show’s lead curator, and Hanley, a new-media project coordinator at USC’s Annenberg Center for Communication, had a rich vein of West Coast art history with which to work. Fuller ticks off a few milestones: Judy Chicago setting up a women’s studies program at Cal State Fresno, then coming to California Institute of the Arts in 1971 to run the seminal Feminist Art Program with Miriam Schapiro; the creation of Womanhouse, in 1972, a set of installations that caused a national sensation; and the founding of the Woman’s Building in downtown L.A., another important feminist art institution.

“We chose artists who through their work influenced a broad spectrum of people,” says Fuller. “I lived through these years and these women affected me and everyone else.”

When Fuller suggests a route through “Parallels and Intersections,” she starts at the staircase that leads from the first to the second floor at the museum. There, the story that underlies the exhibition gets graphic treatment in the form of a giant photographic detail from Judith Baca’s “The Great Wall of Los Angeles.”

The mural, which lines half a mile of the Tujunga Wash in the San Fernando Valley, is one of L.A.’s most famous public art works. For the San Jose show, Fuller chose a signal image--Rosie the Riveter. Rosie may have dutifully served her country during wartime, but in this vignette she’s being sucked, feet first, into the vacuum cleaner operated by a Happy Homemaker inside a television screen, that homemaker being the 1950s ideal of the American woman.

It was also, says Fuller, a time when more women began attending art schools and tackling careers as artists. One can see the progress simply by counting the works from each decade: The 1950s and early 1960s are represented by only a handful, including a grouping of Ruth Asawa’s cascading crocheted wire pieces in the lobby and Jay DeFeo’s painting “The Jewel” in the main gallery. By the late ‘60s and ‘70s, the numbers are growing.

The “parallels” referred to in the show’s title address five cultural communities in California--Fuller included works by African American, Asian American, Latino, European American and Native American artists. “Intersections” refers to those artists’ shared concerns--feminism, for example, is an element in many of the works--and techniques.

“Sometimes the issues are rather subtly expressed,” Northrup says, “such as the work of Mineko Grimmer.” Set on an outside balcony, Grimmer’s “Musical Vessels” (1993) is made up of eight large terracotta jars--and real ice. The ice, replaced a couple of times a day, is placed on a perforated plate across the top of each jar. As it melts, drops of water fall inside, creating ever-changing and unexpectedly beautiful sounds that echo inside the jar chamber. “Grimmer is Japanese [American],” Northrup says, “and this work references Zen, Minimalism and John Cage.”

Although the works aren’t hung strictly by chronology, the main gallery focuses on the flowering of California women’s art in the late 1960s and 1970s, from a group Fuller calls “early trailblazers.” There is a drawing by Vija Celmins, a sculpture by Saar, a fabric assemblage by Schapiro and a painting by Faith Ringgold. The Schapiro work and the Ringgold work have a homemade, folk art quality--in fact Schapiro’s incorporates examples of women’s needlework from Australia--which reflects an attempt to elevate traditional women’s craft.

Smaller side galleries move the story through the 1980s and the ‘90s, with installations by Amalia Mesa-Bains and Mildred Howard, a signature Kara Walker silhouette parodying Old South stereotypes, body-image photographs from a number of artists, and paintings such as a minimalistic triptych of earth tones by Anne Appleby.

Mesa-Bains’ “Emblems of the Decade: Borders Installation” (1990) includes an altar-like dresser surrounded by soil, its drawers half open to reveal yet more soil. Half-burnt candles, religious statues, pop culture idols and three small ships--the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria?--complete the work. In “Taps,” hundreds of used metal shoe taps are carefully arranged in rows; down the center parade pairs of white-painted shoes, marching toward an old shoeshine station with three elevated chairs. A quote from Howard, a black artist, ties the work to the “historic contradictions against which we struggle.”

Also in these galleries are photographic portraits from the austere to the voluptuous. Ann Hamilton’s “Body Object Series” (1984-1993) includes a photograph in which her face is obscured by a blowing scarf. Nearby, in contrast, Laura Aguilar puts her own Rubenesque body into nature scenes as a way, says the wall text, of tackling issues of power and beauty.

Downstairs, documentation of performance art and video works dominate the new media portion of the show. And, given the time frame of the exhibition, some of what’s new is actually pretty old.

“All these works were shown during the time they were made, and most were well-received,” says associate curator Hanley, who organized much of this material. “They were considered groundbreaking for one reason or another.”

For example, while interactive art seems run of the mill to us today, it was novel in 1980, when Lynn Hershman presented “LORNA.” It’s a loose narrative about an agoraphobic woman whose story the viewer can manipulate via a remote control. The work, originally recorded on laserdisc, has been transferred to DVD. Shown on a TV set in a living room environment, it re-creates the original installation.

Hershman “was one of the first artists, and probably the first woman artist, to use interactive technology,” Hanley says.

An installation by Sara Roberts, “Early Programming,” jumps several steps ahead in interactivity--offering more choices and coordinating responses on two monitors via the expanded capacity of a hard drive. This work puts the viewer at a kitchen table, in a dialogue with a lecturing “Mother,” rendered by a droning computer voice.

Generally in these works, Hanley notes, “the content was the same as what was going on in [the rest of] the art world.”

But the medium is the message: As Hanley says, at the time, “Just putting your hands on the equipment was a feminist act.”

Fuller had the idea for her show in 1998, and before the San Jose Museum signed on two years later, she had begun preparing a book on the same subject. Coedited by Fuller, the book contains 20 essays from the likes of UC Santa Cruz professor Angela Davis and artist Mesa-Bains that provide context for the exhibition.

In the museum, however, explanatory text has been kept to an introduction on the wall of the main gallery. The works themselves are accompanied only by artist statements.

It’s a decision with which some critics have disagreed. Jack Fischer, art critic for the San Jose Mercury News, found that the show lacked “connective tissue that ties individual works to a broader story.”

Fuller, however, thinks the structure is sufficiently clear. The show, she says, isn’t meant to be a critical review: “This is about paying homage to women artists and getting the record straight--and even experiencing some really lovely works of art.”

“Parallels and Intersections: Art/Women/California, 1950-2000” Part 1 (media-based works and performance) through Oct. 13; Part 2 (painting sculpture and mixed media) through Nov. 3, San Jose Museum of Art, 110 S. Market St., San Jose. Tuesday-Sunday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Friday till 10 p.m. Free admission. (408) 294-2787.

Scarlet Cheng is a regular contributor to Calendar.