“I Didn't Want to Be a Woman Artist. I Just Wanted to Be an Artist.” – Isabel Bishop
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“I didn’t want to be a woman artist. I just wanted to be an artist.” – Isabel Bishop Late Nineteenth Century to UMass Dartmouth Early Twentieth Century CVPA Campus Gallery Women Artists April 12–29 Introduction When Linda Nochlin queried “Why have there been no great to their professional success. It was, for example, especially women artists” over forty years ago, she prompted many scholars difficult for women to gain access to galleries and other venues to address this question and to amend the historical record.1 where they could sell their work. Feminist historians of American art such as Kirsten Swinth pointed out that “thousands upon thousands of girl art students” Consequently, they founded organizations such as The Plastic attended art academies right after the Civil War to meet the growing Club in Philadelphia or joined groups that welcomed women— industrial and cultural demands for illustrators, engravers, print- including the Providence Art Club. The latter, founded by six makers, miniaturists and portrait painters (implying that we should women and ten men in 1880, was also one of the first clubs to admit have been able to find a few “greats”).2 According to historian women. Early members included Etta Belcher, Mary Louise April Masten, mid-nineteenth century America had a fluid culture Chapin, Sarah J. Eddy, Helen Watson Phelps, Emily McGary Selinger, in which women artists prospered.3 Yet, despite the fact that Emma Swan, Rosa Peckham, Sophia Pitman, Eleanor W. Talbot hundreds of women became professional artists during this period, and Mary Colman Wheeler. Our exhibition is dedicated to this few of them have secured a place in the modern art historical canon. community of women. Each of them, as Michael Rose notes, “is a force to be reckoned with; a pioneer who still inspires.”6 Even as recently as 2016, The New York Times’ Holland Cotter lamented the dearth of notable women artists in both museums Though socially contrived cultural norms did structure the works and historical texts.4 As Laura Prieto asserts, “With the notable of many of these artists, their images did not represent a retreat exception of the two painters Mary Cassatt and Georgia O’Keefe from the modern. Many of them depicted gendered places that and one sculptor, Louise Nevelson, female American artists still empowered them as both women and as creators. With their paintings, remain largely unrecognized.”5 Women’s art has been confined to photographs and illustrations, they disrupted conventional the artistic and historic sidelines because, as many of these critics narratives regarding home and family, and the boundary which note, it does not conform to a canonical art history in which “good” separated the domestic from the public. These women artists altered style is assumed to progress from nineteenth century impressionism the American cultural discourse and created artistic communities to early twentieth century abstraction. UMass Dartmouth’s that eventually challenged the dominant power structure, making Making Her Mark seeks to refute this viewpoint. a clear contribution to the modern American cultural narrative. Nevertheless, our exhibit is not an effort to simply recover “old —Anna Dempsey mistresses.” Rather, we wish to situate nineteenth century women artists’ stories in an expanded modernist narrative—one that will help reshape our understanding of male artists’ histories as well. We challenge the still influential Greenbergian formalist history that valorizes abstraction over representation and excludes many American male and female representational artists who were active before World War II. Women, in particular, employed a conservative, 1 | Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in realist aesthetic in order to procure commissions and commercial Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays (Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1988), work. Our exhibition relates the stories of professional women 147–158. flower painters, academic artists, and book illustrators who were successful because they challenged the institutional and gender 2 | Kirsten Swinth, Painting Professionals: Women Artists & the Development of norms that constrained them. We suggest these artists both Modern American Art, 1870–1930 (Chapel Hill and London: University of employed and subverted stereotypes associated with the period’s North Carolina Press), 12. female “cult of domesticity.” For instance, by choosing to become flower and still-life painters, women effectively co-opted the flower’s 3 | April Masten, Art Work: Women Artists and Democracy in Mid-Nineteenth association with femininity to frame a nineteenth century woman’s Century New York (The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America) space—one that mirrored and supported each of their experiences. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). Female artists of this era could also use the flower to freely experiment with form and color and to covertly explore abstraction 4 | Holland Cotter, “Are All-Women Shows Good or Bad for Art?”, The New and sensuality, while still painting “appropriate” subject matter. York Times, March 16, 2016. www.nytimes.com. Accessed March 15, 2017. To become successful artists, they also created new networks, 5 | Laura R. Prieto, At Home in the Studio: The Professionalization of Women Artists joined progressive organizations and established new educational in America (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2001), 4. institutions to further their professional development. This was crucial, because although many American women artists matriculated 6 | Michael Rose, “Preface,” Women Artists: An Untold Story, 1880–1940 (Catalog at art schools and exhibited at some notable venues during the for the Art History Capstone Exhibition class, University of Massachusetts late nineteenth century, there were significant structural impediments Dartmouth, 2015). Table of Contents Sources: National Women’s History Museum, Women’s Suffrage Timeline Phillips Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art online timeline Etta Belcher p. 4 1848–1913 Marie Chapin p. 5 1843–1898 Sarah J. Eddy p. 6 1851–1945 Charlotte Perkins Gilman p. 8 1860–1935 1913, Armory Show (The International Exposition of Modern Art), 1848, First Women's Rights Convention, Seneca Falls, NY 1876, Centennial Exposition or NY. Triangle shirtwaist fire which killed 145 people (mostly women) Elizabeth Cady Stanton writes "The Declaration of Sentiments" —a rallying cry for the labor movement. creating the agenda of women's activism for decades to come. International Exhibition of the Arts (many women exhibited there). 1896, Plessy vs. Ferguson Case. Supreme 1914–1918, World War I. Court rules segregation not illegal. 1861–1865, U.S. Civil War. 1877, RISD founded. 1920, 19th Amendment gives women the right to vote. Rosa Peckham p. 10 1842–1922 Helen Watson Phelps p. 12 1864–1944 Sophia L. Pitman p. 14 1855–1943 1850, First National Women’s Rights Convention, Worcester, MA Frederick Douglass, Paulina Wright Davis, Abby Kelley Foster, William 1880, Providence 1916, Margaret Sanger founds the Lloyd Garrison, Lucy Stone and Sojourner Truth are in attendance. Art Club Founded. first birth control clinic in NY. A strong alliance is formed with the Abolitionist Movement. 1903, Wright Brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk. 1917, Marcel Duchamp exhibits The Fountain at the Society 1870, 15th Amendment gives black men of Independent Artists in NY. Founding of the “Philadelphia Ten”, 1852, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is published. the right to vote. Metropolitan Museum primarily of students of the Philadelphia School of Design for Women. of Art (NY) and the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston) founded. Emily Selinger p. 15 1848–1927 1929, U.S. stock-market crashes. Depression begins. Emma Swan p. 16 1853–1927 Eleanor Talbot p. 18 1852–1943 Mary C. Wheeler p. 20 1846–1920 1840 1850 1860 1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 Etta Belcher Marie Chapin 1848–1913 1843–1898 Providence’s Lost Artist Providence Portraitist and Still-Life Painter By Mariah Tarentino By Anna Dempsey Etta Belcher was an American portrait painter who worked Club was unique, in that its members included men and women Marie Louise Chapin, a well-regarded member of the art primarily in Providence, Rhode Island during the late nineteenth who sought to share their passion for artmaking and artworks community, was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1843.1 and early twentieth centuries. During this period, many of the city’s with all. Her father was Dr. Joshua B. Chapin, a commissioner of the prominent citizens commissioned her to paint their likenesses. state’s public schools and trustee of the State Normal School Belcher’s portrait of the Providence mayor William S. Hayward Belcher exhibited at least twice in exhibitions at the Providence (now Rhode Island College). Her mother, noted art teacher still hangs in the City Hall’s Mayoral Portrait Gallery. She was Art Club, as well as in other national venues such as the World’s and portrait painter Jane Louise Value Chapin, provided the selected through a highly competitive process to paint the mayor. Cotton Centennial.4 Centennial exhibitions were extremely young artist with a strong creative and aesthetic foundation. Her other portraits can be viewed at the Rhode Island Historical popular in the United States and contributed to the success of many Chapin continued her studies in New York with the acclaimed Society. Despite her professional success, like many other women artists who exhibited in them.