2016 Events

2016 WCA Lifetime Achievement Awardees

TOMIE ARAI
by Tanya Wilkinson

HELÈNE AYLON
by Nancy Ewart

​Tomie Arai's art helps us construct a sense of who we are as individuals, as a society, or as a nation. She questions stereotypes and conventions while exploring attributes such as gender, sexuality, race, nationality and heritage. She uses interdisciplinary, collaborative methods to illuminate intersectionality.  Her work makes a strong case for the idea that art and artists play key parts in the process defining, depicting and respecting cultural identities.
Arai positions herself as a public artist who brings"art directly to
the community" (http://tomiearai.com). Her site-specific public installations present layers of visual information, creating an archeological sense of discovery for the viewer. The artist explores shared histories, often using archival found photographs and imagery associated with traditional Japanese printmaking to produce work that seeks to promote cultural equity. This art practice places her firmly within the Feminist tradition, in
terms of both process and intention.  Elizabeth Sackler, of the Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn museum, cites "equality, equity, justice" as central values in the decades long project of feminist art.  Arai's art pursues these values in ways both obvious and subtle. Her use of autobiography and her evocation of the domestic elevate aspects of life that have, in patriarchal
context, been considered stereotypically feminine and therefore trivial. 
Arai is collaborative in her process, seeking to "use social
interaction as a medium for both production and investigation"  (http://tomiearai.com). She has designed temporary and permanent public works of art for Creative Time, the US General Services Administration Art in
Architecture Program, the NYC PerCent for Art Program, the Cambridge
Arts Council, the MTA Arts for Transit Program, the New York City Board of Education and the San Francisco Arts Commission.
Her public works are both monumental and personal, while her artist books provide a more immediate, in-hand contemplation of the construction of cultural and personal identity.  These pieces are permutations of traditional forms, using paper wood, glass, and printed images to construct objects that are both intimate and surprising.  Aria's artist books evoke the experience of discovering a forgotten treasure in the attic, an old piece of silk or cache of letters, something that reveals a previously untold story.
Arai's work has been exhibited nationally and is in the collections of the Library of Congress, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Japanese American National Museum, the Williams College Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has been a recipient of two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in Printmaking for 1991 and 1994; a 1995 Joan Mitchell Visual Arts Grant, a 1994 National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship for Works on Paper and three MidAtlantic Arts Foundation Visual Artists Residency Grants. In 1997, she was one of ten women nationwide to receive an Anonymous was a Woman Grant for achievement in the visual arts. In the year 2000, Tomie Arai was one of 50 artists nationwide to participate in the Artists & Communities: America Creates for the Millennium Project, sponsored by the
MidAtlantic Arts Foundation and the NEA. She was a recipient of a 2003 MCAF grant, a 2007 Urban Artists Initiative Grant, a 2007 Arts and Activism grant from the Asian Women Giving Circle and a 2013 Puffin Foundation grant.

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​SHEILA LEVRANT DE BRETTEVILLE
by Tanya Augsburg

​I have never liked jewelry, let alone wearing any. My mother would give me shiny gold necklaces and I would put them in a drawer where they would remain untouched. My mother considered my aversion to wearing jewelry a problem. She would make cutting remarks about how I was not feminine enough when she was not reminding me that she spent good money to buy me nice jewelry. My responses were always the same: I thanked her for the gifts but I also stated that wearing jewelry
was not "me." Although at the time I lacked sufficient awareness in feminist theory to articulate my particular gender identity exactly, I was already self-consciously rejecting the kind of girly femininity society imposes on young girls.
Fast forward several decades when I first got my hands on an actual eyebolt necklace designed by Sheila Levrant de Bretteville during the 2012 College Arts Association (CAA) conference. It came with the purchase of two volumes published by Otis College about the Women's Building, where de Bretteville founded the Women's Graphics Center and co-founded the Feminist Studio Workshop with Judy Chicago and Arlene Raven in 1973.  I finally had in my possession a necklace that I truly loved. Why? The eyebolt is shaped like the Venus symbol, which was originally derived from astrology but used in botany and biology long before it was appropriated by the women's rights
movement. It is a standard piece of hardware fastener. In appearance it is thick and curvy; it is hard and smooth to the touch. Aesthetically it is multi-functional, plain and minimalist rather than frivolous and ornate. It gives the impression of a strong DIY attitude--what de Bretteville described as "strength without a fist" when she gave Chicago and Raven the first eyebolt necklaces she had designed in 1972.
As a tangible piece of visual communication, de Bretteville's eyebolt necklace embodies a feminist femininity that I can proudly wear rather than hide in a drawer. I get a sense of satisfaction knowing that if I ever lose my necklace I can find its replacement at the local Home Depot rather than have to set foot in a jewelry store. Wearing the necklace I feel solidarity with other women, particularly with its designer, who is an exemplary role model for women arts educators such as myself.
Over the course of my career as an academic I have been part of revamping the curriculum of two large interdisciplinary studies programs. Both times the processes involved were labor intensive. Nevertheless, these efforts seem to me paltry compared to what de Bretteville has accomplished. De Brettville, in addition to her graphic design studio practice, founded the first design program for women at Cal Arts in 1971 before starting up the aforementioned programs at the Women's Building in 1973. She somehow managed to spearhead these monumental projects as the mother of a young child.
In 1981 she initiated and founded the Department of Communication Design at Otis/Parsons. In 1990 she moved to Yale, where she was joined the faculty as the first tenured professor in its School of Art. In 2010 her  accomplishments were formally acknowledged at Yale as she was named an endowed chair, the Caroline M. Street Professor of Graphic Design. I missed my chances to meet Professor de Bretteville back in 2009 when she honored Joyce Kozloff at the WCA Lifetime Achievement Awards Ceremony, and again in 2011 when I was asked to contribute to the \exhibition catalogue for Doin' It In Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman's Building that was organized by the Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design October 1, 2011-January 28, 2012. I declined because at the time I was busy with WCA's exhibition Man as Object: Reversing the Gaze that was held at SOMARTS in November 2011. I keep telling myself that it is impossible to do it all, but de Bretteville seems to have repeatedly proven me wrong. One only has to take a cursory glance at her website to be amazed by her extraordinary feminist vision and enormous talent as a graphics artist and designer.
I hope to meet de Bretteville finally at the 2016 Lifetime Achievement Awards. I would like to express my admiration to her for her pioneering success as an academic in an elite university--especially since she did not hide the fact that she is a feminist. For example, de Bretteville famously submitted the only entry on the color pink for an American Institute of Graphic Design exhibition on color in 1973. Appropriately titling the poster Pink, de Bretteville amassed together like a quilt small pink sheets of
paper upon which numerous women's thoughts about pink as a color had
been written.
I am wearing my eyebolt necklace as I write this short text, even more appreciative of its designer than I was previously. Much has been made of Duchamp challenging the limits of art when he signed a urinal with the pseudonym R. Mutt. I am fully confident that feminist art historians in the future will write a great deal more about how de Bretteville challenged prevailing gender conventions in the early 1970s by putting an industrial bolt on a chain, thereby transforming it into an iconic feminist image loaded with meaning. For her many contributions to feminist art and feminist art education, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville is an especially noteworthy recipient of the 2016 Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award. I hope too
that you, dear reader, will join me in honoring her at the WCA Lifetime Achievement Awards Ceremony in Washington DC on February 4, 2016!

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​Helene Aylon is a visual, conceptual, and installation artist and an eco-feminist whose work has been exhibited around the world.
Through her art, she has explored the intersectionality among her feminism, the Orthodox Judaism of her upbringing, and her place in a war-torn world.
Helene Aylon (born Helene Greenfield, February 4, 1931) was born in
Brooklyn and received an orthodox Jewish upbringing. At the age of 18, she married a rabbi to whom she had become engaged while still in high school. She bore two children and was only 30 when her husband died of cancer.
Prior to her husband's death, Aylon enrolled as an art student at Brooklyn College, where she studied under Ad Reinhardt. After finishing college, she was commissioned to paint a mural for the youth employment center in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant. When photographed for a newspaper article, she said that her name was HelÈne Aylon, in which she used the Hebrew equivalent of her first name as her surname. She subsequently taught at San Francisco State University and California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland.
Aylon's first notable work, Rauch (Spirit, Wind, Breath) (1965), was a 16-foot mural, commissioned for the now-defunct Synagogue Library at JFK International Airport, that attempted to portray Judaism through the eyes of women. 
Her work can be divided into three phases: Process art (1970s), anti-nuclear art (1980s), and The G-d Project (1990s and early 2000s), a feminist commentary on the Hebrew Bible and other established traditions.
Aylon's earliest exploration of process art was done in California in the 1970s. She created a series called Paintings That Change (1974-77), which included Tar Pouring, Drifting Boundaries, Receding Beige, and Oval on Left Edge. All of the works consisted of oil on paper which would slowly transform as the oil moved, relying on chance.
By the 1980s, Aylon, was a self-described eco-feminist. She began to create anti-nuclear and eco-activist art, which included Earth Ambulance (photo right). This work consisted of an "ambulance" (a converted U-Haul van) that symbolized an attempt to save the world from nuclear war. Using the Earth Ambulance, Aylon gathered dirt from Strategic Air Command nuclear bases, uranium mines, and nuclear reactors from across the United States. She stuffed the dirt into pillowcases and used them in a demonstration at the United Nations during the Second Special Session on Nuclear Disarmament on June 12, 1982.
After the death of Aylon's husband in 1961, she began to develop an idea of reformed Judaism that rejected the patriarchal notions in the Five Books of Moses. In the 1990s, Aylon began work on The G-d Project, a nine-part project that spanned two decades. The first work, The Liberation of G-d, contains the five books of Moses, in English and Hebrew, which sit on velvet-covered stands. Each page is covered in translucent parchment. The sound of turning parchment pages was recorded and played in a loop while the work was on exhibition. Aylon placed the 54 sections of the Torah on glass
shelves along a wall, adjacent to the five books of Moses, and used a pink highlighter to mark phrases that, according to her, convey patriarchal attitudes. She also targeted words or phrases that conveyed a sense of vengeance, deception, cruelty, and misogyny that had been falsely attributed to God. The work was first exhibited in Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art in March 1996. During the exhibition, Aylon formally invited area rabbis to visit and discuss her work.
In 1997, she completed The Women's Section (photo left), the second work in The G-d Project, which is dedicated to women whose estranged husbands do not grant them a religious divorce, making it impossible for them to remarry. Included are texts from the Torah that speak of women's "impurity" and "virginity." In 1998, Aylon created the third work in the series, My Notebooks, which consists of 54 blank 8.5 × 11′ notebooks that form a group of columns. The closed notebooks, with their dark covers, form black columns; the open notebooks form white columns. A transparency of Aylon's photographs from a Jewish girl's school is projected across the notebooks. The work is "Dedicated to Mrs. Rashi and to Mrs. Maimonides, for surely they have something to say and was intended to be a statement on women's lack of scholarship and participation in education."  It also alludes to the female teachers of Aylon's all-female school, who could only
teach commentary from male rabbis. The final work in The G-d Project
is All Rise, an imagined feminist court where women who have been
forbidden on a Beit Din, the Jewish court of law, can now judge.
In 1999, Aylon created Epilogue: Alone with My Mother and My Bridal 
Chamber: My Marriage Contract. The latter is a simple bed covered in a white bedspread that Aylon constructed from handkerchiefs and a wedding canopy. Around it are four columns with superimposed projetions of photographs that show the artist in her wedding gown. Behind the headboard, Aylon wrote quotes from Leviticus concerning women's "uncleanliness" and "impurity." The work was meant to be a comment on marital and religious constraints felt by woman. In 2002, Aylon created The Partition is in Place, but the Service Can't Begin, a comment on the segregation of male and female worshippers in the synagogue. As noted by Aylon, "The material I thought appropriate for the Partition that separates male and female worshippers is made of the ritual garb worn by religious men. But if there were nine male worshippers and one thousand female worshippers, the service could not begin because the service requires the presence of ten men."
http://www.heleneaylon.com/
http://jwa.org/feminism

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JUANA GUZMAN
by Vicki Cormack

​As the principal and creator of I Juana Know, Juana Guzman is drinking in the local lore of Chicago. Her tweets are engaging, pensive and filled with a sense of curiosity and engagement. From
travels to the local coffee roasters to retweeting Mark Ruffalo's insights, she takes the reader along on her explorations of coffeehouses, jazz clubs and other local sights in her beloved City
of Chicago. Most recently, she thoughtfully remarked, "Terrorist Acts
against humanity. My prayers are with the people of Paris." She is a strong community member and a citizen of the world.
Guzman does well by doing good. Undertaking initiatives, immersing herself in direct service through her work in the arts and as a business woman, Guzman models a life worth living. She had been the Vice President at the National Museum of Mexican Art (NMMA) in Chicago for 13 years. The mission of the museum is "to showcase the beauty and richness of Mexican culture by sponsoring events and presenting exhibition that exemplify the majestic variety of visual and performing arts in Mexican culture." Guzman was credited with expanding and promoting that mission. The NMMA is the only Latino museum certified by the American Alliance on Museums. Visitors are offered a chance to "immerse [themselves] in the richness of Mexican art and culture right in Chicago." Showing over 3,000 years of work from North and South of the border and engaging people in the diverse culture, this museum welcomes old and young alike with classes, camps and mentorships.
Since the 80s, Juana Guzman devoted her energy and love of life and art by serving as the arts director, earned income specialist and consultant to non-profits in governmental and philanthropic arenas. Guzman focuses on social change and promoting the art, culture and heritage of diverse groups across the boundaries of age and ethnicity.
As a forerunner in the field of bringing funding to artists in all disciplines, Guzman worked on several initiatives through city and national agencies to create awareness and expand economic opportunities for artists in Chicago's diverse communities. From 1981-99, she served as the Director of Community Cultural Development of Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs. From 2004-2008, she served a technical advisor and consultant for the Ford Foundation's Shifting Sands Initiative. This initiative helped define both arts and cultural organizations as essential components for creating
strong communities, bringing funding to revitalize neighborhoods and
creating a basis for economic and social growth.
After many years as the Vice President of NMMA in Chicago, Ms. Guzman
developed and implemented strategies to increase alternative revenue
sources, helping non-profits develop entrepreneurship and tourism. Her company, I Juana Know, focuses on bringing creative solutions for diverse communities, including bringing enhanced revenue to creative markets. For more information go to www.ijuanaknow.com.
Juana Guzman will be honored at the 2016 Women's Caucus for the Arts
Lifetime Achievement Awards. She is an asset to the arts and activist
communities by promoting art, awareness and entrepreneurship for artists and communities across the states.

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2016 WCA Lifetime Achievement Awards
Press Release