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Spring 2024 Exhibition
She Laughs Back: Feminist Wit in 1970s Bay Area Art
February 6 - April 13, 2024
She Laughs Back: Feminist Wit in 1970s Bay Area Art brings together the early comedic feminist work of nineteen artists who emerged in the greater Bay Area at the height of the radical movements that defined their era worldwide. From the mid-1960s through the early 1980s, the Bay Area was at the center and origin of anti-war, free speech, Black Power, Red Power, Chicano, Third World, and gay and women's liberation movements that challenged traditional belief systems and structures of power.
The second-wave feminist movement took up the long struggle for equality and a woman's freedom to reject given identities and social roles. Breaking social and art establishment rules to attain authentic expression and new art forms that can convey it has been the defining role of avant-garde artists since the 1860s. Although underplayed in art history, visual wit has long been an effective means of political critique and personal empowerment for women artists. It was not until second-wave feminism, intent on consciousness-raising, that subversive feminist humor became a genre.
The artwork in She Laughs Back makes the personal political – and many kinds of fun. The then-young artists turned out to be gifted visual storytellers and humorists. The serious fun – fantasy, role-play, puns, bad-girl humor, satire, and parody on view in She Laughs Back – is a vibrant legacy of 1970s feminism. But what should we make of the disobedient formal choices we see here? Like many others at that time, these artists rejected the abstract formalism that still dominated academia and high art institutions. They joined the return to realism and content of the radical New Realist and Neo-Dada movements like Gutai, Arte Povera, Chicago Imagism, Global Pop, and Northern California Funk. The feminist art in this exhibition also stepped out of line with its extraordinary range of taboo sources, including kitsch, surrealism, old masters, commercial and domestic art, underground comics, Disney, self-taught, and folk art.
Besides its playful, brilliant presence and historical significance, the argument for presenting She Laughs Back in 2024 is its evident relevance to the ongoing drive for democratic individual empowerment regardless of identity and, in America, for the right to choose in a post-Roe world.
-Elaine O'Brien Ph.D., Curator
This project is made possible with major support from the Terra Foundation for American Art.
ARTISTS IN CONVERSATION:
Why is That So Funny?
Featuring Joan Moment, Lorraine García-Nakata, M. Louise Stanley, Kathy Goodell. Facilitated by Elaine O'Brien.
Thursday, February 8, 3-4:30PM
Hinde Auditorium, The Union
PERFORMANCE:
Reenactment of Vicki Hall's Fresno Sleazo, 1970
Thursday, March 7, 12-1:30PM
University Library Gallery
Exhibition Reception Thursday, February 8, 5-8PM
