artwomen.org | NWSA Conference, Summer 2000

Mary Jo Aagerstoun (roundtable co-chair) is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she is also working toward her Certificate in Women's Studies. Her dissertation working title is: "The Gendered Monstrous in U. S. Activist Art of the 1980s and 1990s." She received the David Lloyd Kreeger Prize for Excellence in Art History from George Washington University and has lectured at the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the national conference of the Women's Caucus for Art, and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County on feminism and art history, and on abject art. In 1999 she edited a special issue of the online journal massage on the "monstrous feminine," and chaired a panel on this topic at the annual Barnard Feminist Art and Art History Conference. In 1996 she was a Museum Fellow at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, working with the museum's New Media curator, Philip Brookman, on the performance/exhibition of Guillermo G�mez Pe�a's Temple of Confessions and a retrospective exhibition of the photographs of Gordon Parks. She is a founding board member of NOMADS, a Washington, D.C.-based curatorial project that specializes in web-based art exhibitions and criticism. She also organized the 10-site exhibition of Judy Chicago's Birth Project in Washington, DC in 1986, and served on the board of Judy Chicago's organization Through the Flower for several years.

NWSA Roundtable: Opening Remarks

I had a personal reason for proposing this roundtable. Like several of us in this room today, I have experienced firsthand active discouragement from dealing with art in a women's studies setting, and dealing with feminism in an art history setting.

Just a couple of examples. In the mid-1990s, I was working on my master's in art history. I wanted to use the work of Griselda Pollock to analyze some portraits by a 19th century American woman artist who lived and worked in France. I felt Pollock's thinking was an appropriate choice, because her specialty as an art historian is French 19th century art, and also because she had revolutionized the interpretation of 19th century paintings by proposing that the spaces depicted in these paintings are gendered. It took some doing to convince my professor that doing this would not end up in my paper being a "polemic." This professor ended up being my advisor, and she was one of my biggest boosters, both in the department of art history as well as outside. I like to think I won her over to feminist interpretation of art despite her initial misgivings.

Continuing on toward the Ph.D., I wanted to focus on contemporary art, so I went to see the professor in this same department who was the expert in 20th century. I told him I wanted to pursue a feminist approach to contemporary art, and to take courses in the Women's Studies department as part of my seminar program. His response? "Well, we really have never cooperated with them on Ph.D. work. I don't think that would work out." So I went to the University of Maryland where there was a strong feminist contemporary art historian in the Art History department. Working outside the Art History department in Women's Studies was something she encouraged.

In my second seminar on feminist theory in the Women's Studies Department at Maryland, I suggested to the professor that I would like to do an annotated syllabus for a course on women's art and feminist theory. She said no, that the paper must be interdisciplinary. I explained to her I would be building the course syllabus around reading from a variety of feminist thinkers in philosophy, history, psychoanalysis, Marxism as well as art history. She turned me down flat, saying: "No, obviously you do not know what interdisciplinary work is all about. Give me another topic. This is not an art history class." I dropped the class the next day.

Ever since then I have wondered just what an interdisciplinary project that melded art, art history and women's studies would look like to that professor.

So it is with great satisfaction that I am sitting here today with you, for our proposal to the National Women�s Studies Association has brought us all together to address just such problems. It is to NWSA's credit that they found this topic important enough to give it space here. We have a very stimulating set of speakers who will now share with you some of their perspectives on the problem of the divide between art/art history and women's studies. We would like to start our roundtable with Elissa Auther, a colleague of mine from the University of Maryland. I think you will see that she experienced the same divide as I did, and she has some provocative explanations for why it exists.

NWSA CONFERENCE, SUMMER 2000 MAIN PAGE

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