The Brooklyn Rail

The phenomenon of restaged events and exhibitions from the 1960s and 1970s speaks to a widespread nostalgia for a different kind of art world: one that was smaller, more intimate, less market oriented and more communal. But restaged events also provide a chance to take stock of where we are and where we are going.

(re)FOCUS: Then and Now, currently on view at Moore College of Art in Philadelphia, richly affords the opportunity. This presentation of work by 81 women artists is a recapitulation of an exhibition that took place fifty years ago at the Philadelphia Civic Center Museum. The original 1974 show was the brainchild of Philadelphia-based artist Diane Burko and Princeton-based curator Judith Brodsky. Working together with an expanding group of feminist artists, writers, administrators, and curators, they turned the idea of a feminist art exhibition into a citywide festival called FOCUS. The actual selection of the core exhibition was assigned to a group of prominent women curators whose stature in the art world is now legendary: Marcia Tucker, Cindy Nemser, Adelyn Breeskin, Anne d’Harnoncourt, and Lila Katzen. For the original show, these curators settled on eighty-two artists, one of whom, Judith Bernstein, submitted a darkly humorous drawing of a huge hairy penis which was summarily nixed by the Civic Center director. (Ironically, this work has recently been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.)

Remarkably, Burko and Brodsky have reunited to organize the present iteration. They spent nine months seeking works by the original artists, and managed to locate representative examples by all but four of these participants. Judith Bernstein also returned to the fold with another of her provocative phalluses. (re)FOCUS is both a celebration and a history lesson. Each artist is represented by an actual work and, where available, a photograph of the work that appeared in the original show. Given the modest size of the current venue, smaller works dominate, including prints, drawings, and works on paper, as well as sculptures and paintings. In a further reprise of the original event, Burko and Brodsky, aided by independent art curator Marsha Moss, have also brought back the citywide festival with a five month-long calendar of exhibitions, panels, and other events spread over sixty venues throughout Philadelphia.

What does this revisitation tell us? First and foremost, it raises questions concerning how far women artists have progressed in the fifty years since the first iteration. The original project took place in a world in which women were frequently passed over for shows and jobs and often enjoined to take the role of muse, or otherwise support their artist men. Certainly women and gender fluid people are more visible in all sectors of the art world today and there have been admirable efforts to highlight the work of BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and pioneering women artists. But this is all taking place in the context of a frightening social retrenchment that suggests that old, supposedly settled battles will have to be fought again. From this perspective, the energy, fearlessness, and insouciance of the women who made the original FOCUS happen are both inspiring and instructive. Instead of waiting for institutional sanction, Burko and Brodsky bravely charged forward on their own, pulling together groups of likeminded colleagues and tapping into the DIY zeitgeist of the 1970s. This enterprise and its reprise thus offer a model for action and a reminder that individuals can empower themselves.

A second question raised by this project: how prescient were the original curators in their selections? Logistics necessitated that the artists chosen in 1974 mainly hailed from the northeast with a healthy representation of Philadelphia-based creators. Within that constraint, the curators were admirably inclusive in terms of styles, media, and racial diversity. Their selections included both older, established artists like Elaine de Kooning, Louise Nevelson, Alma Thomas, Joan Mitchell, Isabel Bishop, and Hedda Sterne as well as numerous younger artists, many of whom have since become widely recognized. Striking works in this current show include one of Alice Neel’s voluptuous pregnant female nudes, a colorful homage to Frida Kahlo by Miriam Schapiro, Marjorie Strider’s humorous take on the Pop era’s casual misogyny, a luminous waterfall print by Pat Steir, Joan Snyder’s graffitiesque paean to “Angry Women,” and a Van Gogh-inspired lithograph by Faith Ringgold.

The show also presents powerful works by lesser known (at least to me) women artists like Marcia Marcus, whose stylized self-portrait has a whiff of Klimt by way of Mary Cassatt. I was also struck by Kay Kurt’s hyperrealist painting of four gummy candies greatly enlarged and dramatically lit so that they suggest a pre-Columbian goddess figure. A dazzling pointillist painting by Sally Hazelet Drummond throbs with light, while Ilse Getz is represented by a haunting Joseph Cornell-like assemblage comprising a tiny Victorian doll’s head captured in the vise of large calipers. Also on view is work by Edna Andrade, a Philadelphia icon and subject of a satellite show at Locks Gallery, whose precise system-based paintings and drawings transform mathematics into poetry.

(re)FOCUS is full of such wonderful gems, thoughtfully installed to bring out relationships between different kinds of work. Along with celebrating a wealth of twentieth century women artists, this project also highlights questions about how history is made. How much serendipity is involved in who becomes part of the story and who disappears? How much of the texture of a period has vanished along with the less known artists? Is a reset possible as forgotten artists are rediscovered?

And of course, this project raises a final question: do all-women shows like this one continue to be necessary? In that respect, the wealth of work included in re(FOCUS) speaks for itself. Despite advances, statistics reveal that the number of women artists in critical metrics continues to be depressingly low. Shows like this are reminders of how much work there is left to do.