The Brooklyn Rail

I am a maverick with a healthy disrespect for institutions and academics. When Ann Sutherland Harris and Cynthia Navaretta approached me to join the newly emerging Women’s Caucus for Art, I plunged into a life-changing adventure that took me to undreamed-of places. When Eleanor Heartney invited me to join this Critics Page, I hesitated to share my honest struggle with emerging feminism during the 1970s. My attitude is based on my experiences as a member of the first Jewish family to integrate fashionable Riviera Drive in Coral Gables successfully. The antisemitism I experienced as a child there served to reinforce my mishpocha’s kinship within a common tradition (Gemeinschaft), which is distinct from most of the American population. 

As a child, fairy tales and fables fascinated me. As a teenager, ancient cultures and Neolithic archeology shaped my aesthetics, art history, and relationship to the spiritual in art. These themes often evoke magic or mystical beliefs related more closely to earthworks and Wiccan practices. As a lesbian feminist, I am committed to resisting heteronormativity, misogyny, and labeling. I read Raphael Patai’s The Hebrew Goddess, especially the importance of the Shekhinah for Jewish feminists, Merlin Stone’s When God Was a Woman, and Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance, seminal works in feminist spirituality. These resources significantly shaped my understanding of feminist art and criticism, particularly in its exploration of the divine feminine and the power of women’s circles. Reading and interacting with art critics Jill Johnston and Lucy R. Lippard fed into my seeing art from a different perspective.

My first articles using a female-centered analysis appeared in Donald Kuspit and Lawrence Alloway’s new Art Criticism journal. In 1979, I published an article on The Sister Chapel (1974–78) with commentary by Ilise Greenstein. It was one of the first such collaborations originating in the Southeast. Two works were exciting to me because they diverged from the prevailing narrative at that time: Martha Edelheit’s Womanhero (1974) and Diana Kurz’s Durga (1977). I was interested in the gender-fluid nature of many non-Abrahamic religions, including Hinduism, Tibetan Buddhism, Celtic Triple Goddess practices, and Native American cultures that value their relationship to nature and are much more open to gender diversity.

This continuum is visualized in pre-verbal goddess figurines that often feature phalluses on the backsides. My desire to diversify the boundaries holding back the development of new frontiers in feminist art criticism led me to explore outside the box. This required courage and created controversy. One of the most compelling interpretations of the triple spiral’s connection to female power comes from its link to the triple goddess archetype. This concept, prevalent in many ancient cultures, represents the goddess in three phases—the maiden, the mother, and the crone. The spirals are often interpreted as representations of the feminine aspects of life, symbolizing the cyclical nature of existence that parallels women’s experiences, especially in the realms of reproduction and spiritual connection. In these contexts, the triple goddess represents the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Science reinforces my interest in the spiral. Deoxyribonucleic acid (abbreviated DNA) is the molecule that carries genetic information for an organism’s development and functioning. It is made of two linked strands that wind around each other to resemble a twisted ladder—a shape known as a double helix.

The spiral reflects not only the different stages of a woman’s life but also the cycles of the moon and the seasons of the year, creating a potent metaphor for feminine empowerment and continuity—embodying human experience’s universality, transcending cultural and temporal boundaries. From the earliest articulations of fertility goddesses to Gustave Courbet’s The Source (1862), which Linda Nochlin so humorously used to illustrate the origins and identifications of categories that go beyond the limitations theory has imposed on feminism. The truth is that feminist art opened up undreamed possibilities. It is a creative impulse that can never be uniform or contained, any more than the feminine in art and elsewhere can be.

A few examples are Helène Aylon’s revolutionary experimentation work with Jewish and Arabic women and against nuclear pollution, as well as attacking Orthodox Judaism’s preventing women’s full participation in the religion; Adrienne Momi’s article “Call and Response, Challenges of Printmaking in the Field” that challenged the art of printmaking by actually engaging Indigenous Czech people at Tĕšetice-Kyovice in printmaking in their home; Eva Hesse’s holes/voids, porous membranes, and intricate nets of consciousness using industrial materials fascinated me because they seemed to embody the Kabbalistic concept of yesh me’ayin, “being from nothingness.”

The spiral has always aroused my curiosity, and the scientific discovery of the DNA visualized as a spiral only reinforced my desire to explore how art integrated these ideas. I was immediately drawn to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) and Nancy Holt’s situational use of land art sculptures incorporating natural phenomena and nothingness as the fullness within as an element of her aesthetic. Kyle Staver’s quirky renditions of human passions visualized through her renditions of myths, fables, and fairy tales naturally appealed to me because of her unique depictions of Eros. Staver’s dive into archaic spaces and the infinite continuum is embodied in ancient myths and biblical stories, revealing her insights into how undomesticated the natural is and how it remains outside of human control. The ideas embodied in feminism and their connection to mother goddesses and mother nature are embodied in the art of María Elena González, who brilliantly articulates the interactive spiraling of visible and invisible in her piano roller birch series “Tree Talk”. These beliefs are evident in Maya Lin’s Ghost Forest (2021) and Water Garden installation, expected to open in 2025, as well as a new generation of creatives actively seeking to move beyond traditional boundaries into a future that includes digital representation and AI-generated art.

Connecting with manifestations of feminine energies is not a loop but a spiral. They are loosely related to the cycle of life: birth, growth, death, and infinity. Spiritually, the spiral represents connectivity with the divine, spiraling from the self into the inner soul or cosmic awareness within enlightenment and growth of the spirit. It is a symbol of change and development. At a time when political upheaval, rising tensions, and uncertainty assail us, feminists need to remain grounded, resilient, and connected to their goddess energies.