Taking place: Building histories of queer and feminist art in North America

By Erin Silver

Taking place examines feminist and queer alternative art spaces across Canada and the United States from the late-1960s to the present. It looks at how queer and feminist artists working in the present day engage with, respond to and challenge the institutions they have inherited. Through a series of regional case studies, the book interrogates different understandings of ‘alternative’ space and the possibilities the term affords for queer and feminist artistic imaginaries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Feb 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526162373

Erin Silver

Erin Silver is an award-winning children’s author. Her books include Just Watch Me (Krystal Kite Award nominee), What Kids Did: Stories of Kindness and Invention in the Time of COVID-19 (Hackmatack Award nominee), Proud to Play: LGBTQ+ Athletes Who Made History, Rush Hour: Navigating Our Global Traffic Jam (Blueberry Award winner), Sitting Shiva (Vine Award finalist, TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award finalist) and Good Food, Bad Waste: Let’s Eat for the Planet (2024 American Association for the Advancement of Science/Subaru SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science Books finalist). Erin was chosen to tour during Canadian Children’s Book Week in 2023 and is a sought-after speaker at schools, libraries and conferences. She has an MFA in creative nonfiction and a postgraduate journalism degree. Erin lives in Toronto.

Book preview

Taking place

SERIES EDITORS

Amelia G. Jones, Marsha Meskimmon

Rethinking Art’s Histories aims to open out art history from its most basic structures by foregrounding work that challenges the conventional periodisation and geographical subfields of traditional art history, and addressing a wide range of visual cultural forms from the early modern period to the present.

These books will acknowledge the impact of recent scholarship on our understanding of the complex temporalities and cartographies that have emerged through centuries of world-wide trade, political colonisation and the diasporic movement of people and ideas across national and continental borders.

To buy or to find out more about the books currently available in this series, please go to: https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/series/rethinking-arts-histories/

Taking place

Building histories of queer and feminist art in North America

Erin Silver

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Erin Silver 2023

The right of Erin Silver to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 6238 0 hardback

First published 2023

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or any third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset

by Newgen Publishing UK

I dedicate this book to Martha Langford, inveterate builder of worlds, with gratitude for all the ways she has transformed mine.

Contents

List of figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction: building histories

1 Shifting foundations

2 Dangerous developments

3 Border zones

4 Everyday and extraordinary movements

Epilogue:enter the virtual

Bibliography

Index

List of figures

1.1. Front entrance with signage designed by Sheila de Bretteville reading, ‘The Woman’s Building, a public center for women’s culture, welcomes you,’ 1977. 35mm slide. Courtesy Otis College of Art and Design Library, Woman’s Building Slide Archive, Los Angeles, California.

1.2. Taking down the sign for Grubb & Ellis, the first step in taking over the old Chouinard building on Grandview which became the first location of the Woman’s Building, 1973. Black and white photograph; 8 x 10. Courtesy Otis College of Art and Design Library, Woman’s Building Ephemera, Los Angeles, California.

1.3. Two women with scaffolding. Construction of the new space on Spring Street, November 1975. 35mm slide. Courtesy Otis College of Art and Design Library, Woman’s Building Slide Archive, Los Angeles, California.

1.4. Sheila de Bretteville and Suzanne Lacy moving sheet rock, November 1975. Construction of the new space on Spring Street. 35mm slide. Photograph by Maria Karras. Courtesy Otis College of Art and Design Library, Woman’s Building Slide Archive, Los Angeles, California.

1.5. Taping the walls on the second floor, November 1975. Construction of the new space on Spring Street. 33mm slide. Courtesy Otis College of Art and Design Library, Woman’s Building Slide Archive, Los Angeles, California.

1.6 FASTWÜRMS, House of Bangs , 1999. Installation/performance, Zsa Zsa Gallery, Toronto, ON. Courtesy the artists.

1.7 Feminist Art Gallery (FAG), founded by Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue, Toronto, ON. Image from The Illustrated Gentlemen , inaugural exhibition by Elisha Lim, 2011. Photo by Deirdre Logue. Courtesy the artists.

1.8 Videofag, founded by William Ellis and Jordan Tannahill, Toronto, ON. Courtesy the artists.

2.1 Ryan Conrad, b. 1983 , 2008–9. Broadside Xerox poster. Courtesy the artist.

2.2 Every Ocean Hughes, untitled (David Wojnarowicz project) , 2001–7. 12 black and white photographs, 2 embroidered, 11 x 14. Courtesy the artist.

2.3 Every Ocean Hughes, The Piers Untitled (#2) , 2010. Black and white gelatin print, 31 x 36. Courtesy the artist.

2.4 Ira Sachs, Last Address , 2010. Film still. Courtesy the artist.

2.5 Zoe Leonard, Detail (Tree + Fence) , 1998/1999. Gelatin silver print on paper, 30 x 21.3 cm / 11 3/4 x 8 3/8 inches. © Zoe Leonard. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne and Hauser & Wirth.

3.1 Maggie Groat, Fences Will Turn Into Tables , 2010–13. Installation view of A Problem So Big It Needs Other People , curated by cheyanne turions. Galerie SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art, 15 March–3 May 2014. Photo by Guy L’Heureux. Galerie SBC Gallery, Montreal. Courtesy the artist and Galerie SBC Gallery.

3.2 Adrian Blackwell, Circles Describing Spheres , 2014. Courtesy the artist.

3.3 Andrea Geyer and Sharon Hayes, Space Set / Set Space, 2013. Installation view of STAGE SET STAGE , curated by Barbara Clausen. Galerie SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art, 30 November–22 February 2014. Photo by Guy L’Heureux. Courtesy the artists, the curator, and Galerie SBC Gallery.

3.4 Andrea Geyer and Sharon Hayes, Space Set / Set Space, 2013. Installation view of STAGE SET STAGE , curated by Barbara Clausen. Galerie SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art, 30 November–22 February 2014. Photo by Guy L’Heureux. Courtesy the artists, the curator, and Galerie SBC Gallery.

3.5 Wendy Coburn, Semiotics of Protest Props: Sign, Code, De-code , 2013–14. Mixed materials. Dimensions variable. Installation view, Wendy Coburn: Anatomy of a Protest , Art Museum at the University of Toronto, 2014. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid. Courtesy the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.

3.6 Wendy Coburn, Slut Nation: Anatomy of A Protest, 2014. Video. 36 minutes. Installation view, Wendy Coburn: Anatomy of a Protest , Art Museum at the University of Toronto, October 30 – December 19, 2014. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid. Courtesy the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.

3.7 Sheena Hoszko, Red Light Monument , 2012. Installation photo, Montreal, QC. Courtesy the artist.

4.1 taisha paggett and Yann Novak, A Composite Field , 2014. 3-channel HD video, 23.24. Installation view, TEMPERAMENTAL , The Doris McCarthy Gallery, 5 January–14 February 2015. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid. Courtesy the artists and the Doris McCarthy Gallery.

4.2 Brendan Fernandes, Closing Line , 2014. Courtesy the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.

4.3 Brendan Fernandes, Clean Labor , 2017. Produced in collaboration with More Art. Photo by Chester Toye. Performers: Christopher DeVita, Charles Gowin, Madison Krekel, Erica Ricketts, Oisin Monaghan, Khadijia Griffith, and Wythe Hotel housekeepers, Angie Sherpa, Tenzin Thokme, and Tenzin Woiden. Courtesy the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.

4.4 Brendan Fernandes, Minor Calls , 2017. Design concept by Brendan Fernandes in collaboration with Joseph Cuillier. MCA Chicago. Courtesy the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.

4.5 Brendan Fernandes, Free Fall 49 , 2017. Performance. Courtesy the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.

Acknowledgements

I thought that writing these acknowledgements would be the reward at the end of the very long journey that has been this project, with its early genesis in my doctoral work undertaken at McGill University beginning in 2009; instead, I have found myself consumed by worry and doubt over writing the right (or wrong) thing; over the course of almost a decade, surely important names have been mistakenly left out. I offer these acknowledgements as a snapshot of the past decade which, like this book, no doubt carry and perpetuate certain misremembrances and elisions.

I thank the team at Manchester University Press: Editorial Director Emma Brennan, Assistant Editor Alun Richards, and Rethinking Art’s Histories series editors Amelia Jones and Marsha Meskimmon for their patient guidance through the multiple phases and forms this project has assumed. I also thank the anonymous peer reviewers for generous and honest feedback that has been transformative in coming to clearer answers about what this book is about. My special thanks go to Amelia, for her enduring support of the project over a decade, beginning with her suggestion, in the early 2010s: ‘why don’t you go check out LA?’ Amelia encouraged me to engage with scenes more holistically – to immerse myself, go to the places, talk to the people, forge the relationships, in ways that are not extractive, but mutually nourishing. Amelia has always been generous in sharing her networks with me (and countless others, I know for certain) and helping me to figure out ways of researching and writing and disseminating not as removed from community, but for and with them.

Early research for the book was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant, while the images reproduced within have been made possible through the Scholarly Publication Fund at the University of British Columbia. Archival assistance was generously provided at NYU’s Fales Library and Special Collections (New York), USC/ONE Archives (Los Angeles), the Otis College of Art & Design (Los Angeles), and through the personal archival collections of former dUMBA collective members (Brooklyn, New York, Alaska, and various elsewheres), while image and quote reproduction assistance and permissions were provided by the Art Museum at the University of Toronto (Toronto, ON), the Doris McCarthy Gallery (Scarborough, ON), the dUMBA collective, Galerie SBC Gallery (Montreal, QC), Hauser & Wirth, Monique Meloche Gallery (Chicago), Otis College of Art & Design, Paul Petro Contemporary Art (Toronto, ON), and USC/ONE Archives. I thank the historians and archivists, trained and ad hoc, who have done the hard work of conserving these histories.

It turns out I have been working through the same problems for some time: I thank McGill-Queen’s University Press, volume editor Martha Langford, and Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Crago for allowing me to reprint pieces of ‘Mending Walls: Imagining the Sovereign Subject in Contemporary Exhibition Practices’ from the volume Narratives Unfolding: National Art Histories in an Unfinished World (2016) for Chapter 2. I also thank Performance Matters journal and editor Peter Dickinson for permission to reprint pieces of my article ‘Racism and Social Space in Canadian Dance: Actants, Structures, and Dancing Differently’ (2019) for Chapter 3. Thank you, too, to M-C MacPhee for permission to reprint a small excerpt from my article ‘Whatever Happened to Queer Street West?’ in No More Potlucks (2010) for Chapter 1.

‘Gratitude’ seems insufficient a word for what this project owes the artists, curators, and space-makers whom this book has permitted me to gather here: Scott Miller Berry, Adrian Blackwell, Wendy Coburn (RIP), Ryan Conrad, the dUMBA collective, FASTWÜRMS, Brendan Fernandes, Andrea Geyer, Maggie Groat, Trajal Harrell, Sharon Hayes, Sheena Hoszko, Every Ocean Hughes, Zoe Leonard, Elisha Lim, Ange Loft, Deirdre Logue, Allyson Mitchell, Slawa Osawska, taisha paggett, Adee Roberson, Ira Sachs, Walter Scott, Alexandro Segade, Sienna Shields, Videofag (William Ellis and Jordan Tannahill), and David Wojnarowicz (RIP).

My relationship to scholarship, and to work, is ameliorated by several colleagues, mentors, thinkers, collaborators, and co-conspirators who have provided support and guidance; at the University of British Columbia: Ignacio Adriasola, Rachel Boate, Tracy Chiu, Dana Claxton, Christine D’Onofrio, Bryn Dharmaratne, Greg Gibson, Gareth James, Trey Le, Giorgios Makris, Jaleh Mansoor, Michelle McGeough, Karice Mitchell, Joseph Monteyne, Jeneen Frei Njootli, John O’Brian, Melanie O’Brian, Julia Orell, Nuno Porto, Marina Roy, Maureen Ryan, Saygin Salgirli, Anthony Shelton, T’ai Smith, Catherine Soussloff, Althea Thauberger, Andrea Tuele, and Scott Watson. Further afield, mentors and advisors who have influenced and impacted the ultimate shape of this project, from its seeds as a doctoral project to now, or else have been supportive colleagues throughout the past decade include: Amber Berson, Anthea Black, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Alena Buis, Elizabeth Cavaliere, Barbara Clausen, Jon Davies, Jennifer Doyle, Anne Dymond, Mary Hunter, Alice Ming Wai Jim, Jonathan D. Katz, August Klintberg, Suzy Lake, Claudette Lauzon, Allison Morehead, Ara Osterweil, Kim Simon, Johanne Sloan, Trevor Stark, and Alanna Thain.

Students over the years (at Concordia University, OCAD University, Queen’s University, the University of Guelph, the University of Southern California, the University of Toronto, and my current academic home, the University of British Columbia) are too many now to name, but the following in particular have and are updating and reinvigorating the fields of queer and feminist art and art history, and I consider myself lucky to have worked with them at various stages on their own paths: James Albers, Krista Bailie, Adrian Deveau, Adriana Disman, Nateene Diu, Angela Glanzmann, Clinton Glenn, Karina Greenwood, Maxim Greer, Hannah Grossman, Shala Gutierrez, Jasmine Hynes, Reiko Inouye, Erika Kindsfather, Lucas Kling, Christopher Lacroix, Cory E. Wittmann MacLeod, Robin Alex McDonald, Tatiana Mellema, Kareem Obey, Jade Pollard-Crowe, Marcus Prasad, Ido Radon, Yasmine Semeniuk, Camille Sung, Nina Vroemen, Laurie White, Johnny Willis, and Michael Wooley.

To my bio and blended family: parents Joel Silver & Sylvie Allard, Linda Overing & Ivan Patenaude, siblings Matt Silver, Andy Silver, and Mike Silver, sisters-in-law Diana Haber and Laura Campbell, and nephew Lake Silver-Campbell – thank you for being the family I would choose if we weren’t already related, and for making ‘home’ an expansive, unconventional place that I always want to come back to.

Certain friends have stuck across time and place, colliding and amalgamating in messy and queer ways: David Balzer, Jac Renée Bruneau, Natasha Chaykowski, Kari Cwynar, Nola Fay Dare, Claris Figueira, Sky Goodden, Ayasha Guerin, Trina Hogg, Jenn Jackson, Am Johal, Amy Kazymerchyk, Zoë Lepiano, Ciarán McGrath, John Monteith, Julia Rosenberg, Jesse B. Staniforth, Don Teeuwsen, Althea Thauberger, cheyanne turions, Jayne Wilkinson, and Ulrike Zöllner – thank you for the ineffable thing, bigger than the word ‘friendship’ can encapsulate, that happens when we are together. I am fortunate to have been unofficially ‘adopted’ at the outset of my undergraduate degree by my art parents Donigan Cumming and Martha Langford, whom I thank for getting me into this racket nearly two decades ago, and for continuing to model a work ethic, integrity, and generosity that I attempt to emulate (though likely rarely achieve as effortlessly) in my own life and work.

Although they are unlikely to read this, our pets must be acknowledged for their important role in my writing of this book: our dogs Grey(by), who has been by my side across borders and coasts (Toronto, LA, Toronto, Vancouver) almost to the day I defended my PhD in 2013, and plucky newcomer Radio; they are the unconditional joy in our lives. Let these acknowledgements also mark the memory of two majestic cats: Neko and Tinker, both of whom diligently supervised my writing from my lap, and the absence of whom is deeply felt.

Not finally, but foundationally, is my partner, Christine Atkinson, my complete opposite and, for that reason, my perfect complement. Thank you for witnessing, inspiring, stimulating, and challenging me; thank you for excising my passive phrases and phases; thank you for encouraging me to explore and embody the multitude of curiosities, desires, passions, contradictions, start-stops, about-turns, and catapults that comprise an interesting life; mostly, though, thank you for sharing your life and your light with me.

Introduction: building histories

Histories of North American feminist, queer, and queer feminist art, from their roots in the second-wave feminism of the 1970s, to their influence on queer and feminist cultural production in the present, can be traced in relation to a history of the institutions, organisations, collectives, and structures that have helped to secure and legitimise feminist and queer art practices. Over the last fifty years, a specifically feminist art history has responded to the exclusion of women artists from the official registers of art history, while the writing of queer cultural histories has resulted from increasing awareness of what histories risk being lost by remaining idle. Prior to the formation of politically activist queer communities in the 1990s, lesbian and feminist communities were considered to be politically and socially distinct from gay cis-male communities. However, as has become increasingly clear, histories of feminist and queer cultures stand to benefit from discursive proximity; a queer feminist historiographical analysis serves to further emphasise the possibilities afforded by their union.

This book engages select feminist and queer alternative art spaces in Canada and the United States in an effort to both affirm their enduring historical significance and to delineate the ways by which present-day queer and feminist artists support and challenge the dominant narrative lenses through which these histories have been constructed. Methodologically, I posit that the intersection at which historiography, social geography, feminist theory, queer theory, and institutional critique meet is an ideal locus through which to uncover how the specificities of place, as well as space, contribute to historical understandings of feminist, queer, and queer feminist cultural production. Since the development of a distinctly feminist art movement in the early 1970s, the socio-political conditions of place have resulted in divergent paths among queer and feminist institutions; I argue that the specific aesthetic, social, and political forms feminist and queer art production take on must be read through the spaces, communities, and cities that provide the conditions for their cultivation.

In my position as participant-observer, with case studies informed both by happenstance and by deliberately seeking out proximity to practices and histories that contribute to this research, I argue that an emphasis on locality (i.e. my locality) in an era of art world globalisation and fluidity of movement is a political choice on my part: to engage the specific conditions of places I have come to know as an inveterate inhabitant or literate visitor, a privilege of both mobility and staying-in-place bestowed by virtue of my citizenship (Canadian), ethnicity (white settler), and class (however nebulously defined, one that permits choice to stay or go). My movements and relocations have been precipitated in relation to institutions – notably, those institutions offering gainful employment and rewarding intellectual and cultural community – but they have not been accidental: proximity to rich and disparate queer and feminist culture has influenced my decisions to commit to certain places, places that, as this book will show, continue to engage and extend feminist and queer art ecologies and histories in the present.

However, and paradoxically, as a result of my peripatetic background (sometimes working across cities and provinces in any given semester prior to arriving in Vancouver, where I have lived since 2017), in this book I am making an argument for committing to ‘place’ at the same time as I share in the scepticism about regionalist approaches that serve to confine, rather than to expand, the nuance of what the term means. I am concerned, too, not to let the entrenched pathways of history steer the direction and scope of the project, and to allow a porousness in the geographic crossings and divergences that permit certain spaces and practices to speak to each other across regional and temporal lines. Although the book’s chapters are loosely grouped into ‘regions,’ I abandon geographic didacticism, moving, as with my movement in the world, towards an improvisational methodological perambulation, applying the Debordian dérive – a ‘mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society; a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances’ – as organisational guide.¹ I level more traditional academic research (in archives, libraries, galleries, and through interviews) with the psychogeographic opportunities and invitations afforded me throughout this project: a driving tour with artist Susan Silton to all of the former sites of the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles, for instance, feeling the LA dweller’s unique relationship to the road; an invitation from Amelia Jones to a social gathering on my first day in LA in 2012, learning, as a non-driver, just what a walk from Hollywood to Silverlake entails, what it means in reality versus how it appears on Google Maps; a walk through New York’s Greenwich Village with filmmaker Ira Sachs, our conversation punctuated by Sachs pointing out various apartment buildings, naming the artists who lived in them, and which appear in his short film Last Address; a walk across the Manhattan Bridge, to and from Jay Street in Dumbo, Brooklyn on the same trip to New York, unseasonably warm for early February; a view and an ear to the hundreds of thousands of bodies in the streets, the sounds of banging pots and pans, during the 2012 Quebec student movement in my hometown of Montreal. I follow a lineage of so many queer and feminist writers and scholars attempting to translate peripatetic experience onto the page: Tina M. Campt, Dianne Chisholm, Samuel R. Delany, Amelia Jones, and Karen Tongson, to name a few who have allowed their own ‘relocations,’ in Tongson’s words, to become part of the story.² Although the Baudelarian flâneur is more regularly engaged in queer spatial theory for its links to anonymity, desire, and the state of being an outsider, a Debordian positioning opens up to Michel de Certeau’s tactical deployments against the city’s structure as passively received. Amid the backdrop of institutional histories spanning the 1970s to the present (2022), I introduce artistic practices, projects, deployments, and interventions that, I argue, activate my sites of interrogation, and make them valuable as subjects of study. The artists whose practices are examined throughout this book offer examples of tactical engagement with the sites, spaces, and places of the everyday via extraordinary punctuations and perforations of the built environment.

The goals of my study are twofold: to examine and contribute to the development of histories of feminist and queer art ecologies; and to promote a queer feminist historiographical project in which queer and feminist artists are essential collaborators in the task of interrogating and critically dissecting the dominant narratives that increasingly attach to these spaces. As the following chapters demonstrate, this work requires first building up (focusing on the physical sites of early feminist and queer cultural production that made their histories legible) in order to, in essence, tear down, with cognisance of the enduringly precarious position of feminist and queer art histories relative to more mainstream art histories, and the shared motivation to first ensure the preservation of feminist and queer art histories before troubling their methodological foundations. The historical position of feminist and queer artists relative to the mainstream institutions that have long bestowed legitimacy on artists and their practices, as well as the histories of those alternative institutions that have been built and occupied in response to mainstream institutional neglect, warrant further study.

The book is framed by four lines of inquiry corresponding to the four chapters that follow: first, I revisit now canonical histories of feminist alternative art spaces, founded in the early 1970s in urban centres such as Los Angeles, New York, and Montreal, to interrogate debates about ‘alternatives’ to the centre: the reasons why feminist