Archival exhibitions are not merely the best way to understand currents in 1970s feminist art and activism, but to form an active and personal connection to them that can energize both practices in the present. Janet Sarbanes visits "The Feminist Art Program (1970-1975): Cycles of Collectivity" at REDCAT, and "Heresies: Still Ain’t Satisfied" at UCR Arts, both which pay tribute to feminist pedagogy and organizing through the art of assembling the archive.

Artists' books printed in multiples achieved deep emotional resonance when infused with the care and craft characteristic to the feminist art movement. The Women's Graphic Center, housed at the Woman's Building in Downtown Los Angeles, evolved into a dynamic ecosystem of print art experimentation, providing feminist artists the tools and community to innovatively approach the artists' books form. Writer and art librarian Sam Regal positions these works within California print history and interrogates the problematics of their reductive library classification and belated institutional embrace.

To outsiders the place looked like a hippie colony, a place full of longhairs and dogs, children running free, and hand-held video cameras recording it all. Inside, it was a place of possibility. Although there were recognizable classes, the motivating idea was to create more informal spaces where artist teachers and their students discussed ideas and developed projects, most outside the traditional frameworks of art-making, projects that aimed to question the very institutional construction of art itself.

This interview with Fluxus artist Alison Knowles took place in her Soho apartment in June 2011. Knowles describes being recruited for the original CalArts faculty by Allan Kaprow, the assistant dean of art; what it was like to teach at the institute in the first two years; the kind of student she encountered there; and the radical nature of the pedagogical situation. She also describes several pieces she did at CalArts, including an iteration of her famous House of Dust.

In 1970, Suzanne Lacy was a second-year graduate student in psychology when she entered Fresno State's burgeoning Feminist Art Program. Her education, and ultimate career, charted new art territories that incorporated training in carpentry skills, consciousness raising, and an emotive feminist approach to conceptual strategies.

In this interview, Miriam Schapiro describes her discovery of a new, more engaged way of teaching when she moved to Southern California from New York, and how that was inspired by what she witnessed visiting Judy Chicago’s class at Fresno State. This meeting led to the two artists collaborating on the Feminist Art Program at CalArts, and Schapiro discusses the program and describes some of the student projects, including Womanhouse and Anonymous Was a Woman. She then discusses her return to New York and her role in establishing the feminist art journal Heresies.

In this brief extract from a long discussion of a painting career spanning several decades, Pat Steir describes her first visit to Los Angeles and the four years she subsequently stayed there on and off, both painting and teaching at CalArts.

Paul Brach was a painter from New York hired to be the founding dean of the art school at CalArts. In this interview, he discusses his earlier career in New York in the 1950s and early ’60s, as well as his move to California in the late ’60s. He discusses his own inability to make more politically relevant work at a time of social unrest but admires the experiment his wife, Miriam Schapiro, had begun, along with Judy Chicago—the creation of the Feminist Art Program within the school. He also has some interesting thoughts—good and bad—on artists who teach.