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.

A painter, a composer, a drama scholar, two directors, and two radical social scientists sat down at a table in 1969 to plot the future of the California Institute of the Arts. These were CalArts’ first administrators, and the challenge before them—and before the faculty they’d recruited for each of their departments or “schools” of art, film, theater/dance, music, design, and critical studies—was to actualize Walt Disney’s vision of bringing all of the arts together in one institution of higher learning, resulting in “a kind of cross-pollination that [would] bring out the best in its students.”

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.