A( WILD) WOMAN’S WORLD

Long overdue, Kaleta Doolin’s survey exhibition unites more than three decades of her feminist art.

BY EVE HILL-AGNUS PHOTOGRAPHY BY KEVIN TODORA

When I arrive at the artist and philanthropist Kaleta Doolin’s studio in East Dallas on a Wednesday afternoon, I find her in the space with her cat, Hey Baby. Within what feels like five minutes, she has shown me T-shirts printed with the words “Eve and Adam,” her reworking of assumptions about Genesis. These will be part of her upcoming survey exhibition, Crazier Than Crazy Quilts, at Erin Cluley Gallery and Cluley Projects. It has been years now that she has been taking on the patriarchy.

Doolin is the daughter of a father who famously invented Fritos and Cheetos and founded the current Frito-Lay Company, and a mother who introduced her to crafts. One of four siblings, Doolin yoked their conceptualism and fabrication, melded art and physical matter. What she loves in her work is achieving what she calls alchemy. Rigid becomes malleable or soft like skin—in filigreed steel handkerchiefs or smooth, alabaster carvings. She makes steel waterfalls and metal afghans looped from tire chains carefully sewn and crocheted into imposing lattices.

Doolin has never shied away from controversy or speaking her mind, from paradox or dichotomy. We pull out one of her series, called Dirty Dozen, which features men’s neckties slyly embroidered with slang words for male genitalia. Sculptural, they are textile books, their tongues like pages. She has forayed into a dozen or so films. (The first featured her nursing her son, because, she says, she was so fascinated and smitten.)

But I am moved to turn the pages of one of six editions of her seminal work that takes on male hegemony. In completing a feminist studies class while earning her MFA at Southern Methodist University, Doolin realized that the canonical textbook, H. W. Janson’s History of Art, excluded female artists. Horrified, she cut a neat, vulvar shape down through its pages and threaded a red ribbon through it, like menstrual blood. She titled it Improved Janson: A Woman on Every Page. It was time to be vocal.

When we cross busy Columbia Avenue to her metal shop, which resides in a historic fire station, I discover her plasma cutter, bronze polisher, and forge. “This is where I’m happy,” she tells me, pointing to a photo on her phone of herself wearing a leather welding apron at the foundry where her metal sculptures are cast. This is how her now-husband, Alan Govenar, first met her, looking like Rosie the Riveter in a kerchief and work clothes. Once, she poured molten steel down the tongue of her boot. But her love of metalworking has not waned.

People have come to know Doolin for the eponymous Kaleta A. Doolin Foundation, the feminist nonprofit organization that brings works by female artists to museum collections and advances the causes of women and girls. But she calls her inheritance, in 2015, an “accident of fortune”: “…the accident of my birth. I didn’t choose that, but it’s available to me,” she says. “So the way I’ve weaponized it is part of my creativity.”

Already, however, she had had a lengthy social art practice. In 1990, she bought the fire station to house the 5501 Columbia Art Center, which she co-directed from 1992 to 2001. Wanting students to have shows with openings, she welcomed them into the fire station twice a year for a weekend. Hence “The Frame Project” was born. A Sunday afternoon circle allowed female artists to talk shop, air their frustrations, and process. “There are so many obstacles for women,” she says. “One at a time, I can help them over a hurdle.”

Throughout the ’90s, Doolin acquired a total of six neighboring lots, some with buildings on them, for $6,000 or $25,000, applying for grants and leading her social programs on shoestring budgets. It was, she says, “exhilarating.”

Now the renovated fire station holds the metal shop where she punches steel into perforated doilies, like industrial valentines, and cuts rusted steel into oversize lace, domesticity taking on new valences. Other pieces riff on the auger shape she first saw as a child in her father’s factory.

Since the foundation hired an executive director, Doolin has been able to spend most days in the studio. “I’m trying to correct it,” she says—“it” meaning the entire misogynistic apparatus. Her mind teeming with images and ideas, she employs her diverse media to assail the system through originality and her wry, witty, trenchant social critique. “I want to deny anyone from pigeonholing me,” she says. She will not be confined to a box. Not as a philanthropist. Not as a feminist. Certainly not as an artist.

As we stand surrounded by pieces for the upcoming show, she mentions the workshops of artists Phyllida Barlow and Nicole Eisenman, which she has visited, witnessing their teams. This is what she would like to move toward, a model where she might have assistance to go bigger, bolder. It’s simple, she says: “I want to keep doing it.”

She now has a studio in Brooklyn as well, with duplicates of all her metalworking tools. Otherwise, she lives a modest life. P