Deeds Not Words: Women Working for Change Catalog — A BIG IDEA project of Sun Valley Museum of Art by Sun Valley Museum of Art

Deeds Not Words: Women Working for Change A BIG IDEA PROJECT

cover: Pat Boas, Sentinels (banner) (detail), 2020, acrylic on linen over panel, courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland back cover: Pat Boas, Sentinels (banner), 2020, acrylic on linen over panel, on wallpaper designed by Pat Boas with assistance from Kris Blackmore, courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland; photo: Dev Khalsa

Deeds Not Words: Women Working for Change JANUARY 8–APRIL 16, 2021

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Special thanks to the following for their generous support of the BIG IDEA project Deeds Not Words: Women Working for Change The Ford Family Foundation Idaho Commission on the Arts Don and Marcia Liebich Jane P. Watkins Western States Arts Federation (WESTAF) Regional Arts Resilience Fund Jeri L. Wolfson

Thank you to the following lenders: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Jennifer DiBrienza and Jesse Dorogusker Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland Brook Hartzell and Tad Freese Henrique Faria Fine Art, New York Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco Betsy Blumenthal and Jonathan Root

KRISTIN POOLE

s we conclude an election year when we experienced the greatest national participation in more than a century and where grassroots efforts to engage African American voters turned a southern state from solidly red to purple, it is hard not to recognize the importance of the right to vote. SVMoA’s Deeds Not Words BIG IDEA project was conceived more than two years ago when the goal was to celebrate the anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment as a mechanism to explore how women have long worked for social change. As the exhibition opening date approached, it became evident that a discussion about voting rights and the nature of social change was more potent than ever. Why does a museum choose to mount a project and exhibition that celebrates women’s efforts to advance social change? The easy answer is because artists are inspired by the concept and continue to make powerful work on the theme. We know that art reflects the time in which it is made, serving as both filter and megaphone for social, political and economic issues of the day. Art invites us to see and evaluate our world through an alternative and often more personal lens. Sometimes that lens is critical, sometimes celebratory. More often than not, it is rooted in a private truth and grounded in individual experience. Illumination is the work of both artists and the institutions that support them. For SVMoA to cast a focused look at the importance of women’s role in shaping our nation is to offer perspective on history as well as this contemporary moment of enormous social change. Over the decades, much has been written about the leaders of the suffragist movement, but as is true for all actions that press for social reform, it is essential that leadership is

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

supported, advanced and advocated by many. While there are individuals who articulate and condense the reasoning and the policy, who speak into microphones and to the press, there are many more citizens who make up the movement for change—those who are present, witnessing, standing firm, risking exposure for their rights and those of others. For this exhibition we selected artists whose art honored those whose names may not be well known, but whose efforts were essential to reform. As the exhibition took shape, it become evident that our contemporary moment—a time when embedded systems of racial oppression were being seen, expressed and fought against around the country—was providing artists with even greater incentive to celebrate those who advance change. For Pat Boas, the Black Lives Matter movement shifted the focus of her work from honoring early 19th and 20thcentury suffragist leaders to more abstracted works that pay homage to all those unnamed individuals who make up a movement. For Lava Thomas, the prospect of making larger-thanlife-size portraits of women who were jailed for participating in the Montgomery Bus Boycott was a way to make visible the steady, quiet work of committed citizens. The beauty of putting together strong artistic voices in exhibition is that you are often rewarded with unexpected dialogue. Collected together, the artists in this exhibition address not only individual examples of courage and social action but also another underlying theme— that of women’s divided identity in their life inside their home and that which is shown in the public space. The notion of an interior and an exterior life can take all sorts of forms, but many of the artworks in the exhibition explore the tensions evident in the two primary spheres

of activity that women navigate. Elena del Rivero frames this duality most explicitly with her dish towels as flags. She takes the most ubiquitous of household cleaning items, a common dish towel used in traditional women’s work from cleaning to baking, and enlarges and elevates it to the realm of a public flag—a symbol of power, pride and political identity. To acknowledge the kitchen space as both private and public space is to acknowledge its political potency. Del Rivero’s flags underscore the essential nature of the daily work done in the kitchen while simultaneously acknowledging that it is at the kitchen table that women have long strategized for personal and public advancement. For artist Angela Ellsworth, her Pantaloncini speak to women’s clothing as both armor and hair shirt. Her pantaloons are compelling objects. Inspired by dress reform actions, which offered women freedom of movement, the pants are decorated with pearlescent abstract patterns built from hundreds of corsage and dress pins assembled together. Close inspection of these colorful forms reveals a composition of sharp steel pinheads that threaten to shred whatever they come into contact with. Ellsworth’s forms reinforce the contradictions inherent in women’s participation in the public sphere—suggesting that what we wear and how we wear it neither reveals nor protects the person underneath. The importance of a woman’s appearance is also subtly explored in Lava Thomas’s exquisite drawings of women who have been arrested after participating in a bus boycott. Posed for their mug shots, the women are dressed in their Sunday best—their decorum and formal appearance underscoring the seriousness with which they took their responsibility and signaling the respect with which they hoped to be received. This idea that a woman’s outward appearance was a consideration in how the world

perceived their commitment as activists is also part of Pat Boas’ explorations in her Sentinel paintings, which were inspired by a group of 2,000-plus women who stood in silent protest in front of the White House for more than two years (1917-1919) until Congress passed the 19th Amendment and ratification began. The forms and patterns found in the paintings recall the particularities of dress and physical form that affected women’s work for change. In Sentinels (frame), Boas reflects on how women’s domestic space can be oppressive—the thin crossing lines that surround the hoop skirt form suggest bars, and the skirt itself resembles a cage. In her wallpaper design, Boas describes the repeated banister form as both furniture and bars. While Boas pays homage to suffragists for their courage and tenacity, she does not ignore the fact that there were private household battles that had to be waged alongside the more public fight for freedom. The recognition that women have long been negotiating between two selves—that of ourselves in the public sphere as well as in our homes—is reinforced in the work another artist we included in this project. Azar Nafisi uses her platform as writer and activist to share the realities of life for women and girls in Iran. In her memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi draws for the reader the harsh duality faced by her students who are bold, forthright and colorfully dressed while they are safe, learning in the privacy of her living room, but in public are required to present compliant reserve without voice or power under the watchful eyes of a repressive political regime. Nafisi’s own story reinforces the personal and professional sacrifices required of those who work against oppression. Each of the artists featured in the Deeds Not Words exhibition honor the efforts and commitment of those who have worked for equal and fair opportunities—for the right for all to be seen and heard. With considerable skill

they celebrate the steady attention and daily commitment necessary to advance change. Together they allow us to reflect on our past and honor our democracy, a system and process that requires the collective work and commitment of individuals and which can be refined and improved by the perspective of active artistic voices.

Elena del Rivero, Suffrage Flag (installation view at SVMoA), 2020, nylon flag, courtesy the artist and Henrique Faria Fine Art, New York; photo: Dev Khalsa

COURTNEY GILBERT CURATOR OF VISUAL ARTS

Deeds and Words A

s my colleagues and I began planning Deeds Not Words two years ago, we intended to open the exhibition and BIG IDEA project in September 2020, just after the August 18 centennial anniversary of ratification of the U.S. Constitution’s 19th Amendment, which allowed women to exercise their right to vote. We anticipated a project that would span the 2020 general election, celebrating women’s suffrage while offering our community an opportunity to look back on nearly two centuries of women’s work for social justice—for suffrage, but also for abolition, dress reform, civil rights and economic equality. That conversation still guides this project, but its timing has shifted. The Covid-19 pandemic forced us to close our doors for several months in early 2020 and to delay the opening of this exhibition to January 2021. Just as we could not have imagined the pandemic two years ago, we did not expect the rescheduled show to coincide with the political upheaval of early 2021. Images of the violent incursion into the U.S. Pat Boas and Kris BlackCapitol on January 6 more, Abigail Scott Duniway: Equal Rights for All (detail), dominated the news 2020, broadside, courtesy cycle as we opened the artists and Elizabeth the exhibition, searing Leach Gallery, Portland

themselves into the collective memory of our nation and renewing conversation about what form legitimate protest can and should take. The women whose history this exhibition considers found answers to that question in public demonstrations as well as more private (and sometimes hidden) work. Deeds Not Words takes its title from the slogan of

British suffragettes who, like many suffragists in America, decided that direct action rather than rhetoric alone was necessary to secure women’s suffrage. But the BIG IDEA could also be titled Deeds and Words, for women activists have always employed language and text alongside marches and boycotts. They have given speeches, written editorials and printed pamphlets, using their voices as well as their bodies as tools in the struggle for social justice. The exhibition includes work by five contemporary artists and one early 20th-century architect made in response to the history of women mobilizing for social change. Working with a wide range of materials and from different points of view, the artists consider the many ways women have championed social justice since the mid-19th century. One of the surprises I encountered when beginning research for this project was the fact that Idaho granted women the right to vote in 1896, nearly a quarter century before ratification of the 19th Pat Boas, installation view; photo: Dev Khalsa Amendment, making

it the fourth state (after Wyoming, Colorado and Utah) to do so. It felt important to invite an artist to respond to that history, and to examine suffrage in the American West within the larger context of suffragism in the U.S. The painter and printmaker PAT BOAS has long been interested in language, and her artwork, as she has written, often “plays with ways to interpret and unsettle information gleaned from popular print sources.” She sometimes incorporates obscured or abstracted elements of writing into works that allude to text even when they aren’t legible. Because the women’s suffrage movement relied on speeches, editorials and other written materials as well as direct action, SVMoA invited Boas to create an installation in response to the history of women’s suffrage in the U.S. with a focus on Idaho. The resulting paintings, wallpaper and poster emerged out of her research into that history. Following a residency at SVMoA’s Hailey House and research at the Idaho State Archives, Boas created five paintings entitled Sentinels. She describes the paintings as meditations on

the Silent Sentinels, women led by suffragist Alice Paul who protested outside Woodrow Wilson’s White House from 1917 to 1919, when Congress passed the 19th Amendment. The Silent Sentinels maintained their public vigil in the face of harassment, fines, arrests and jail time. Each Sentinels painting bears a subtitle that connects to both the forms within it and to different aspects of the suffrage movement, from the public work of women like the Silent Sentinels (banner, shield) to the unseen work of women within the domestic sphere (window, frame, vessel). Boas has spoken of a parallel between the jail time the Silent Sentinels faced and the oppression many women of the period encountered within the home. She describes some elements of these works as “icons”—a pink latticed form in Sentinels (frame), for example, simultaneously evokes a hoop skirt, a cage and a cake on a pedestal. In Sentinels (banner), a patterned dress form lies at the center, flanked by flowing lines that suggest streams of fabric. Sentinels (shield) bears a string of shiny black beads that encircle the form of a shield, while Sentinels (vessel) features a series of nested vases, with a form Boas describes Elna del Rivero, Suffrage as a perfume bottle Flag, 2020, nylon flag, courat the center. As Boas tesy the artist and Henrique has said, she came Faria Fine Art, New York

Elena del Rivero, Domestic to the realization Landscape #41 (detail), while making these 2019, gouache, thread and paintings that those graphite on collaged vintage who seek their human graph paper, courtesy the artist and Henrique Faria rights have always Fine Art, New York had to maintain a level of decorum that supersedes that of those oppressing them.1 Necklaces of beads, hoop skirts, dress forms and perfume bottles—symbols of feminine decorum—collide with shields and banners. But like the shield and the banner, they

too were tools in the struggle for suffrage. Because so much of her work has found its inspiration in language, Boas at first imagined making a series of paintings based on the monograms of specific suffragists in Idaho and the American West, abstracting their initials in paintings that would honor these individual women. As she began work on the paintings in 2020, one hundred years after the Silent Sentinels’ success, the nation erupted into protests following the murder of George Floyd by a M inneapolis police officer. These protests led her to reimagine the project and, instead, to make paintings that acknowledge the necessity of many individuals working together to produce change. Pat Boas’ residency at SVMoA’s Hailey House, where the walls are covered in 1880s Arts and Crafts-era wallpaper, inspired her to design the wallpaper on which her paintings would hang. Working with designer Kris Blackmore, Boas created wallpaper that, like the paintings, calls attenElena del Rivero, Domestic tion to both the public Landscapes (installation and private aspects view); photo: Dev Khalsa

of the suffrage movement; the repeating yellow pattern evokes the banister of an elegant domestic staircase, while the delicate purple script pattern suggests the written words suffragists employed in public speeches and editorials as they worked to convince others to support their cause. Boas addresses the suffragists’ use of language in another element of the installation. During her research, she came across a speech that Oregon-based lecturer, writer, editor and activist Abigail Scott Duniway (1834–1915) gave in July 1889 at Idaho’s Constitutional Convention in Boise. Duniway, who was mentored by Susan B. Anthony, spent part of each year on her family’s ranch in Idaho’s Pahsimeroi Valley. She used her appearance at the Constitutional Convention as an opportunity to implore the men in attendance to grant women the right to vote within their state’s constitution: The eyes of the world are upon these new states and territories of the Pacific Northwest. The freedom-loving spirit of our Western men is our proudest boast. Shall we, the women of their border land, who have shared alike your

trials and your triumphs, shall we not be permitted to go up to the national capital next winter, bearing aloft the banner of our freedom? Shall we not have the proud distinction of proclaiming to the older states of the union that the chivalry and honor of our fathers, husbands and sons outrank their own? May we not tell the world that these are the men who scorn to accept any rights for themselves which they would deny to their mothers, sweethearts, wives, sisters and daughters?2 Boas and designer Kris Blackmore designed a poster (or “broadside,” in the language of 19th-century politics) using an edited version of Duniway’s speech. Duniway’s words grace the installation’s walls, and visitors are invited to take a copy of the broadside with them as a way of remembering this little-known chapter in Idaho history. Like Pat Boas, the artist ELENA DEL RIVERO has produced a new body of work that celebrates the centennial of the 19th Amendment. For several years, del Rivero has been working with the form of the household dish towel, painting the instantly recognizable pattern of interlocking red stripes on large pieces

Angela Ellsworth, Panof canvas in the taloncini: Group IV, The creation of what she Ten Largest No. 6, Behind calls “monstrous” dish (Hilma), 2020, 59,302 pearl corsage pins, colored towels. Often stained dress pins, fabric, steel; with remnants of daily Pantaloncini: Group IV, The Ten Largest No. 6, Ahead life within her home (Hilma), 2020, 40,180 pearl and studio, such as corsage pins, colored dress pins, fabric, steel, courtesy coffee, spices, wine the artist; photo: Dev Khalsa and dirt, the works are part of her investigation of the intersection of the private and the public in women’s lives. With support from a Guggenheim Fellowship, del Rivero has transformed these dish towels into nylon flags in a project called Elena del Rivero: Home Address. SVMoA joins institutions around the country in flying these flags, which refer to the public work women undertook in pursuit of suffrage as well as their private activism within the domestic sphere. Flags are inherently political symbols; by presenting stained dish towels as flags, del Rivero invites viewers into a conversation, as she has said, about the way that the kitchen has always functioned as a political space.3 Del Rivero has referred to these flags as anti-monuments; She uses their domestic pat-

terns to raise questions about how we recognize symbols of power. Their simple grid of red stripes is also part of her investigation of the history of modernism—dish towels bore the patterns of geometric abstraction long before abstract art emerged in the 20th century. In addition to the flags, which fly both inside the exhibition and outside The Museum, del Rivero has lent six works on paper from a series she titled Domestic Landscapes, which continue her investigation into intersections between women’s public and private lives, and the birth of abstract art. Inspired by the work of the Swedish spiritualist Hilma af Klint, who made radiant abstract paintings more than a decade before more well-known male artists adopted abstraction, the drawings feature geometric patterns on ledger paper. Like her dish towels, del Rivero’s Domestic Landscapes drawings are stained with spices, coffee and wine, and sometimes sewn with embroidery thread. Like the suffrage Angela Ellsworth, Pantaloncini: Group IV, The flags, these drawTen Largest No. 6, Behind ings bring together (Hilma) (detail), courtesy the private (symbols the artist

Angela Ellsworth, and materials of daily Pantaloncini: Group IV, The life) with the public Ten Largest No. 6, Ahead (paper associated (Hilma) (detail); photo: Dev Khalsa with accounting and business). While Boas and del Rivero have created work that considers the suffrage movement, ANGELA ELLSWORTH’s sculptures respond to another aspect of women’s work for social change—dress reform. Ellsworth works in sculpture, video and installation to investigate gender, social rituals and religion. A descendent of the Mormon Prophet Lorenzo Snow, Ellsworth was raised in the LDS Church and is well known for Seer Bonnets, a series of sculptures inspired by the bonnets of Mormon pioneers. Made from thousands of pearl corsage pins, the bonnets feature seductively decorative exteriors and prickly, pin-lined interiors. This exhibition features two sculptures that expand on work from the artist’s recent series, Pantaloncini. Inspired by women’s bloomers, Ellsworth crafts these works with fabric, steel and tens of thousands of pearl corsage pins and colored dress pins. Like the Seer Bonnets, Ellsworth’s

antaloncini address the uncomfortable nature P of traditional gender roles, their shiny and colorful surfaces masking painful interiors. The Pantaloncini also allude to the literal discomfort of women’s clothing and the history of dress reform, which freed women from confining garments like corsets and hoop skirts. Bloomers, promoted by prominent suffragists including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, promised women greater freedom of movement, allowing them access to bicycles and other outdoor activities. As rendered by Ellsworth, bloomers also symbolize the strength and power of the female body, functioning as a kind of armor for women fighting for a reimagined world. Ellworth’s first Pantaloncini bear decorative patterns drawn from the work of the Swiss spiritualist, healer and artist Emma Kunz, who created geometric drawings as a way of organizing philosophical and spiritual ideas. The sculptures in this exhibition feature imagery that refers to artwork by Hilma af Klint (also a source for Elena del Rivero), the Swedish mystic and artist who expressed her interest in spiritual concepts through large-scale, nonrepresentational paintings filled with complex systems of geometric and biomorphic imagery. Ellsworth’s incorporation of the images and ideas of these two women into her own work illuminates a little-known chapter in the history

Lava Thomas, installation of art and the role view; photo: Dev Khalsa women played in developing a truly modernist visual language long before male artists recognized as the fathers of modernism. In theory, the 19th Amendment gave formally gave all female U.S. citizens the right to vote, but in reality, American women of color faced ongoing obstacles to voting for decades. Like African American men, Black women encountered poll taxes, literacy tests and threats of violence that prevented them from voting. Native American women were not recognized as citizens until 1924, and Asian American immigrants too were denied citizenship for decades. The push for unimpeded suffrage for African American citizens was entwined with the larger civil rights movement until passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. 4 The artist LAVA THOMAS has revisited key historical moments in the struggle for civil rights for Black Americans in a number of her projects, with a focus on the role women have played in the movement. Thomas works in sculpture, installation, painting and drawing to address race and gender, representation, and what she calls “memorialization.” The exhibition includes three drawings Thomas made that exist at the intersection of these ideas: portraits of Black women who risked violence, imprisonment and

worse in the struggle for civil rights for African Americans. The largest of the drawings depicts Harriet Tubman, the abolitionist and activist who escaped slavery in 1849 and dedicated her life to helping other enslaved people attain freedom. Thomas made the drawing in early 2020, the bicentennial of Tubman’s birth. While several well-known photographs of Tubman as a younger woman exist, Thomas chose to work from one taken in 1911, near the end of Tubman’s long life. In both the photograph and Thomas’s interpretation, Tubman stares directly into the viewer’s eyes with the strength that defined her life. Thomas made slight alterations to the photograph in her drawing (removing the outdoor background and a black cloth on the back of Tubman’s chair) while meticulously reproducing other elements (the patterning on Tubman’s sleeve and the knitted stitches in her shawl). Although Harriet Tubman’s name is widely known, the names of the women represented in Thomas’s other portraits—Audrey Belle Langford and Ida Mae Caldwell—are not. These drawings are part of her project Mugshot Portraits: Women of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. These painstakingly drawn portraits reproduce the mugshots of women arrested for their participation in the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–56, led by Rosa Parks, a watershed moment in the civil rights movement. As Leigh Raiford, a professor of African American Studies at Stanford University, has written, the project addresses “the absence of Black women in what remains a largely male-centered historiography of the [civil rights] movement,” and celebrate

Lava Thomas, Ida Mae the commitment of Caldwell (detail), 2018, everyday citizens to graphite and conté pencil on paper, collection of Betsy working for social Blumenthal and Jonathan 5 justice. Thomas Root, image courtesy transforms mugRena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco shots—images that imply the criminality of their subjects—into large-scale portraits that celebrate these women, many of whom were deliberately dressed in their best clothes at the time of their arrests. But there is a precariousness in these portraits; as Thomas has said, her choice to work in pencil on paper “draws our attention to the fragility of this history, the ease with which it can be erased.”6 While the artwork in Deeds Not Words focuses largely on actions like those of the women who participated in the Montgomery Bus Boycott and those of suffragists—marches and boycotts, speeches and editorials—one perhaps surprising tool for social change was architecture. The 19th and early 20th centuries saw a burst of activity in the field of architecture aimed at improving the lives of women within the home in order to give them more independence outside it.7 Among the practitioners of this new approach to architecture was ALICE CONSTANCE AUSTIN, an architect, city planner, feminist, socialist and activist. In 1913, Job Harriman, a two-time candidate for mayor of

Los Angeles, embarked on a plan to create Llano del Rio, a socialist intentional community in California’s Mojave Desert. The person he hired to bring his vision to life was Austin. Austin envisioned Llano del Rio as a circular city of common gardens and kitchenless houses linked by a system of tunnels for the delivery of hot meals and clean laundry. Austin designed houses with built-in furniture, heated tile floors and roll-away beds that would minimize housework and free women to pursue the profession of their choice. The architectural drawings reproduced in the exhibition illustrate Austin’s ideas at work and include her layout for the city, floor plans and elevation drawings. One drawing shows the tunnels Austin planned, which would house a network of electric carts running throughout the city for deliveries. Austin’s ideal city would, in her

Materials related to Llano words, relieve women del Rio, installation view; of “the thankless and photo: Dev Khalsa unending drudgery of an inconceivably stupid and inefficient system, by which her labors are confiscated.”8 As photographs of daily life in Llano del Rio illustrate, Austin’s Maypole Festivities, Llano vision for the comdel Rio, 1913–18, Paul Kagan munity never saw Utopian Communities Collection, Yale Collection completion. But more of Western Americana, than 1,000 residents Beinecke Rare Book and did come together Manuscript Library

in a city of temporary tent and adobe houses for several years. Together, they celebrated May Day, worked communally in kitchens and local businesses, educated their children and published the magazine The Western Comrade. The ruins of what once existed at Llano del Rio have been documented by photographer KIM STRINGFELLOW as part of The Mojave Project, which explores the physical, geographical and cultural landscape of the Mojave Desert. As Stringfellow’s photographs illustrate, the members of Llano del Rio embraced Austin’s vision for an egalitarian city in which women could thrive outside the home and began building infrastructure—including a substantial grain silo—but lack of water and capital ultimately doomed the experiment. Though Austin’s socialist city was never fully realized, her work, intended to liberate women from housework in order to free them to pursue professions in the public sphere, was part of a larger conversation among women about how to reshape the world through both public and private action. This conversation started long before the 19th century and it con-

Kim Stringfellow, Grain tinues today, but the Silo, Grain Silo (interior), 19th and 20th centuand R uins of Llano del Rio Socialist Colony, Llano, CA, ries were a time when 2017, inkjet prints, courtesy women organized for the artist; photo: Dev Khalsa change in ways they hadn’t before, targeting injustices with the goal of improving the lives of not just women, but all people. The artists featured in this exhibition invite us to reflect on that h istory.

“Artist Talk with Pat Boas,” Sun Valley Museum of Art, January 11, 2021. https://www.crowdcast.io/e/artist-talkwith-pat 2 To read Duniway’s speech in full, visit: https://asduniway.org/%e2%80%9cequal-rights-for-all%e2%80%9djuly-17-1889/ 3 “A Conversation with Elena del Rivero, Alanah Odoms, Kara Tucina Olidge & Andrea Andersson,” The Brooklyn Rail, November 12, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCr2GI2ZK_k 4 For more on the relationship between the 19th Amendment and women of color, see Melissa Block’s 2020 article on the topic: https://www.npr.org/2020/08/26/904730251/yes-women-could-vote-after-the-19th-amendment-but-not-all-women-or-men 5 Leigh Raiford, “Lava Thomas’ Mugshot Portraits: Women of the Montgomery Bus Boycott,” in Lava Thomas: Mugshot Portraits: Women of the Montgomery Bus Boycott (San Francisco: Rena Bransten Gallery, 2018), 3. 6 Lava Thomas, “Contemporary Artists in Conversation with History: 1968,” Washington, D.C., April 4, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQTNi5wwrD0, as quoted in Raiford, 5. 7 For more on this history, see Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: The MIT Press, 1981). 8 Alice Constance Austin, The Next Step: How to plan for Beauty, Comfort, and Peace with Great Savings Effected by the Reduction of Waste (Los Angeles: Institute Press, 1935); as quoted in Hayden, 242. 1

SARAH SENTILLES

Sentinels: Pat Boas and the Art of Reclaiming Freedom Pat Boas, installation view; photo: Dev Khalsa

The Silent Sentinels picketed the White House. Their protest began on January 10, 1917, and was organized by Alice Paul and the National Women’s Party. The women stood at the gates of the White House day after day, reminding President Woodrow Wilson of his failure to support women’s suffrage. They did not speak, but they held banners: MR. PRESIDENT HOW LONG MUST WOMEN WAIT FOR LIBERTY. The title for Pat Boas’s five paintings comes from those early activists—Sentinels. Boas’s work was commissioned by Sun Valley Museum of Art (SVMoA) for Deeds Not Words: Women Working for Change, timed

with the 100-year anniversary of women’s suffrage in the United States. Boas titles like a poet, and she granted each sentinel a subtitle: banner, window, shield, vessel, frame. For Boas, the subtitles “sketch out the boundaries that came to define the way [she] was thinking about 19th-century suffragists’ experience,” which was “not limited to enfranchisement but extended to women’s rights more generally.” The language points to both the public and the domestic struggles. A window is a view to the world and your barrier to it. A shield obscures, hides, protects, and defends. Words here are both objects and more than objects, so crowded with meanings they seem to move. In Sentinels (banner), circles of color fill the plane of the painting. Stripes, diamonds, wavy lines—patterns repeat. “Stripes and harlequin patterns were early on seen as subversive, marking renegades,” Boas told me. “In the Middle Ages, prostitutes, jesters, thieves, and prisoners wore striped or harlequin patterned cloth.” The negative space between the circles forms the shape of stars. It was important to Boas that the negative and positive spaces—circles, stars—seem to flip back and forth. “I wanted to make a surface screen, a barrier the viewer must look through,” she said. At the painting’s center, a ghostly outline resembles a dress form and is also reminiscent of the banners the sentinels held outside the White House gates. Boas was influenced by the lush wallpaper of Ezra Pound’s house in Hailey, where she had a residency and was surrounded by its leaves, lions, cranes, sparrows, and vines. She created her own wallpaper for the show at SVMoA, transforming the exhibition room into space you might find in

Pat Boas, Sentinels (vessel), 2020, acrylic and flashe on linen over panel, courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland

Pat Boas, Sentinels (shield), 2020, acrylic and flashe on linen over panel, courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland

a home. The five paintings are informed by “the domestic,” by “boundedness,” a reminder of “the sphere many women had been relegated to.” Yet within each image is both constraint and possibility, a sense of limitlessness within finite space. In Sentinels (window), for example, a big X spans surface of the painting, while the space within the painting seems to go on and on, boundless. For me, Boas’s Sentinels capture the constraint at the heart of all nonviolent political activism. The activist’s goal is paradoxical: to make those in power grant something that they have (sometimes violently) denied. And for that to happen, the activist must appeal to the oppressor in terms and images that the oppressor recognizes as “good.” It is the activist who must be understood to follow the rules, to be civilized, non-threatening, peaceful. “This is what these protesters were doing, these sentinels,” Boas told me. “They were trying to be read as ‘respectable,’ while demanding to vote,” while being radical and engaged in direct action. There was a split within the protestors about best tactics. How long do we wait and ask politely? When “pleading and acting decorously got them no closer to their goal,” Boas told me, they chained themselves to the gates and burned Woodrow Wilson in effigy. Talking with Boas, I could not stop thinking about the unacknowledged reversals that operate when one group oppresses another, and then the oppressed group struggles for freedom—reversals visible in the Black Lives Matter protests today. Those who deny civil rights and safety to women and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of

color) are democracy’s dissidents, yet it is those who fight to expand civil rights who will be accused of being un-American, unpatriotic, violent. But activism itself is patriotic—an attempt to make a country, a city, a town better, more just. In “The Idea of America,” an essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones that was part of her 1619 project and for which she won the Pulitzer Prize, Hannah-Jones argues that it is Black Americans who have “believed fervently in the American creed” and “helped the country live up to its founding ideals.” Hannah-Jones writes, “Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different—it might not be a democracy at all.” Her essay is, in part, about trying to understand her father’s choice to fly the American flag, to celebrate the country that had denigrated him: “My father… knew what it would take me years to understand: that the year 1619 is as important to the American story as 1776. That black Americans, as much as those men cast in alabaster in the nation’s capital, are this nation’s true ‘founding fathers.’ And that no people has a greater claim to that flag than us.”1 How do you exercise citizenship when you have been shut out of it? How do you ask people in power to grant what has, really, by definition, always been yours? How do you prove your humanity to those who have enslaved you? How do you change the mind of your oppressor? And should that even be the goal? Must we work within the system? Or is it time to burn it all down? When I was a graduate student in divinity school— nearly two decades ago—I wrote an essay about feminist performance art as a kind

Pat Boas, Sentinels (frame), 2020, acrylic and flashe on linen over panel, courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland

Pat Boas, Sentinels (window), 2020, acrylic and flashe on linen over panel, courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland

of activism. Feminist performance art was a way for women to insert and assert themselves in places they have been denied entrance. Specifically, I argued that women imagining themselves as superheroines might affect institutional change through both disruptive and creative action. This was a deeply personal essay for me. I had been in the ordination process to become an Episcopal priest, and sexism had driven me out—first from a specific church and then from Christianity altogether. My politics, my sermons, my body were not welcome. I was told I did not belong. I was not holy, not priest material. To try to heal from this loss, I joined the Boston Superheroine Project. My alter ego: The Mad Priestess. I bought an elaborate priest’s robe from a local thrift store, gold and lined with peach silk. I wore a crown. And boots. If the church would not allow me to celebrate, then I would celebrate myself. If I could not be ordained as a priest, I would perform priest. I discovered, in the words of Ricardo Levins Lorales, “that the supposed rules of the game are not the real rules—once I ceased to consent to them.”2 “Our real lives hold within them our royal lives; the inspiration to be more than we are, to find new solutions; to live beyond the moment,” Jeanette Winterson writes in Art Objects. “To see outside of a dead vision is not an optical illusion.” How do you help others see outside of a dead vision? Boas, in her paintings, offers her viewers a way to do just that. The first images I ever saw by Boas were her Logo paintings—images that look like words, like letters, like text, yet nothing is legible or recognizable. Looking, I can’t make the painting mean anything. In Logo #4, an upsidedown R folds over itself, becomes a J, a D, becomes something original,

never before seen. How do you invent a new letter? How do you speak a new language? In “Protesting Like a Girl: Embodiment, Dissent, and Feminist Agency,” Wendy Parkins writes, “When women sought enfranchisement,… the problem was how to intervene in the political domain to voice their demands when they were not recognized as political subjects with a concomitant capacity for political participation.” Parkins continues, “Suffragists did not simply act to become citizens or act like citizens, they acted citizenship.”4 And for American suffragists, Boas reminded me, there were existing models for equal citizenship. Matilda Joslyn Gage—a 19thcentury women’s suffragist, Native American rights advocate, abolitionist, freethinker, and author—wrote about women’s power and position in the Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous societies. Gage’s dream of an inclusive society of equals was already a reality for the Haudenosaunee, whose territory was not far from Seneca Falls. Gage gave her first speech at the 1852 National Convention in Syracuse. “We need not expect the concessions demanded by women will be peaceably granted,” she said. “There will be a long moral warfare before the citadel yields.”5 To be able to act in ways that have been forbidden requires imagination. “When the world fails to provide an object, the imagination is there,” Elaine Scarry writes in The Body in Pain.6 And this kind of imagination is exactly what artists like Boas help viewers like me practice. The arts help “create the moral orders of the imagination with which we can get in touch and which can save us.”7 Artists—by making a painting, a drawing, a sentence, a vase—remind us that the world is made and can be unmade, remade. Art—bringing a physical object into the world where there previously was not one—illustrates on a small scale what’s possible on a larger scale, Scarry argues in The Body in Pain. You take something from inside

Pat Boas, installation view; photo: Dev Khalsa

Pat Boas, installation view

your mind and put it out in the real world—from my head to my hand, from my head to your hand—which means that what was once inside your mind is now sharable. Imagining a city, you make a house, Scarry writes. Imagining a political utopia, you help build a country. Imagining the elimination of suffering in the world, you nurse a sick friend.8 “The God of Genesis is a poet and a potter,” my mentor, the late theologian Gordon Kaufman, used to say. “This doesn’t tell us very much about God, but it does tell us what those writers thought of artists: They knew their work was world-making.” Scarry calls the creation of an artifact—a sentence, a cup, a piece of lace, a painting—a fragment of world alteration. If individuals can make these smaller changes, she writes, if one person can alter the world in fragments, just think what can be imagined together, what might be possible in community: a total reinvention of the world.9 And that is the spirit of Boas’s Sentinels too—to recognize not just the individuals who fought for women’s rights, but the masses who did and who continue to do so. Before she painted Sentinels, Boas had been creating images she calls monogram paintings, “based on those beautiful monograms that people have embroidered on their tablecloths and towels,” she told me. She thought she would make monograms to honor women who fought for suffrage but might not be well known. “I quickly realized the idea is bound up in class distinctions that made it politically problematic for me,” she told me. And the project became more complicated as she researched. Though she found a collection of women she thought would be good candidates for monograms, they were all White women—because

those are the stories that were remembered in official histories, while the activism and leadership of Black and Indigenous women were often written out.10 “We’re talking about votes for women,” Boas said, “but we are really talking about votes for White women, and some of the people that you would hold up as heroes are pretty good for their time, and some aren’t.” She continued, “I was trying to figure out how to honor my own sense about what this history really is.” Her original idea for monogram paintings evolved into the Sentinels, a title that loosens the paintings from a direct correspondence with an individual suffragist and opens it up to the protester, the sentinel, within each of us. What am I willing to stand for? Who am I willing to fight for? Day in and day out. In the face of insults and spitting and arrest and torture. Each of us can be witness to a possibility that doesn’t yet exist—and we can help bring that new, more life-giving world into being. “I am generally painting with flat colors and bounded shapes,” Boas told me, “but I am trying to make air in there, a place for the viewer to enter. There is one artist who talks about the place in the painting where it breathes.” It is impossible to write about breath inside a painting without noting that Boas worked on these paintings during the summer of 2020, during the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd, when his last words, “I can’t breathe,” became a rallying cry. This fall, I watched a conversation about “frequencies of blackness” among Tina Campt, Zara Julius, Alexander Weheliye, and Jenn Nkiru. These four thinkers and artists reminded me that rights that have been denied are not things to be “granted.” Rather they must be remembered as already yours. “Freedom is innate, a birthright, an ancestral right,” Jenn Nkiru said. “The pursuit of freedom is a pursuit toward things we are trying to reclaim.”11 Boas told me that her research for this project reinforced her belief that the United States was founded on genocide, slavery, racism, and women’s oppression. And the events of this year showed we have not come as far as we sometimes like to pretend. “I found it hard to fully celebrate this victory—one that was so very long in coming, and when it arrived clearly left out many—without an accompanying sense of mourning about how far away from ‘equal rights for all’ we remain.”

Pat Boas and Kris Blackmore, Abigail Scott Duniway: Equal Rights for All (cover), 2020, broadside, courtesy the artists and Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland

Pat Boas and Kris Blackmore, Abigail Scott Duniway: Equal Rights for All, 2020, broadside, courtesy the artists and Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland

Boas’s paintings drew me close, made me look carefully, so I might discover how they are made. I found myself counting the loops on the wallpaper, looking for what repeats. I stared at one circle on the right edge of Sentinels (shield), noticed at least six shades of blue. Shapes touch, intersect, make new forms. Boas’s Sentinels are beautiful—layered, patterned, vibrant. In On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry redefines beauty as that which can create the possibility of justice. According to Scarry, beauty places demands on its beholder.12 Beauty can function as an awakening. Scarry writes, “At the moment we see something beautiful, we undergo a radical decentering.”13 According to Scarry, “aesthetic attributes exert… pressure on us.”14 She figures the relationship between the beautiful being and the perceiver as a covenant: “Beauty seems to place requirements on us for attending to the aliveness or (in the case of objects) quasi-aliveness of our world, and for entering into its protection. Beauty is, then, a compact, or contract between the beautiful being (a person or thing) and the perceiver.”15 For me, like the banners held by the Silent Sentinels, Boas’s paintings offer a contract. They invite each viewer to activate the sentinel within. What am I willing to march for? Struggle against? Protest? What will I help change? What new world will I help bring into being?

Nikole Hannah-Jones, “The Idea of America,” The New York Times, August 14, 2019, https://www. nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/blackhistory-american-democracy.html 2 Ricardo Levins Morales, in Reimaging America: The Arts of Social Change, ed. Mark O’Brien and Craig Little (Philadephia: New Society Publishers). 17. 3 Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), p. 142. 4 Wendy Parkins, “Protesting Like a Girl: Embodiment, Dissent, and Feminist Agency,” Feminist Theory 1, no. 1 (2000), 63. 5 Susanne Marie Poulette, “Women’s History Month: The Haudenosaunee and Matilda Joslyn Gage,” The Times Union, March 6, 2017, https://blog.timesunion. com/susannepoulette/womens-history-month-thehaudenosaunee-and-matilda-joslyn-gage/222/ and https://matildajoslyngage.org/ 6 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 161-171. Scarry wrote against Sartre’s understanding of imagination in these passages. I engaged her work throughout Draw Your Weapons (New York: Random House, 2017). 7 Wayne L. Proudfoot, “Religious Belief and Naturalism,” in Radical Interpretation in Religion, ed. Nancy K. Frankenberry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 88-89. 8 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, 161-171. I wrote about this argument by Scarry in Draw Your Weapons (New York: Random House, 2017), 252. 9 Ibid. 10 Boas shared with me in conversation that there is now scholarship on the experiences and contributions of Black and women of color, for example Cathleen Cahill’s Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement (UNC Press, 2020). 11 “Frequencies of Blackness: A Listening Session,” facilitated by Tina Campt, Zara Julius, Jenn Nkiru, and Alexander Weheliye, November 20, 2020, https://www. thesojournerproject.org/frequency 12 Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 57. 13 Ibid., 111. 14 Ibid., 57. 15 Ibid., 90. 1

Pat Boas and Kris Blackmore, Abigail Scott Duniway: Equal Rights for All (interior), 2020, broadside, courtesy the artists and Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland

Pat Boas’ installation project was made possible through generous support from The Ford Family Foundation.

PAT BOAS

SENTINELS

The Sentinels paintings in the Sun Valley Museum of Art’s exhibition Deeds Not Words: Women Working for Change began with an invitation from curator Courtney Gilbert. The idea was to make new work in celebration of the centennial of the passage of the 19th Amendment, with an emphasis on the role of women in Idaho and the Pacific Northwest. I knew little about 19th-century America other than its defining moments: Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction. I knew the names Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, but little else. I had never been to Idaho. And, as an abstract painter, it was not clear how I might incorporate historical research into my work. How could I make good paintings that would inform without being didactic? My initial plan was to look for individual women who played a part in the struggle for women’s rights in the West. I imagined paintings that might be a kind of “thank you” card to individuals who were not well known and ought to be recognized and remembered. I traveled from my home in Portland to Sun Valley and stayed at SVMoA’s Hailey House, the birthplace of Ezra Pound. The house was refurbished top to bottom, including the ceilings, in facsimile Arts and Crafts patterned wallpaper, which inspired the wallpaper on which my paintings hang in the exhibition. I rooted around the small Blaine County Historical Museum and the Community Library in Ketchum, where I pored over newspapers more than 100 years old, took afternoon hikes in the breathtaking landscape, and traveled with Courtney through the rugged countryside to thumb through the State Archives in Boise. I returned home with a handful of likely candidates—intelligent and (mostly) righteous women who made unique contributions despite the obstacles. But it was the feeling of domestic boundedness of all the women’s stories that moved me most. I was learning about generations of women who decorously pleaded, to no avail, for the right to control a portion of their own lives, inside the home and without, a history predictably deformed by gender, class, and racial prejudice. What was there to celebrate in that? My work on the paintings in this exhibition began in earnest when I settled on the story of the “Silent Sentinels,” having been driven there by the racial justice protests that exploded across the country following the police murder of George Floyd. Led by Alice Paul and the National Women’s Party, the Silent Sentinels were a group of suffragists who protested daily in front of Woodrow Wilson’s White House. For two and a half years, six days a week, they stood silently with banners outside the gates, ceasing only with the passage of the 19th Amendment. During this time, more

than 2,000 women participated: When one left or was arrested, another took her place. The Sentinels paintings not only take as their focus the signs the protestors carried but also embrace the bodies of the women who held them. The message and the messengers. Solidarity in silence, refusing to be moved or denied. Banner. Window. Vessel. Shield. Frame. This was how I chose to celebrate the victories of 1896 (Idaho women’s enfranchisement) and 1920, while acknowledging that “equal rights for all” is an o ngoing struggle.

Pat Boas, Sentinels (banner), 2020, acrylic on linen over panel, courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland

ELENA DEL RIVERO

HOME ADDRESS: 19 NOTES ON ELENA DEL RIVERO’S LETTER FROM HOME (SUFFRAGE) FLAGS John A. Tyson 1. I am here as a soldier who has temporarily left the field of battle in order to explain… what civil war is like when civil war is waged by women… I am here as a person who, according to the law courts of my country, it has been decided, is of no value to the community at all... So you see there is some special interest in hearing so unusual a person address you.1 2. Elena del Rivero’s Letter from Home (Suffrage) (2020), flags recalling massive, stained dishtowels, shine a light on domestic politics. 3. The artworks play with traditional ideas of the “feminine” in order to explode categories of gender. 4. Del Rivero prompts a consideration of “women’s work,” especially the labor of care—maintaining, mending, cleaning—that occurs in the home and tends to be largely invisible. 5. Given the temporal proximity of their creation to the 2020 centennial of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave American women the right to vote, the series registers a specific history: that of the legislation of women’s suffrage in the United States with the 19th Amendment, ratified on August 18, 1920. 6. Banners paraded through the streets formed an essential part of women’s suffrage manifestations. 7. The artist’s spare design and palette recalls the bold burgundy stripes found on the “Votes for Women” sashes and buttons. 8. Deeds Not Words weaves new threads through del Rivero’s projects: Her wordless missives become Pankhurst’s standards. 9. Significant scholarly writing on the origins of tea towels and dishtowels is scarce. Heralded by the rise of the tea trade in the 18th century between China and European nations, tea towels and other accoutrements of the tea service became increasingly common household elements by the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Indeed, this was particularly true in the North American colonies. From at least the mid-19th century, the checked and gridded tea towels that are still familiar today have been mass-produced and increasingly employed for drying all kinds of dishes. 2 10. Letter from Home (Suffrage) is a multiplatform banner, in an edition of 19 (an allusion to the structure of the “supreme law of the land”).

11. In practice, women’s suffrage often meant white, upper and middle class women’s suffrage; American democracy shut out people of color as well as residents of U.S. Territories. 12. Sullying of all of the suffrage towels signals the fraught nature of commemorating a positive-yet-exclusionary event. 13. The psychotherapist and art historian Rozsika Parker argues that handwork, such as embroidery, “has been the means of educating women into the feminine ideal… but it has also proved a weapon of resistance to the constraints of femininity.”3 14. Del Rivero cuts down the myth of the “genius” of the white male 20th-century artist: Their “ur-modernist” grids were long anticipated in the kitchen. 15. Similarly, her Domestic Landscapes—unruly, mixed-media “drawings” on ledger paper—suture sewing and disegno. 16. Collectivity and hospitality. Convener over curator. 17. A generative feminist spirit imbues the series “Letter from Home.” Many people and institutions have advocated for, and organized the exhibition of, del Rivero’s flags. 18. Letter from Home (Suffrage) sparks exchange: A plurality of interpretations emerges in tandem with each host. 19. Boise, Ida.—Woman suffrage is an accomplished fact in Idaho. 4

John A. Tyson is Assistant Professor of Art at University of M assachusetts, Boston.

Emmeline Pankhurst, “Freedom or Death,” Hartford, CT, November 13, 1913 reproduced in The Guardian, April 27, 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2007/apr/27/greatspeeches1 (my emphasis). 2 See Jessica Cumberbatch Anderson, “What the Heck Are Tea Towels, Anyway?” Huffington Post: Home, November 12, 2014, https://www.huffingtonpost. com/2014/11/12/what-are-tea-towels_n_6135252.html 3 Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: IB Tauris & Co Ltd., 2010), ix. 4 “Woman Suffrage in Idaho,” Boston Daily Globe, December 13, 1896, 9. 1

Elena del Rivero, Domestic Landscape #44, gouache, thread and graphite on collaged vintage graph paper with turmeric, courtesy the artist and Henrique Faria Fine Art, New York

Elena del Rivero, Domestic Landscape #39, gouache, thread and graphite on collaged vintage graph paper with coffee, courtesy the artist and Henrique Faria Fine Art, New York

Elena del Rivero, Suffrage Flag (installation view at Henrique Faria Fine Art), 2020, nylon flag, courtesy the artist and Henrique Faria Fine Art, New York

ANGELA ELLSWORTH

As a fourth-generation Mormon, my ancestors were some of the earliest settlers to pioneer the American West. They were prophets and poets who spoke in tongues, lived within the construct of polygamy, practiced mystical aspects of Mormonism, and called themselves “a peculiar people.” Since 2003, I have embedded my research in the interdisciplinary project titled the Plural Wife Project. The work includes sculpture, drawing, and performance and is rooted in excavating my personal history to understand my queer identity as an extension of homosocial communities established by my ancestors. My great-great-grandfather, Lorenzo Snow, was the fifth prophet of the Mormon church and his sister, Eliza R. Snow, was one of the first plural wives of Joseph Smith. Lorenzo Snow had nine wives and was incarcerated for one year for “unlawful cohabitation” with more than one woman. I never knew the name of my matriarchal lineage until recently. Her name was Eleanor Houtz, she was my great-greatgrandfather’s last wife, and she was 17 when she married. As I am a queer woman with polygamous roots, my research initiates a dialogue with a contentious history and proposes new possibilities for thinking about homosocial community and family. Seer Bonnets are sculptural pioneer bonnets covered in thousands of pearl-tipped steel corsage pins. Each embellished bonnet stands in for one of the multiple wives of the early prophets of the Mormon church. These bonnets speak of colonialism, cohabitation, faith, and utopian ideals of the western United States. In reimagining traditional pioneer bonnets as fiercely ornamented headpieces, I am exploring the tensions between women having their own revelatory powers and church-sanctioned revelations. Pantaloncini are a continuation of the Plural Wife Project. This new body of work consists of sculptural oversized bloomers replicating original undergarments from the 1800s, each covered in more than 50,000 brightly colored dress pins and faux-pearl corsage pins. These bloomers, Pantaloncini, are covered (front and back) with complex designs inspired by spiritualist artists including Emma Kunz, Hilma af Klint, and Agnes Pelton. Emma Kunz’s drawings were created using a pendulum to produce resonant designs linked to sacred geometries with healing powers for select individuals. Agnes Pelton created imagined landscapes based on her spiritual transcendentalist beliefs. Hilma af Klint was the founding member of “De Fem” (“The Five”), a group of women who held séances regularly to communicate with spirits and celestial beings to uncover secrets of the universe. The compositions and shapes used in af Klint’s paintings are known to have been inspired by her “spirit guides.” She was

also considered one the first metaphysical scholars on psychic phenomena and trance drawings. This work by Kunz, af Klint, and Pelton harks back to the early mystical practices that intrigued me in early Mormonism when groups of women spoke in tongues and had their own revelations. These practices were soon forbidden by church patriarchy in the faith due to the intoxicating and uncontrollable power of a group of women translating each other’s visions. These Pantaloncini sculptures are literally splitting at the seams. They refuse to be forbidden, invisible, and silent any longer. These sculptures—stand-ins for sacred healing—have been here this whole time; it’s just that we haven’t been listening.

Angela Ellsworth, Pantaloncini: Group IV, The Ten Largest No. 6, Ahead (Hilma), 2020, 40,180 pearl corsage pins, colored dress pins, fabric, steel, courtesy the artist

LAVA THOMAS

LAVA THOMAS’ MUGSHOT PORTRAITS: WOMEN OF THE MONTGOMERY BUS BOYCOTT by Leigh Raiford By featuring black women in the honorific tradition of portraiture, placing them at the center of their own frames, [Lava] Thomas not only addresses the absence of black women in what remains a largely male-centered historiography of the movement, but encourages us to reconsider what we think we know of this history. Indeed, so many women participated in the Montgomery boycotts not simply for racial equality. Black women boycotted for over a year because, as the overwhelming majority of Montgomery’s bus ridership, they were sick of being physically molested and verbally abused by white bus drivers, police officers and other riders. Black women were not only on the front lines of the civil rights movement, but their refusal to remain silent about the intersection of racial and gender discrimination, and their insistence on what historian Danielle McGuire has called “bodily integrity,” places these issues at the frontlines of the movement as well.1 “Mugshot Portraits” works scrupulously to portray the bodily integrity of its subjects, to reflect the dignity and seriousness with which these women approached their activism. The mugshot, a photographic form that emerged out of the 19th century eugenic movement and aimed to visualize criminality as biological and rooted in racial difference, labors just as hard to deny and remove such dignity. 2 It is a tension at the heart of this project that reveals the difficulty of rendering in full human detail those who have only come to historical viability through public records explicitly meant to dehumanize.3 Thomas grapples with, and sometimes embraces, these dichotomies in illuminating and inventive ways. Excerpted from Leigh Raiford, “Lava Thomas’ Mugshot Portraits: Women of the Montgomery Bus Boycott” in Lava Thomas: Mugshot Portraits: Women of the Montgomery Bus Boycott (San Francisco: Rena Bransten Gallery, 2018), 3–5. Leigh Raiford is Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Vintage, 2011); see also Jo Ann Robinson and David Garrow, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987). 2 Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October, Vol. 39 (Winter, 1986): 3–64. 3 Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe, Number 26 (volume 12, number 2), June 2008: 1–14. 1

Lava Thomas, Harriet Tubman, 2020, graphite and conté pencil on paper, collection of Brook Hartzell and Tad Freese, image courtesy Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco

Lava Thomas, Audrey Belle Langford, 2018, graphite and conté pencil on paper, collection of Jennifer DiBrienza and Jesse Dorogusker, image courtesy Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco

Lava Thomas, Ida Mae Caldwell, 2018, graphite and conté pencil on paper, collection of Betsy Blumenthal and Jonathan Root, image courtesy Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco

ALICE CONSTANCE AUSTIN

Meyer Elkins, group viewing Alice Constance Austin’s architectural model, c. 1917, Paul Kagan Utopian Communities Collection, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

“THE SOCIALIST CITY,” THE WESTERN COMRADE (JUNE 1917) Devices for minimizing the labor of housekeeping are an important part of the general conception of the Socialist city. The frightfully wasteful process by which women throw away their time and strength and money in a continuous struggle to deal with a ridiculously haphazard equipment in the ordinary home is one of the great and useless extravagances of the present system. The central kitchens will remove the hatefully monotonous drudgery of cooking three meals a day, three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, and washing the dishes. A few improvements, such as stationary tubs, are in general use in the better class of homes in many progressive communities. In our city the stationary tubs will not be important, as the people will own the central laundry and will be able to administer it so that their effects will not be damaged by carelessness, rough work and chemicals. Electricity will contribute its thousand conveniences—lighting, heating, power for vacuum-cleaning and sewing machines, egg-beaters, irons and who knows what devices the morrow may bring forth in this age of miracles. “Built-in” furniture solves the problems of unnecessary labor. Cleaning under the heavy furniture has always been an element of danger for the frailer class of women and a temptation for neglect by the careless housewife. Beds that can be swung this way or that with a touch, and bookcases and sideboards that are part of the wall finish, all means of economy of strength and time and the achieving of real sanitary conditions. In the old times the more difficult details of cleaning were often deferred by a desperately overworked housewife to a semi-annual cyclonic disruption of the home. Some of the most beautiful modern homes have tile floors, which, beside having the harmonious tones of a P ersian rug, are the beau-ideal of simplicity of cleaning and absolute clinical sterilization. It must be remembered that women are as individual in their tastes and abilities as men, only their expression has been rigidly repressed into one channel by their economic slavery through the ages.

The fact that the girl very commonly “takes after” the father, would be enough in itself to vitiate the theory of the intrinsic conventionality of women. Relieved of the thankless and unending drudgery of an inconceivably stupid and inefficient system, by which her labors are confiscated and her burdens aggravated in every possible way, she springs forward with astonishing elasticity and power. To accuse her of lack of originality and organizing capacity is most unjust. These manifestations have been imputed to her as crimes. She has been most strictly drilled from babyhood to isolation in the home and to conformity, while her brother was stimulated to aggressive individuality by contact with the larger world. In the Socialist City the home will no longer be a Procustian [sic] bed to which each feminine personality must be made to conform by whatever maiming or fatal spiritual intellectual oppression, but a peaceful and beautiful environment in which she will have leisure to pursue her duties as wife and mother, which are now usually neglected in the overwhelming press of cooking and cleaning. She will also have time in the intervals of her rightful occupations, or when they are unfortunately denied her, for the activities which are personal expressions, her individual contribution to the welfare of the community.

Alice Constance Austin, architectural drawing for Llano del Rio, c. 1917, Paul Kagan Utopian Communities Collection, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Excerpted from the final article in a seven-part series Austin published in The Western Comrade in 1916 and 1917.

KIM STRINGFELLOW

“EXPERIMENTS IN DESERT UTOPIC LIVING,” THE MOJAVE PROJECT (NOVEMBER 2014)

The ruins of the once vibrant but short-lived Llano del Rio Co-operative Colony appear like some picturesque Craftsman folly along Antelope Valley’s Pearblossom Highway. Llano del Rio was conceived by Job Harriman, an earnest but ambitious left-leaning lawyer who nearly became the first socialist mayor of Los Angeles in 1911 had his bid for office not been derailed by some shady backroom dealings orchestrated by his more wellknown legal partner, Clarence Darrow. Disillusioned but determined to make good elsewhere, Harriman’s exit strategy envisioned an economically practical socialist colony set geographically in the southwestern Mojave Desert where it merges into the San Gabriel Mountains. Convinced the best way to spread socialism was by way of example, Harriman and his comrades sought to build the ultimate “Socialist City.” Incorporated under the Llano del Rio Company, the settlement officially opened on May Day 1914 “with five families, five pigs, a team of horses, and a cow.” Over 100 colonists arrived within the first year. By the next year, the population had more than doubled. The promise of a better life with continuous employment drew hundreds to the agrarian settlement through print advertisements in national socialist journals. Qualifications for membership required that applicants be “idealistic, industrious, and sober” and provide “three good references.” As the colony quickly expanded, so did its infrastructure. Irrigation ditches were laid to water acres of alfalfa, corn, vegetables, fruit orchards and livestock. Housing was built using materials produced at the on-site sawmill, quarry, limekilns and other industrial shops. In addition, a hotel, commissary, dairy, and grain silo were constructed. The soap factory, laundry, tannery, cannery, bakery, printing press, machine shop, post office, barbershop and other trades provided employment. Children were taught at one of California’s first and largest Montessori schools. By 1917, there were over 900 colonists living at Llano, and more than three-quarters of their provisions were supplied internally. “Llanoites” spent their spare time participating in a variety of cultural events, team sports, and a variety of extracurricular activities. Photographs of the settlement depict a happy, robust community, although it is noted that there were troubled periods when they had only carrots to eat for weeks on end. For the women involved, Llano del Rio promised a gender-neutral environment. Architect Alice Constance Austin proposed a conscious feminist design for the future Socialist City that featured a non-grid circular spatial plan with centralized communal kitchens, laundries and day care,

built-in furniture, and other modern innovations that minimized housekeeping while relying heavily on modern technologies such as electricity. Women were meant to equally participate in the everyday governance and politics of Llano. Liberating them from the daily toil of “woman’s work” was the first step in doing so. Still, even with this idealism, the colony suffered from its share of avarice, laziness, internal bickering, and factionalism. Worse were the settlement’s entangled water rights, which were challenged in court by local ranchers in 1916 and eventually lost—rendering the colony’s land holdings valueless. The final blow came from one of their own. Founding Christian Socialist investor Gentry Purviance McCorkle worked behind the scenes, quietly purchasing company shares in an effort to take control of the orchard endeavor “without the socialist element.” Although McCorkle’s maneuvers were eventually stopped, the fiasco had effectively bankrupted the colony by 1918. Edited for length from the original, which can be accessed at: mojaveproject.org/dispatches-item/experiments-desert-utopic-living/

Kim Stringfellow, Grain Silo, Llano del Rio Socialist Colony, Llano, CA, 2017, inkjet print, courtesy the artist

ARTISTS AND ESSAYIST Born in Chicago, ALICE CONSTANCE A USTIN

Center (Los Angeles), Museum of Contemporary

(1862–1955) was an architect, city planner, feminist

Art (Sydney, Australia), Zacheta National Gallery of

and socialist. Although her best-known project,

Art (Warsaw, Poland), National Review of Live Art

the proposal for Llano del Rio, was never realized,

(Glasgow, Scotland), Los Angeles Contemporary

Austin’s ideas about domestic life and architecture

Exhibitions, Museum of Contemporary Art (Den-

were influential in her lifetime and beyond. Austin

ver), Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art,

spent much of her life in California, where she

and Phoenix Art Museum. She holds an MFA from

designed a home for her parents in Santa Barbara

Rutgers University in painting and performance

in the 1880s. In 1935, she published her theories

and a BA from Hampshire College in photography

about the ideal domestic architecture and city

and painting. She attended Skowhegan artist resi-

plan in the pamphlet The Next Step: How to plan

dency on a fellowship and has worked with artists

for Beauty, Comfort, and Peace with Great Savings

Rose Shakinovsky and Claire Gavronsky (Rosen-

Effected by the Reduction of Waste.

claire) for numerous years.

PAT BOAS’ paintings, drawings, prints and digital

Born in Spain, ELENA DEL RIVERO is a multi-dis-

projects often use the form and sound-sense of

ciplinary artist with a focus on painting and works

words as maps for abstraction. Solo and group

on paper. Her work is in the collections of the Met-

exhibition venues include the Portland Art Mu-

ropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Museum of

seum, Elizabeth Leach Gallery, PDX Contemporary,

Modern Art (New York), Yale University Art Gallery

Disjecta Contemporary Art Center (Portland, OR),

(New Haven, CT), Fogg Art Museum (Cambridge,

the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (Eugene, OR),

MA), National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.),

the Hallie Ford Museum (Salem, OR), the Center

Baltimore Art Museum, Colby College Museum of

for Contemporary Art (Santa Fe), the Boise Art

Art (Waterville, ME), Institut Valenciá d’Art Mod-

Museum, the Salt Lake Art Center, the Center on

ern (Valencia, Spain) and The Reina Sofía (Madrid,

Contemporary Art (Seattle) and the Cleveland Mu-

Spain), among others. Major grants and prizes

seum of Art. She is a 2017 Hallie Ford Visual Arts

include Academia Bellas Artes de España in Rome

Fellow and the recipient of honors, fellowships,

(Prix de Rome 1988), Pollock-Krasner Foundation

grants and residencies from the the Corporation

Grant (1991 and 1995), Creative Capital Foundation

of Yaddo, the Oregon Arts Commission, the Bon-

Grant (2001), The New York Foundation for the

nie Bronson Fund, Harold and Arlene Schnitzer

Arts Fellowship (2001 and 2002), The Rockefeller

CARE Foundation and Pollock-Krasner Foundation,

Foundation Residency at The Bellagio Center, Italy

among others. Reviews of Boas’ work have ap-

(2005) and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award

peared in Art in America and Art Papers. Repre-

(2015). Most recently she was awarded a residency

sented by Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, she

at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans (2017)

is professor emerita of Art Practice in the School

and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Fellowship

of Art + Design at Portland State University.

(2019). She has lived and worked in New York since 1991 and is represented by Henrique Faria Fine Art

ANGELA ELLSWORTH is a multidisciplinary artist traversing disciplines of drawing, sculpture, installation, video, and performance. Her work has been reviewed in Art News, Frieze Art, Fiber Arts, ArtUS, and Artforum.com. She has presented work nationally and internationally including The Getty

(New York) and Travesía Cuatro (Madrid).

Based in Hailey, Idaho, SARAH SENTILLES is a

(London), the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts

writer, teacher, critical theorist, scholar of religion,

(ISEA) (Tallinn, Estonia), and at the José Martí

and author of many books, including Draw Your

National Library (Havana, Cuba). Her photographs

Weapons, which won the 2018 PEN Award for

are included at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and

Creative Nonfiction. Her next book, Stranger

Manuscript Library Western Americana Collection,

Care: A Memoir of Loving What Isn’t Ours, will be

Comer Collection of Photography at UT Dallas, UC

published by Random House in May 2021. Her writ-

Riverside’s Culver Center for the Arts, The Altered

ing has appeared in The New York Times, The New

Landscape Collection at the Nevada Museum of

Yorker, Oprah Magazine, Ms., Religion Dispatches,

Art and the Margulies Collection in Miami, FL.

and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. She’s had residencies at Hedgebrook

LAVA THOMAS studied at UCLA’s School of

and Yaddo. She earned a bachelor’s degree at Yale

Art Practice and received a BFA from California

and master’s and doctoral degrees at Harvard. She

College of the Arts. Thomas is a recipient of the

is the co-founder and current Executive Director

2020 San Francisco Artadia Award and a 2019-2021

of the Alliance of Idaho, which works to protect

Lucas Artists Fellowship Award at Montalvo Arts

the basic human rights of immigrants by engag-

Center. She has participated in artist residencies at

ing in education, outreach, and advocacy. She has

Facebook Los Angeles (2020), Headlands Center

taught at Pacific Northwest College of Art, Port-

for the Arts (2018) and the Djerassi Resident Artist

land State University, California State University

Program. In 2015 she received the Joan Mitchell

Channel Islands, and Willamette University.

Grant for Painters and Sculptors. Thomas’s work has been exhibited in various institutions including

KIM STRINGFELLOW is an artist, educator,

the National Portrait Gallery (Washington, D.C.),

writer and independent curator based in Joshua

Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washing-

Tree, CA, and is the creator and project director

ton, D.C.), the International Print Center (New

for the Mojave Project. She is an Associate Profes-

York), the Museum of the African Diaspora (San

sor at San Diego State University’s School of Art

Francisco), the Contemporary Jewish Museum

+ Design. She received her MFA from the School

(San Francisco), and the California African Ameri-

of the Art Institute of Chicago. Stringfellow’s

can Museum (Los Angeles). Her work is held in

projects have been commissioned by organiza-

the permanent collections of the United States

tions including California Humanities, Creative

Consulate General in Johannesburg, South Africa,

Work Fund, Graham Foundation for Advanced

the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the San

Studies in the Fine Arts, Los Angeles County Arts

Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Studio

Commission and the Seattle Arts Commission. She

Museum in Harlem, the Pennsylvania Academy

is a 2016 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual

of Fine Arts, the M.H. de Young Museum (San

Arts Curatorial Fellow and a 2015 Guggenheim

Francisco) and the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific

Fellow in Photography. Stringfellow’s work has

Film Archive. Thomas’s work has been written

been exhibited at the International Center for

about in Artforum, Hyperallergic, SF Chronicle,

Photography (ICP), Los Angeles County Museum

The Guardian, The Art Newspaper, and LA Weekly.

of Art (LACMA), LACE (Los Angeles Contempo-

Thomas is represented by Rena Bransten Gallery in

rary Exhibitions), The Autry National Center, The

San Francisco.

Nevada Museum of Art, The John Michael Kohler Arts Center, and Gagosian Madison Avenue among others. International exhibitions include Cubitt

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