A.I.R. Gallery (Artists in Residence) is the first all female artists cooperative gallery in the United States.[1] It was founded in 1972 with the objective of providing a professional and permanent exhibition space for women artists during a time in which the works shown at commercial galleries in New York City were almost exclusively by male artists. A.I.R. is a not-for-profit, self-underwritten arts organization, with a board of directors made up of its New York based artists. The gallery was originally located in SoHo at 97 Wooster Street, and was located on 111 Front Street in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn until 2015. In May 2015, A.I.R. Gallery moved to its current location at 155 Plymouth St, Brooklyn, NY 11201.
A.I.R. is a non-profit organization that aims to show the diversity and artistic talent of women, to teach, to challenge stereotypes of female artists, and to subvert the historically male-dominated commercial gallery scene, with the overall hope to serve as an example for other artists who wish to realize their own art cooperative endeavors.
History
Founded in 1972, A.I.R. is the first non-profit, artist-run gallery for women in the country. The announcement for the gallery's first exhibition elaborates its founding concept best, stating, "A.I.R. does not sell art; it changes attitudes about art by women. A.I.R. offers women artists a space to show work as innovative, transitory and free of market trends as the artists' conceptions demands." Based on the feminist principles of economic cooperation and decision by consensus, A.I.R. continues to offer an alternative venue for women that protects the creative process and the individual voice of the artist.
Barbara Zucker and Susan Williams, two artists and friends, confronted the challenges of finding a dealer and decided to look for other women artists to start a co-op. Feminism at that time had barely penetrated the New York Art scene and a 1970 Whitney Museum protest drew attention to the less than 5 percent female representation. Directed by activist art criticLucy Lippard, the two, together with Dotty Attie and Mary Grigoriadis, visited 55 studios to select and invite women artists to form a co-op.
At the first meeting on March 17, 1972, in Williams' loft, women artists met, among them were Maude Boltz, Linda Vi Vona, Nancy Spero, Louise Bourgeois, Howardena Pindell, Ree Morton, Harmony Hammond, Cynthia Carlson and Sari Dienes. For the artists themselves, their work and exhibition goals were all about quality. Still, having to deal with feminist politics was in the center, which meant fighting prejudices and fears that the showings would be considered second-rate. After the opening, one man said grudgingly, "Okay you did it; you found 20 good women artists. But that's it."[2]
The gallery was structured to be both an exhibition space for art by women and a radical, progressive, and even subversive, not-for-profit institution. Its cooperative nature and its democratic structure have meant that the members vote on all decisions and participate in monthly meetings to plan exhibitions, programs, and the overall direction of the gallery. Each artist pays membership dues and thus has ownership over the organization itself and their own career. In this way, the structure of A.I.R. differs from that of dealer-driven galleries. Incoming artists are chosen through a rigorous peer review process that includes reviewing the works of applicants, lengthy discussions and a studio visit by current members.[3] Each artist has to curate her own show, which allows for experimentation and risks that are not always possible in commercial settings.[4] The group soon acknowledged the importance of building a heritage; collaborations and international group shows, in parts curated by their members, were established. The fellowship program in its earliest years provided sponsorship on a case-by-case basis as funds were available.[5][6]
Name
The name "A.I.R." arose when, in a first meeting, artist member Howardena Pindell suggested "Jane Eyre". From that came "air" – then, "A.I.R." This was also a reference to the "Artist in Residence" Certification given by the city to allow artists to live in otherwise illegal Soho commercial spaces.[7]
Programs
Monday-Night Program Series 1972–1981; Current Issue Series 1982–1987 (both programs included general-audience panels on criticism, the market, public art as well as "how-tos" – for example 'tax night', and so on); Exhibition Programs: Solo Shows of Gallery Artists; Sponsored Solo Shows for Fellowship Artists; Group Shows of National Artists; Group Shows designed to include a broader community of women artists such as the "Generations" invitational series and juried Biennial Exhibitions; Lectures/Symposia/Panels; Fellowship Program; Internship Program
The Fellowship Program, founded in 1993, is open to all self-identified women and non-binary[8] artists who have never had a solo show in NYC, or who have not had a solo show in NYC in the last ten years, outside of an educational or not-for-profit venue. The Fellowship Program is structured to give the Fellows the opportunity to develop their work in preparation for a solo show, to build relationships with other artists and arts professionals, and acquire skills necessary to maintain a not-for-profit gallery or arts organization. The Fellows leave the program with a series of naturally forged relationships, experiences, and essential skill sets that are necessary to continue their careers as visual artists.
Fellowship artists include (1993–2021): Tenesh Webber, Diyan Achjadi, Angie Eng, Debra Hampton, Juri Kim, Sheila Manion-Artz, Fay Torres Yap, Elizabeth Zechel, Enid Crow, Christine Gedeon, Marni Horwitz, Fay Ku, Diane Meyer, Jinnine Pak, Hye-Kyung Kim, Jill Parisi, Sarah Blackwelder, Pattie Lee Becker, Soyeon Cho, Betsy Alwin, Megan Biddle, Margarida Correia, Stephanie Lempert, Brynna K. Tucker, Claudia Vieira, Lauren Simkin Berke, Barbara Hatfield, Kharis Kennedy, Katherine Dolgy Ludwig, Anita Ragusa, Hanna Sandin, Nivi Alroy, Monica Carrier, Ari Tabei, Elena Wen, Jennifer Williams, Jennifer Wroblewski, Damali Abrams, Suzanne Broughel, Kira Nam Greene, Jee Hwang, Keun Young Park, Annette Rusin, Jiyoon Koo, Juliana Cerqueira Leite, Meghan Mcinnis, Anne Percoco, Sam Vernon, Elisabeth Waterston, Rachel Farmer, Dina Kantor, Amelia Marzec, Jayanthi Moorthy, Laura Petrovich-Cheney, Susan Stainman, Ian Gerson, Shanti Grumbine, Jessie Henson, Sujin Lee, Hannah Smith Allen, Naho Taruishi, Aimée Burg, Annie Ewaskio, Bang-Geul Han, Einat Imber, Katherine Tzu-Ian Mann, Régine Romain, Željka Blakšić, Amber Esseiva, Sara Mejia Kriendler, Amanda Turner Pohan, Alexandria Smith, Claudia Sohrens, Fanny Allié, Andrea Burgay, Shadi Harouni, Daniela Kostova, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Negin Sharifzadeh, Manal Abu-Shaheen, Elizabeth Hoy, Eleanor King, Marykate Maher, Alison Owen, Naomi Elena Ramirez, Rachelle Dang, H. A. Halpert, Sareh Imani, Victoria Manganiello, Aliza Shvarts, Crys Yin, Melanie Crean, Isabella Cruz-Chong, Kim Dacres, Macon Reed, Gabriela Vainsencher, Zhiyuan Yang, Aya Rodriguez-Izumi, Caroline Wayne, Daniela Puliti, Dominique Duroseau, Karen Leo, Megan Pahmier, Aika Akhmetova, Destiny Belgrave, Lizania Cruz, Kyoung Eun Kang, Sky Olson, Bat-Ami Rivlin.
Reception
A.I.R. Gallery has played a widely recognized role in the art world since the institution's founding. In 1978, notable feminist painter Sylvia Sleigh commemorated the 21 current members (including Sleigh herself) of A.I.R. through her painting A.I.R. Group Portrait.[9] In the essay "The Enemies of Women's Liberation in the Arts Will be Crushed", Art Historian Meredith Brown praises how A.I.R. "created a wide-ranging network of individuals and organizations that collectively rallied to counter the patriarchy of the art establishment".[10] Art Historian Lenore Malen similarly acknowledges the influence of A.I.R. stating "New York City where I moved in 73 I saw how the women's collectives: A.I.R., Soho 20, and others were shaping the feminist art movement".[11] While many acknowledge the influence of A.I.R. on feminist art, the gallery has received some criticism in its use of government funding. In her article "The Balance Sheet: A.I.R. and Government Funding", Meredith Brown argues that "A.I.R. began to rely on financial support from sources whose bureaucratic complexities necessitated the gallery shift its organizational structure, if not compromise its feminist principles".[11]
Gallery locations
The first, self-renovated location for the inaugural A.I.R. exhibition was 97 Wooster Street, which opened on September 16, 1972. After occupying a gallery space at 63 Crosby Street from 1981–1994, A.I.R. Gallery was located at 40 Wooster Street from 1994–2002, at 511 West 25th Street from 2002–2008 and opened a new space at 111 Front Street # 228, Dumbo - Brooklyn, New York, starting with The History Show on October 2, 2008. In May 2015, A.I.R. Gallery moved to a new location. The current address is 155 Plymouth St, Brooklyn, NY 11201.
There are five tiers of membership programs for self-defined women artists at AIR Gallery. The New York Artist membership is open to self-identified women artists residing in the New York area. The National Membership program includes 22 self-identified women artist throughout the United States. Alumnae membership is open to any former New York, National, and Fellowship Artists who wish to remain a part of the gallery. After maintaining 7 years of membership at A.I.R., artists will automatically be eligible for the Adjunct Program.[13]
Artists
Artists whose works have been exhibited at the gallery include:
Nancy Spero was an American visual artist. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Spero lived for much of her life in New York City. She married and collaborated with artist Leon Golub. As both artist and activist, Nancy Spero had a career that spanned fifty years. She is known for her continuous engagement with contemporary political, social, and cultural concerns. Spero chronicled wars and apocalyptic violence as well as articulating visions of ecstatic rebirth and the celebratory cycles of life. Her complex network of collective and individual voices was a catalyst for the creation of her figurative lexicon representing women from prehistory to the present in such epic-scale paintings and collage on paper as Torture of Women (1976), Notes in Time on Women (1979) and The First Language (1981). In 2010, Notes in Time was posthumously reanimated as a digital scroll in the online magazine Triple Canopy. Spero has had a number of retrospective exhibitions at major museums.
Dotty Attie is an acclaimed feminist painter, and the co-founder of the first all-female cooperative art gallery in America, A.I.R. Gallery. Her work has been widely exhibited and is in many major museum collections, including the Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art, and the National Gallery in London. She also has the rare distinction of having an all-female punk rock band named after her. Attie currently resides in New York, New York.
The feminist art movement in the United States began in the early 1970s and sought to promote the study, creation, understanding and promotion of women's art. First-generation feminist artists include Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, Suzanne Lacy, Judith Bernstein, Sheila de Bretteville, Mary Beth Edelson, Carolee Schneeman, Rachel Rosenthal, and many other women. They were part of the Feminist art movement in the United States in the early 1970s to develop feminist writing and art. The movement spread quickly through museum protests in both New York and Los Angeles, via an early network called W.E.B. that disseminated news of feminist art activities from 1971 to 1973 in a nationally circulated newsletter, and at conferences such as the West Coast Women's Artists Conference held at California Institute of the Arts and the Conference of Women in the Visual Arts, at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C..
Sylvia Sleigh was a Welsh-born naturalised American realist painter who lived and worked in New York City. She is known for her role in the feminist art movement and especially for reversing traditional gender roles in her paintings of nude men, often using conventional female poses from historical paintings by male artists like Diego Vélazquez, Titian, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Her most well-known subjects were art critics, feminist artists, and her husband, Lawrence Alloway.
Hera Gallery is a small, non-profit artist cooperative in Wakefield, Rhode Island USA. Created within the context of the feminist art movement, Hera Gallery was a pioneer in the genesis of artist-run spaces. Its founding objective in 1974 was to provide a venue for women artists, under-represented at the time in commercial galleries. As the cultural climate changed in the 1980s, the gallery broadened its scope to include visual artists of more gender identities. Concurrently, Hera curated more topical exhibitions with a broadened spectrum of social awareness and activism. To this day, the gallery provides contemporary artists with the opportunity to address cultural, social, and political issues and to maintain creative control.
Linda Goode Bryant is an African-American documentary filmmaker and activist. She founded the gallery Just Above Midtown (JAM), which was the focus of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in the fall of 2022, organized by curator Thomas Lax.
SOHO20 Artists, Inc., known as SOHO20 Gallery, was founded in 1973 by a group of women artists intent on achieving professional excellence in an industry where there was a gross lack of opportunities for women to succeed. SOHO20 was one of the first galleries in Manhattan to showcase the work of an all-woman membership and most of the members joined the organization as emerging artists. These artists were provided with exhibition opportunities that they could not find elsewhere.
Howardena Pindell is an American artist, curator and educator. She is known as a painter and mixed media artist, her work explores texture, color, structures, and the process of making art; it is often political, addressing the intersecting issues of racism, feminism, violence, slavery, and exploitation. She is known for the wide variety of techniques and materials used in her artwork; she has created abstract paintings, collages, "video drawings," and "process art."
Nancy J. Azara is an American sculptor. Her work involves sculpture using carved, assembled and highly painted wood with gold and silver leaf and encaustic. The wood, the paint and the layers that make up the sculpture record a journey of memory, images and ideas. Azara's other art pieces involve collages, banners, prints where she continuously reshapes the elements and materials. Azara has worked and carved in wood for many years because of the presence and symbolism inherent in trees and because the metaphor of the tree is a “stand-in” for herself. This statement and representation of tree as “self” and woman is timely in a world which is losing touch with its primal essence.
The Women's Caucus for Art (WCA), founded in 1972, is a non-profit organization based in New York City, which supports women artists, art historians, students, educators, and museum professionals. The WCA holds exhibitions and conferences to promote women artists and their works and recognizes the talents of artists through their annual Lifetime Achievement Award. Since 1975 it has been a United Nations-affiliated non-governmental organization (NGO), which has broadened its influence beyond the United States. Within the WCA are several special interest causes including the Women of Color caucus, Eco-Art Caucus, Jewish Women Artist Network, International Caucus and the Young Women's Caucus. The founding of the WCA is seen as a "great stride" in the feminist art movement.
Artists Space is a non-profit art gallery and arts organization first established at 155 Wooster Street in Soho, New York City. Founded in 1972 by Irving Sandler and Trudie Grace and funded by the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), Artists Space provided an alternative support structure for young, emerging artists, separate from the museum and commercial gallery system. Artists Space has historically been engaged in critical dialogues surrounding institutional critique, racism, the AIDS crisis, and Occupy Wall Street.
New York Feminist Art Institute (NYFAI) was founded in 1979 by women artists, educators and professionals. NYFAI offered workshops and classes, held performances and exhibitions and special events that contributed to the political and cultural import of the women's movement at the time. The women's art school focused on self-development and discovery as well as art. Nancy Azara introduced "visual diaries" to artists to draw and paint images that arose from consciousness-raising classes and their personal lives. In the first half of the 1980s the school was named the Women's Center for Learning and it expanded its artistic and academic programs. Ceres Gallery was opened in 1985 after the school moved to TriBeCa and, like the school, it catered to women artists. NYFAI participated in protests to increase women's art shown at the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art and other museums. It held exhibitions and workshops and provided rental and studio space for women artists. Unable to secure sufficient funding to continue its operations, NYFAI closed in 1990. Ceres Gallery moved to SoHo and then to Chelsea and remained a gallery for women's art. However, a group continues to meet called (RE)PRESENT, a series of intergenerational dialogues at a NYC gallery to encourage discussion across generations about contemporary issues for women in the arts. It is open to all.
WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution was an exhibition of international women's art presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles from March 4–July 16, 2007. It later traveled to the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the PS1 Contemporary Art Center, where it was on view February 17–May 12, 2008. The exhibition featured works from 120 artists and artists' groups from around the world.
Women's Art Resources of Minnesota (WARM) is a women's art organization based in the U.S. state of Minnesota. It was founded in 1976 as Women's Art Registry of Minnesota, a feminist artist collective. The organization ran the influential WARM Gallery in downtown Minneapolis from 1976 to 1991.
Vernita Nemec, also known by the performance name Vernita N'Cognita, is a visual and performance artist, curator, and arts activist based in New York City. She earned her BFA at Ohio University in 1964 and has resided in New York City since 1965. She is also known for her soft stuffed sculpture, collages, artist's books, photographs, and installations. Nemec adopted the pseudonym "N'Cognita," a pun on incognito, as a way to honor artists who have not become well-known.
Susan Michod is an American feminist painter who has been at the forefront of the Pattern and Decoration movement since 1969. Her work "consists of monumental paintings [which are] thickly painted, torn, collaged, spattered, sponged, sprinkled with glitter and infused with a spirit of love of nature and art," the art critic Sue Taylor has written.
Janet Henry is a visual artist based in New York City.
Women Artists News was a feminist magazine produced between 1975 and 1992 in New York City.
The Women's Interart Center was a New York City-based multidisciplinary arts organization conceived as an artists' collective in 1969 and formally delineated in 1970 under the auspices of Women Artists in Revolution (WAR) and Feminists in the Arts. In 1971, it found a permanent home on Manhattan's far West Side.
↑ Carey Lovelace, a.i.r. ways. From the Catalogue: A.I.R. Gallery: The History Show, September 16 – December 12, 2008, at Tracy/Barry Gallery, Bobst Library, NYU and A.I.R. Gallery: The History Show, October 2 – November 29, 2008, and November 6 to 29, 2008, at A.I.R. Gallery, Dumbo, New York
↑ Kat Griefen and Susan Bee, artists in residence: a short history. From the Catalogue: "A.I.R. Gallery: The History Show"
↑ Dena Muller, A.I.R. Gallery: a space-time continuum. From the Catalogue: “A.I.R. Gallery: The History Show”
↑ Meredith A. Brown, "The Balance Sheet: A.I.R. Gallery and Government Funding", vol. January 27, 2011, n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal pp.29–37
↑ Carey Lovelace, a.i.r. ways. From the Catalogue: *A.I.R. Gallery: The History Show"
Meredith A. Brown 'The Balance Sheet: A.I.R. Gallery and Government Funding' n.paradoxa:international feminist art journal vol.January 27, 2011, pp.29–37
Meredith A. Brown, 'The Enemies of Women's Liberation in the Arts Will be Crushed': A.I.R. Gallery's Role in the American Feminist Art Movement. Smithsonian Archives of American Art publications,
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