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.
Hera Gallery was created in 1974, the year that the alternative gallery movement burst beyond major cities and into more remote locations, like Wakefield, Rhode Island. [1] It was conceived from a consciousness-raising group consisting mostly of artists, and often associated with the nearby University of Rhode Island, that started meeting in 1969. [2] One of the common topics to discuss were the difficulties of balancing the domestic responsibilities of being wife and mother with a professional artistic career. [3] The women discussed the difficulty in having their work represented in Manhattan galleries, where apparent sexism from gallery owners caused their work to be disregarded. [2] Hera Gallery was thus created in order to foster a professional community of women artists, in the vein of other recently established women-run artist cooperatives, [3] such as New York City's A.I.R. Gallery. At the time, a Providence Journal writer commented that "...a women's art center named after a bitchy Greek goddess and housed in a barn that used to be a laundry is New England's only art gallery completely owned and controlled by women..." [1]
The gallery continues to host topical exhibitions. Their 2022 exhibition, "Erosion," highlighted artist's emotional responses to the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court Case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. [4] The gallery also hosts community outreach programs; from September 2020 to June 2021 the gallery ran the program The Green Stitch: Knitting Community Together, in which Hera Gallery, The Rhode Island Natural History Survey, and Save the Bay RI hosted monthly environmentalist presentations and corresponding craft activities. [5]
Initially the organization of Hera Gallery consisted of non-hierarchical egalitarian committees, influenced by feminist ideals. [2] [3] As the gallery grew, its board of directors, once only represented by artist-members, was appended with a community Advisory Board from 1986–2000, according to the gallery's unpublished “Addendum to the History of Hera”. Furthermore, when the Advisory Board was discontinued in 2000, the Board of Directors began including external community members (Addendum). Since 1992 (Addendum) there has also been a Gallery Director part-time paid position. [6]
Hera Gallery offers its members an annual solo exhibition, inclusion in group exhibitions, curatorial opportunities, and positions on the Board of Directors. [6] It serves the surrounding community by “encouraging ethnic and cultural diversity in both audience and program development. [6] ”
Since its inception, Hera Gallery has resided in a building that was a garage in the 1920s, then a laundromat, and later a flea market, before finally being outfitted by the founding artists and their loved ones. Its landlord throughout this time was a sympathetic URI professor who kept the rent low for them. [2] After his recent demise, the family put the land on the market but waited for a buyer whose plan included preserving the gallery. [7] In September 2007 it was announced that a buyer plans on demolishing the existing building to create a mixed-use development including residential condominiums and inclusion of the gallery. [8]
In 2022 the gallery opened their BackSpace Gallery, a space dedicated to showing experimental, multi-media, and installation art. [9]
Judy Chicago is an American feminist artist, art educator, and writer known for her large collaborative art installation pieces about birth and creation images, which examine the role of women in history and culture. During the 1970s, Chicago founded the first feminist art program in the United States at California State University, Fresno which acted as a catalyst for feminist art and art education during the 1970s. Her inclusion in hundreds of publications in various areas of the world showcases her influence in the worldwide art community. Additionally, many of her books have been published in other countries, making her work more accessible to international readers. Chicago's work incorporates a variety of artistic skills, such as needlework, counterbalanced with skills such as welding and pyrotechnics. Chicago's most well known work is The Dinner Party, which is permanently installed in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. The Dinner Party celebrates the accomplishments of women throughout history and is widely regarded as the first epic feminist artwork. Other notable art projects by Chicago include International Honor Quilt, Birth Project, Powerplay, and The Holocaust Project. She is represented by Jessica Silverman gallery.
Yocheved (Juki) Weinfeld is an artist, museum educator and developer of interactive exhibitions for children. She studied at the Tel Aviv University and the State Art Teacher's College (Israel); at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the Michaelis School of Art at the University of Cape Town in South Africa).
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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.
Lynda Benglis is an American sculptor and visual artist known especially for her wax paintings and poured latex sculptures. She maintains residences in New York City, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Kastellorizo, Greece, and Ahmedabad, India.
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Natalie Kampen was an American art historian and women's studies professor.
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