Alessandra Comini, 1994 Committee on Women in the Arts at the Annual Conference

CAA Conversations

In 1994, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts held a panel chaired by Judith Stein that featured speakers Linda Nochlin, Ann Sutherland Harris, and Alessandra Comini. Their individual presentations look at the progress of women artists and art historians over the previous twenty years, since 1974. The talks use the exhibition, Women Artists 1550-1950, curated by Nochlin and Harris, as a benchmark for discussion. This landmark exhibition toured four American museums in 1976-77, such as the Brooklyn Museum in 1977, and raised public awareness of the many gifted women painters, sculptors, and architects. The talks in this session compare and contrast the attitudes that prevailed when the show was being organized with views in the nineties. Releasing these recordings of the session almost another twenty years later, it is an opportunity to reassess the status of women in the arts once again. Fifty years ago in 1972, CAA founded its first committees devoted to women in the arts. This year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of this history by sharing historic materials from CAA members and archives that intersect with feminism at the organization, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts, and from its Affiliated Societies, the Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) and The Feminist Art Project (TFAP). CAA established the Committee on the Status of Women (COSW), the first committee to focus on women in CAA’s history, in 1972. The COSW was renamed the Committee on Women in the Arts (CWA) in 1996, and it continues to promote women in the visual arts field.