The Feminist Origins

The Feminist Origins:VDB’s On Art and Artists Interview Collection

"In April 1974, Video Data Bank co-founders Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield conducted their first interview, an in-depth conversation with art historian and curator Marcia Tucker. During the remainder of that year, Blumenthal and Horsfield went on to interview four more notable art world women: Joan Mitchell, Lucy Lippard, Agnes Martin and Ree Morton.

Seen together, these five interviews mark a seminal moment in the history of 20th Century art, a moment in which women artists were increasingly being asked to define and position their practice within the growing feminist movement. Blumenthal and Horsfield’s interviews with these remarkable women each touch on the question of gender and the role it played in shaping their aesthetics and career trajectories in a male dominated art world. Through these conversations, Lippard, Mitchell, Morton, Tucker, and Martin each personally define their experience as women artists, and talk about the influence of feminism on their own life. With self-awareness and considerable thought, these artists each embrace (or dismiss) an artistic vision aligned with femininity. Four decades later, these important conversations shed light on an exceptional period in which a new awareness of oppressive social constraints and gender inequality was matched by an exuberant sense of excitement and potential about what “women’s work” in the field of art might truly be." VDB