Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists or Ad Hoc Women Artists' Committee was founded in 1970 and included members from

Women Artists in Revolution Women Artists in Revolution (WAR) was a New York City-based collective of American women artists and activists that formed in 1969. They seceded from the male-dominated Art Workers' Coalition (AWC), prompted by the Whitney Museum of American Art's 1 ...

(WAR), the

Art Workers' Coalition The Art Workers' Coalition (AWC) was an open coalition of artists, filmmakers, writers, critics, and museum staff that formed in New York City in January 1969. Its principal aim was to pressure the city's museums – notably the Museum of Modern Art ...

(AWC) and Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation (WSABAL). Founding members included Lucy Lippard, Poppy Johnson, Brenda Miller,

Faith Ringgold Faith Ringgold (born October 8, 1930 in Harlem, New York City) is an American painter, writer, mixed media sculptor, and performance artist, best known for her narrative quilts. Early life Faith Ringgold was born the youngest of three children ...

and later, Nancy Spero.

1970 Whitney Museum Protest

The group's specific focus was to address the under-representation of women in the Whitney Museum's Painting and Sculpture Annual, the precursor to what is now known as the

Whitney Biennial The Whitney Biennial is a biennial exhibition of contemporary American art, typically by young and lesser known artists, on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, United States. The event began as an annual exhibition in ...

. During the months leading up to the exhibition in December 1970, the Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists staged numerous protests, sit-ins, and interventions at the museum circulating their demand that 50% of artists represented in the upcoming exhibition be women, and that fifty percent of those women be black. The 1969 Whitney Sculptural Annual, for instance, featured 143 artists, eight of which were women. Coinciding with the opening of the 1970 Sculpture Annual, they printed fake tickets and distributed a forged press release stating that "half the artists in the exhibition would indeed be women, with a proportional percentage of black, Asian, and Puerto Rican artists," forcing the director of the museum to issue a statement to the contrary. The group also placed tampons and uncooked eggs around the Whitney Museum, on which the artists had written their "fifty percent" message. The group's actions had quantifiable results—the number of women represented rose from 4.5 to 22 percent in one year. Faith Ringgold describes some of this protest work in her memoir, ''We Flew Over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold''. Ringgold writes, "The Whitney Museum became the focus of our attention. We went there often to deposit eggs. Unsuspecting male curatorial staff would pick up the eggs and experience the shock of having raw egg slide down the pants of their fine tailor-made suits. Sanitary napkins followed...Generally, everywhere the staff went they found loud and clear messages that women artists were on the Whitney's case."

Further works

In the winter of 1970-71 the group established the Women's Art Registry, a slide collection of work by female artists, which served as a model for later registries like

West-East Bag West-East Bag (WEB) was an international women artists network active from 1971 to 1973. West-East Bag formed towards the beginning of the feminist art movement in the United States. Sources differ as to the exact origin of WEB. In one account, a ...

(W.E.B.). The registry was housed by several galleries, including cooperatives 55 Mercer and A.I.R., before going to Special Collections and University Archives at

Rutgers University Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a Public university, public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's ...

in New Jersey, where it is now archived. In 1972, the Committee (on the colophon listed as:

Maude Boltz Maude Boltz (1939-2017) was an American artist and co-founder of the A.I.R. Gallery. Biography Boltz was born in 1939 in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. She attended the Philadelphia College of Arts and Yale University. In 1972 Boltz co-founded the ...

Loretta Dunkelman Loretta Dunkelman, (born 1937 in Paterson, NJ) is an American artist based in New York City, NY. She studied at what is now Rutgers University, but was the New Jersey College for Women and later the Doulgass Residential College, where she completed ...

Joan Snyder Joan Snyder (born April 16, 1940) is an American Painting, painter from New York City, New York. She is a MacArthur Fellows Program, MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellow, and a National Endowment for the Arts, National End ...

, Nancy Spero,

May Stevens May Stevens (June 9, 1924 – December 9, 2019) was an American feminist artist, political activist, educator, and writer. Early life and education May Stevens was born in Boston to working-class parents, Alice Dick Stevens and Ralph Stanley ...

and Joyce Kozloff) published th
Rip-Off File
The 'dossier' was based on responses they received when Spero and Kozloff sent letters to 800 women in the art world asking for stories about their experiences with sexism and discrimination. ''The Rip-Off File'' was installed as an exhibition at the Mabel Smith Douglass Library during the 1973-74 academic year.

References

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1970 Whitney Museum Protest

Further works

References

Further reading