The Conference of Women in the Visual Arts was an event held on April 20, 1972, through 22, 1972 at the

Corcoran Gallery of Art The Corcoran Gallery of Art was an art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, that is now the location of the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, a part of the George Washington University. Overview The Corcoran School of the Arts & Design ...

in Washington DC. The conference was organized by Cynthia Bickley,

Mary Beth Edelson Mary Beth Edelson (born Mary Elizabeth Johnson) (6 February 1933 - 20 April 2021) was an American artist and pioneer of the feminist art movement, deemed one of the notable "first-generation feminist artists." Edelson was a printmaker, book art ...

, Barbara Frank, Enid Sanford, Susan Sollins, Josephine Withers, and Yvonne Wulff. The impetus behind the conference was anger over the complete lack of women represented at the Corcoran Biennial the previous year, 1971. The three day conference consisted of lectures and panels of women artists and art historians. It was attended by over 300 female artists, art historians, critics and museum curators. Notable speakers and attendees included Liza Bear,

Adelyn Dohme Breeskin Adelyn Dohme Breeskin (1896–1986) was an American curator, museum director, and art historian known for her longtime leadership of the Baltimore Museum of Art and Mary Cassatt scholarship. Biography Adelyn Dohme was born in 1896 in Baltimore t ...

Judy Chicago Judy Chicago (born Judith Sylvia Cohen; July 20, 1939) 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 ...

Elaine de Kooning Elaine Marie Catherine de Kooning (, née Fried; March 12, 1918 – February 1, 1989) was an Abstract Expressionist and Figurative Expressionist painter in the post-World War II era. She wrote extensively on the art of the period and was an edito ...

Helen Frankenthaler Helen Frankenthaler (December 12, 1928 – December 27, 2011) was an American abstract expressionist painter. She was a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work for over six decades (early 1950s u ...

Alice Neel Alice Neel (January 28, 1900 – October 13, 1984) was an American visual artist, who was known for her portraits depicting friends, family, lovers, poets, artists, and strangers. Her paintings have an expressionistic use of line and color, psyc ...

Cindy Nemser Cindy Heller Nemser (March 26, 1937 – January 26, 2021) was an American art historian and writer. Founder and editor of the ''Feminist Art Journal'', she was an activist and prominent figure in the feminist art movement and was best known for he ...

Linda Nochlin Linda Nochlin (''née'' Weinberg; January 30, 1931 – October 29, 2017) was an American art historian, Lila Acheson Wallace Professor Emerita of Modern Art at New York University Institute of Fine Arts, and writer. As a prominent feminist art h ...

, M. C. Richards, Enid Sanford,

Miriam Schapiro Miriam Schapiro (also known as Mimi) (November 15, 1923 – June 20, 2015) was a Canadian-born artist based in the United States. She was a painter, sculptor, printmaker, and a pioneer of feminist art. She was also considered a leader of the Pat ...

, and

June Wayne June Claire Wayne (March 7, 1918 – August 23, 2011) was an American painter, printmaker, tapestry innovator, educator, and activist. She founded Tamarind Lithography Workshop (1960–1970), a then California-based nonprofit print shop dedicated ...

. It was one of the first conferences to focus on the place of women in the visual arts, encouraging participation and

consciousness-raising Consciousness raising (also called awareness raising) is a form of activism popularized by United States feminists in the late 1960s. It often takes the form of a group of people attempting to focus the attention of a wider group on some cause or ...

References

{{Authority control Women's conferences Feminism and history American artist groups and collectives American contemporary art