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 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 Lac ...

. Sources differ as to the exact origin of WEB. In one account, artists

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 ...

and

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 Pa ...

formed the idea with art critic Lucy R. Lippard in April 1971 after visiting the exhibition ''26 Women Artists''. A second account places ''

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' art writer

Grace Glueck Grace Glueck (July 24, 1926 – October 8, 2022) was an American arts journalist. She worked for ''The New York Times'' from 1951 until the early 2010s. Early life Glueck was born in New York City on July 24, 1926. Her father, Ernest, worked ...

at the formation and a third has Chicago and Schapiro meeting Lippard, Marcia Tucker and Ellen Lanyon during a lecture trip. Lippard recalls mentioning East Coast Bag while talking to Chicago, who replied "ah ha, if you're going to say East Coast Bag then we're going to call it West East Bag instead of East West Bag, because the west coast came first." In 1971, West-East Bag published the first issue of their newsletter ''W.E.B.'' to link efforts in their home cities. The inaugural issue made mention of tactics used against museums to protest the lack of women artists in their collections and exhibitions. Schapiro (Los Angeles), Lippard (New York), and Ellen Lanyon (Chicago) took turns producing the then-monthly newsletter. Like the Ad Hoc Women Artists' Committee before them, the group encouraged chapters to set up slide registries, creating an archive of the work of women artists on

photographic slide In photography, reversal film or slide film is a type of photographic film that produces a positive image on a transparent base. Instead of negatives and prints, reversal film is processed to produce transparencies or diapositives (abbreviat ...

s. WEB slide registries were created in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and Seattle. WEB members also held

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 ...

sessions and organized protests of their local art institutions. Local chapters such as Boston and Chicago published their own WEB newsletters, sponsored conferences, and organized monthly meetings. By April 1972, Chicago's WEB chapter had sponsored a series of conferences that led to the formation of feminist arts organizations across the Midwest. WEB members in Chicago organized the first women artists' conference there, ''Artists Meet'' in Spring 1973. West-East Bag laid the foundation for a series of cooperatively run women's galleries, starting with A.I.R. Gallery in 1972. West-East Bag grew to include representatives from 52 cities and eight countries. By 1973, WEB ceased being active on a national level.

References

{{Feminist art movement in the United States Arts organizations established in 1971 Feminist art organizations in the United States Newsletters

See also

References