Gender Bender

Where are the great men artists?: The story of the famous cover of the ARTnews October 1980 issue

Excerpt:

The story of the famous cover of the October 1980 issue began in January 1971. That month, ARTnews published a special issue, "Women's Liberation, Woman Artists and Art History," which featured Linda Nochlin's groundbreaking, passionate, and rigorous essay "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" The fault, she said, was with the institutions of art history and art education, which offered few provisions for the training or recognition of women artists. 

In the following decade, women artists, reflecting the feminist movement in the culture around them, explored new ways of art making as they also employed increasingly militant methods for making their presence known. The magazine chronicled those efforts in another special issue devoted to women, in October 1980. It included articles by Grace Glueck, Kay Larson, and Avis Berman on the evolution of women's art—and the status of women in the art world—during the 1970s, as well as a provocative essay by Richard Whelan titled "Are Women Better Photographers than Men?" 

For the cover, ARTnews invited 20 top women artists to the studio of photographer Neal Slavin. The group was diverse--from the eminent Isabel Bishop to the up-and-coming performance artist Laurie Anderson, Sculptor Nancy Graves was there, and so were painter Elaine de Kooning and Miriam Schapiro, whose assemblages called "femmages" were discussed in the issue. Some of the artists met there for the first time…

 Read more in ARTnews, January 2002.