Womanhouse

Womanhouse (January 30 – February 28, 1972) was a feminist art installation and performance space organized by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, co-founders of the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) Feminist Art Program. Chicago, Schapiro, their students and women artists from the local community, including Faith Wilding, participated. Chicago and Schapiro encouraged their students to use consciousness-raising techniques to generate the content of the exhibition.

Only women were allowed to view the exhibition on its first day, after which the exhibition was open to all viewers. During the exhibition's duration, it received approximately 10,000 visitors.

The Feminist Art Program began at the California Institute of the Arts in 1971 after an experimental year at Fresno State College under the name Women's Art Program. The students in the program were admitted as a group when Chicago and Schapiro were hired at Cal Arts after Chicago found that the Fresno State College Art department was reluctant to embrace her vision of a new kind of female centered art. It was their intention to teach without the use of authoritarian rules or a unilateral flow of power from teacher to student.

The Feminist Art Program was slated to occupy a new building but found itself without adequate space at the start of the school year in 1971. The lack of appropriate studio space paved the wave for a collaborative group project set to highlight the ideological and symbolic conflation of women and houses. The end result of this project was the Womanhouse installation, built by the students in an abandoned Victorian house just off of the CalArts campus.

The program utilized a method of teaching that relied on group cooperation. Students would sit in a circle and share their thoughts on a selected topic of discussion. The circular teaching method was intended to provide a "nourishing environment for growth" and to promote a "circular, more womb-like" atmosphere. The goal of these discussions was for each woman to reach a higher level of self-perception, to validate their experiences, as well as the "search for subject matter" to incorporate into artwork and to address their individual aesthetic needs. However, many students fostered resentments towards Chicago and Schapiro, claiming they were suffering from their own power trips. Chicago insisted her students feelings were the result of their own internalized sexism and unconscious manifestations of their difficulties dealing with female authority figures.

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