Chapter 1 provides an overview of the early histories of the feminist art movement as it was developing in various urban centres across the United States and Canada, with emphasis on the material sites of making and their implications for the constructions of history that have attached to such physical sites of the Los Angeles Woman’s Building, Montreal’s La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse, and A.I.R. Gallery in New York City. I consider how in subsequent decades of historicising the movement, well documented through oral histories, exhibitions, and online repositories, former participants have commented on this engagement with form and materials as an arduous yet essential part of the process of recognising themselves as artists, while form and materials coalesced into some of the most emblematic historical containers for feminist art production. I consider how alternative institutions negotiated visibility and recognition with the changing makeup of the neighbourhoods in which they were located, and how subcultural communities address victimisation of other local communities by gentrification, and their potential complicity in this process. This chapter also critiques how certain feminist art histories have become hegemonic and turns attention to more marginalised histories of feminist art spaces that served as correctives and created additional enclaves for feminist art production for racialised artists.
Histories of feminist, queer, and queer feminist art can be traced onto the histories of the institutions, organisations, collectives, and structures that have helped to secure and legitimise feminist and queer art practices. Building histories examines select feminist and queer alternative art spaces across Canada and the United States and the ways by which contemporary queer and feminist practices support and challenge the dominant narratives through which these histories have commonly been understood. Beginning with an exploration of the foundational histories of feminist art, the book examines how queer and feminist institutions have taken divergent paths in subsequent decades, and how they might be read through the spaces, communities and cities that provide the conditions for their cultivation. The book contributes to the development of histories of sites of feminist and queer cultural production and considers the enduringly precarious position of feminist and queer art histories relative to more mainstream art histories. It also examines how present-day queer and feminist artists engage and respond to the histories, spaces, and institutions they have inherited.