A.I.R. Gallery: Chapter 4

On August 3, 1972, Chairman of the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) Seymour Knox wrote a letter to inform A.I.R. that it had been approved for a grant from the council. The letter was mailed to Agnes Denes, a founding member of A.I.R. and pioneer of the land art movement, who helped bring ecological consciousness to contemporary art. 

The programs included everything from general-audience panels on criticism, the market, and public art, to “slide raps” on women’s work, to helpful “how-to’s” (“Getting Your Work Out,” “Tax Night,” workshops on pottery, weaving, and “making things”).

The artists who mobilized and organized the protest against the exhibition ended up forming Artists Meeting for Cultural Change (AMCC), an activist group that pushed for the greater representation of diversity in the arts.

The exhibition featured the work of Judith F. Baca, Beverly Buchanan, Janet Olivia Henry, Senga Nengudi, Lydia Okumura, Howardena Pindell, Selena Whitefeather, and Zarina, and sought to portray the disregard white feminists and American culture have toward women of color.

Mendieta (1948–1985), a Cuban-American artist, wrote a powerful introduction for this exhibition in which she described the injustices of being both a woman and a person of color in the US. She highlighted the erasure of women of color in the American feminist movement that they helped to build and described "a personal will to continue being 'other'." 

Howardena Pindell (b. 1943), an American artist and founding A.I.R. member, first showed her 12-minute performance video Free, White and 21 in the exhibition Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists in 1980.

 In this video piece, Pindell reflects upon her career, her relationship with white feminism, and her experience at A.I.R. specifically. This black-and-white photograph, which was featured in the exhibition catalog, captured Pindell’s silhouette as she retold stories about her personal experiences of racism and sexism.

To celebrate the diversity of womens’ artistic practices—which encompassed experimentation across and between media and disciplines—A.I.R. inaugurated its first women artist performance series in 1980. 

Carolee Schneemann (1939–2019) was a pioneer of feminist performance art who abandoned the male-dominated abstract expressionist movement in favor of performance-based work that extended the discipline of painting into space.

This exhibition proposal, completed in collaboration with A.I.R., was for a photography show that would commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and celebrate the contributions of a number of living women photographers, including Barbara Bordnick, Annie Leibovitz, Annie Griffiths, and Berenice Abbott.

In 1988, A.I.R. hosted the traveling exhibition Blue Angel: The Decline of the Sexual Stereotypes in Post-Feminist Sculpture, curated by Juli Carson and Howard McCalebb. 

It featured 12 women sculptors, including Faith Ringgold, Nancy Azara, and Hannah Wilke. Exhibited alongside the sculptures are photographs by Michael Shodahl depicting each artist in a context or environment that relates to her work.

In 1991, A.I.R. Gallery held a panel discussion at 63 Crosby Street called “Who Cares About Feminism? Art and Politics in the Nineties.” The event was part of A.I.R. Gallery’s twentieth-anniversary celebration.

A.I.R. members would also go on to participate anonymously in the Guerilla Girls, an artist-activist group that focused on combating the art world’s pervading sexist and racist attitudes through gorilla masks and campaigns.

This event highlights A.I.R.’s commitment to using its space to highlight and uplift other organizations. 

Choice: A Show of Solidarity for Women's Reproductive Rights was a 1992 exhibition at A.I.R. that featured over 750 small works touching on the issue of reproductive rights.

The event series was partially the result of Ann Pachner’s desire to engage the gallery in more dialogue with the lesbian and gay community, and coincided with her solo exhibition of wood sculptures, Not at my Father’s Table.

The exhibition included videos, performances, and panels of literary readings. This poster was designed with leaves and a lotus-like arrangement of legs with circles above them.