A.I.R. Gallery: Chapter 2

Tucker elaborated on the obstacles the artists faced when building the space, such as communication difficulties between the artists, and how the group overcame them.

She emphasized that A.I.R.’s success could be attributed to the fact that each co-founding artist had been chosen purely on the basis of their work’s merit. 

Barbara Rose, a critic, and historian, wrote for New York Magazine that A.I.R. was aesthetically pleasing and beautifully put-together, noting that it offered its art for prices lower than those at commercial art galleries. 

Lastly, Laurie Anderson, in an unknown publication, wrote favorably about the 1973–74 ten-woman group show, acknowledging that although the artists were part of a group, their artworks each possessed highly distinguishable individual character. The gallery, Anderson added, provided a solution to the male-dominated art scene.

Pictured in the bottom row, from left to right, are Howardena Pindell, Daria Dorosh, Maude Boltz, and Rosemary Mayer

In the second row: Mary Grigoriadis, Agnes Denes, Louise Kramer, and Loretta Dunkelman.

In the third row: Barbara Zucker (slightly behind), Patsy Norvell, Sari Dienes, Judith Bernstein, and Dotty Attie (on the ladder); and in the fourth row: Laurace James, Nancy Spero, Pat Lasch, and Anne Healy.

Sylvia Sleigh (1916–2010) was a painter and feminist art pioneer who joined A.I.R. in 1974. She resigned from A.I.R. after a conflict with several members over a request the collective made for Sleigh’s husband, Lawrence Alloway, to write a text for the gallery’s fifth-anniversary exhibition. 

To this day, the collective maintains the practice of receiving formal resignation letters like Sleigh’s, which allow the group to prepare for departures both financially and in terms of labor.

In the late 1970s, A.I.R. Gallery made efforts to reach an international audience and generate collaborative exchanges with women artists from around the world.

The article “Current American Female Artist Exhibition,” written by Lucy Lippard and translated into Japanese, introduced Japanese audiences to the then-newly opened women’s cooperative art gallery.

In an effort to further A.I.R.’s international feminist network, the gallery spotlighted six young female Israeli artists, each of whom had been largely excluded for their local contemporary art world, in its 1979 show Artists from Israel. 

The exhibition touched on stereotypes of women, the relationship between women and earth, and the female body. 

The exhibition was reviewed by Lucy Lippard in Art in America in January 1980, Grace Glueck in the New York Times on September 21, 1979, and Kay Larson in the Village Voice.

It was accompanied by a screening of Marie-Louise De Geer-Bergenstråhle’s Swedish film and a discussion with Beate Sydhoff on Swedish women artists. The next exhibition of Swedish artists at the gallery, A.I.R. Expedition Sweden, curated by Daria Dorosh, would take place in 2010.

With the arrival of the new decade, some members left A.I.R. and new members quickly replaced them. In this 1981 photograph, taken by Mary Beth Edelson, the members of A.I.R. Gallery posed on the doorstep of the gallery then located at 63 Crosby St. 

On the left, holding an umbrella, is Daria Dorosh. Pictured from left to right standing are Lenore Goldberg, Dotty Attie, Nancy Spero, Patsy Norvell, Sari Dienes, and Anne Healy; seated are Mary Beth Edelson, Kazuko Miyamoto, Clover Vail, Donna Byars, and Sandra Eisenstein. 

 To facilitate this, the gallery launched its first Affiliate Membership Program, or what is known today as the National Membership Program, allowing artists not located in NYC to become members of the gallery.

It featured affiliate members Gerda Meyer Bernstein, Erin Goodwin, Nicole Jolicoeur, Nancy Storrow, and Barbara Strasen.

In 1982, A.I.R. sponsored an intensive six-session media workshop called "Media for Artists" at 63 Crosby Street. The goal of this course was to provide artists with the skills and theories needed to expand their abilities to make art that incorporated motion, time, sound, light, electronics, and performance. 

To this day, A.I.R. continues to be a space for conversations and dialogues regarding contemporary art and continues to host workshops needed by artists to sustain creative practices. 

David Plakke took this annual A.I.R. group photograph of twenty members of A.I.R. at the 40 Wooster Street gallery location in 1995. 

From left to right standing are Louise McCagg, Barbara Grinnell, Michi Itami, Tenesh Webber, Carol Ross, Elke Solomon, Carolyn Martin, Nancy Storrow, Daria Dorosh, and Nancy Azara.

Annual A.I.R. Member portraits depict a tradition of careful documentation and an understanding of being part of history in the making.

A Composite Portrait sketched the history of the gallery from a variety of angles, looking at the artists who maintained the organization; at the remarkable exhibitions that encompassed art practices in a variety of styles, media, and visions; and at the multiple programs and events around the issue of feminism and art-making by women artists that the gallery held.