(upbeat music) - Philadelphia spotlights female and BIPOC visual artists and highlights their contributions with citywide public installations, paintings, prints, and much more.

"You Oughta Know" takes a closer look.

Welcome to "You Oughta Know," I'm Shirley Min.

Today's show looks back at the citywide movement displaying the works of some influential visual artists.

The 1974 groundbreaking exhibit focus came full circle this year with (re)FOCUS then and now, which took place right here at Moore College.

We begin with the organizers who birthed this movement in the arts.

- Right from the start, we planned on doing something that would make a big splash.

We were beyond the point, if you will, of consciousness raising.

All of us were already concerned with women and the status of women, so it was more how do we put this to use?

How do we create something that would be a big enough stir to really shake people up and make people realize that women are wonderful artists.

I've been an artist ever since I was a little kid and my parents say that I picked up a pencil and started to draw before I could walk or talk and fortunately my mother and father both encouraged me so I was able to go to art school every Saturday morning from the time I was six years old until I graduated from high school.

Tyler turned out to be the school that I went to for my graduate work and that really started my connections to Philadelphia, which have resulted in this particular project, focused on women artists.

- I was just beginning to be a college professor and going to my first college art association that's like the professional organization and it was in San Francisco.

It was very exciting and somehow I got swept into a meeting of women art historians and they were up in arms about the fact that there was no one who was a woman on the board of the College Art Association, which made no sense because at least half of our historians at Moore were women as were many artists who were part of this organization.

I just realized there's a feminist art movement as well as a feminist movement.

I mean the second wave feminism was beginning in the 70s but I connected a lot of dots and came back, fired up, not knowing that many people in Philadelphia but being determined to do something and I had a meeting at my house and I invited people who I really didn't know as well as people I knew.

- [Judith] I went to this meeting at Moore College and this was only the second meeting that Diane had called.

- And lots of women came and that was the beginning of Philadelphia focuses on women in the visual arts in 1973.

- [Judith] Right from the start, our ambition was to do something that was spectacular, that would focus attention on women artists and on the contributions of women artists to the world.

- We had things happening at Annenberg, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

You name an institution, most of them participated either with panels or with exhibitions and important people were in some of these exhibitions.

- We also got sued by a man who said that he couldn't get an exhibition during those months of focus because the institutions were all showing women artists and New York Times did a big coverage of all these exhibitions.

So we did achieve our goal of having women artists be recognized on a national level.

- Okay, wow.

- (re)FOCUS came about because I gave her a call.

I said, Judy, do you know that in 2024 it's gonna be 50 years since focus, we have to do something?

And of course she said, absolutely.

- [Judith] We thought Moore College would be an appropriate place.

Since Moore is the only college for women artists.

It was established in the 1840s because of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts only admitted men.

- While Moore wasn't a host to any of the programming back in 1973, Diane had mentioned that it was an integral part of the planning process.

Also, Moore's mission and our history is to, you know, educate women for careers in art and design.

There was a lot of alignment with the mission of the 1974 show and the work that we're doing today.

I thought it would be really important to have Moore be at the center of it.

- Wow, look.

- Wow, it looks fabulous.

- Fantastic.

- When possible, we reproduced what they showed way back, 50 years ago at the Civic Center Museum, which no longer exists.

Judith Bernstein's piece, very similar to this, but much larger.

It was about 10 feet long and it was a hairy screw, although she didn't title it hairy screw, horizontal was her title and the director comes up to us and he said you can't have this in this museum, if you have this in this museum, you are not having the show.

I won't let it open.

He was adamant and the show had to go on.

So we did not show Judith's piece but everyone wore buttons saying, where's Bernstein?

And that's where she likes to say, we began her career.

- This is a very early video, and Howardena Pindell was African American, was just leaving being a curator at MoMA and really starting her career as an artist.

And she did this particular video, her head is all wrapped in white bandages and gradually as she tells the story, she unwraps herself to show that she's actually a black woman and the story is about that if you're free, white and 21, you have quite a different life from the kind of life that she has as an African American woman.

- So much of what was done on these walls was groundbreaking way back when.

(upbeat music) - I started thinking about gender identity and what it means today.

It's not the same as it was in 1974.

And it became my goal to sort of have it be a show in two parts and that's where we came up with the (re)FOCUS then and my vision for the now.

Artists who are gender non-conforming, non-binary, but also women of course, and specifically people of color so that we could provide a platform for them to be shown and represented.

- [Presenter] The artists will talk about their work, then we will have a discussion.

- [Isa] My name is Isa Isioma Matisse.

We focused a little more on young queer people.

This is from our exhibition outside, curating this exhibition has been super fun.

- I noticed how difficult it was for a lot of LGBTQ+ artists to break into the arts or to get their work noticed.

(audience clapping) - The issue of women's representation in art has come a long way, but there's still a long way to go, presenting an exhibition and series of panels and citywide celebration like this is gonna be really important to help move the needle maybe a little bit further.

I think that's the biggest issue is getting it out into the public space so that people feel comfortable talking about it.

There's just so much work to be done.

(upbeat music) - Here, on the avenue of the arts is where you'll find the Brandywine workshop.

For 50 years, this organization has been preserving the art of printmaking with an inclusive residency program and an extensive archive.

- We're standing in the (indistinct) lithography section of the workshop.

This is brand new in Workshop in Archives.

It's a nonprofit that specializes in doing printmaking that was founded 1972 by Alan Edmonds right out of college.

He was 21 to 22 years old when he said, I'm gonna make an organization.

The reason why it's called Brandywine Workshop is because it used to be located on Brandywine Street in the spring garden section, and the first people that the organization worked with were Puerto Rican students that used to live in the neighborhood.

We're in the avenue of the arts.

This is one of the oldest organizations in continuous operation that specialize in fine art printmaking and working with artists in a collaborative process.

- This is where our collection resides.

We protect them in these wonderful flat files.

This year is 52 years of Brandywine Workshops and Archives and next year we celebrate 50 years of the artist residency program that was created here at Brandywine.

You can only imagine how much work we have here from various artists, from diverse backgrounds, identities, heritage, and cultures that have come through Brandywine through the Artist Residency program and creating wonderful works of art.

- Printmaking is the art of making multiples.

Most people are not familiar with any of the processes outside of hitting print on their computer and you know, having a piece of paper come up.

What we do at Brandywine Workshop and Archives is basically fine art printmaking, the primary methods for printmaking, you have relief, which is basically creating giant stamps with wood or other substrates like plastic.

You have etching, which is a metal plate, usually copper that gets etched with acid and then images created on and then transferred to paper.

And then you get lithography, which originally started using limestones as the matrix to create the stamp to then transfer to paper.

And then the last method that people are familiar with is silkscreen, which is a frame with a mesh stretched over it and then a stencil applied.

Then that way you can make the prints.

Part of the job of Brandywine is to work with artists and master printers in order to facilitate fine art prints that stay fatefully to the vision that the artists are trying to convey through their artwork.

- This is called the Printed Image Gallery and it's on the second floor of firehouse.

The exhibition is part of a citywide project called (re)FOCUS.

Michele and I discussed the idea of putting together a show of women artists Brandywine had worked with over the years to show the diversity of the workshop.

The exhibition is probably about 50% African American artists, but it also includes artists from Africa, from Cuba, Native American artists, and European American artists.

Many works have political overtones, but if you don't know the politics, you look at them how you look at them.

It's always interesting to get opinions from diverse people on what a work of art means because you'll pretty much always get a different one from everybody.

It's one of the things that I think makes art wonderful.

There are many prints in this show that have collage elements and that's also an interesting aspect of printmaking to me, that you can start with a basic image and print 20 objects, but have 20 unique objects and it allows an artist to think about an image in a variety of ways.

It's one of the things that's always interested me about printmaking.

- So this is a very interesting wall, how the artist is calling to you, the viewer, to respond to their story.

- Absolutely.

- Deborah Willis, she talks about when she was in art school here in Philadelphia, a professor actually said to her in a public setting that she was taking up space for a good man to be placed there.

She says she felt very embarrassed by that.

Years later, her son, Hank Willis Thomas, revered in the art field, found the contact sheet of her being pregnant with him.

So she did make space for a good man by giving birth to a good man who is an artist.

Here we have Howardena Pindell.

- [Ruth] Yeah, she's listing all of the percentage of what DNA she has and it's called Pindell DNA.

- You see so many different connections stamps, so trying to show this connection that we have also throughout the globe.

And then we have a wonderful artist, Camille Billops.

Hers is very interesting, it's called the KKK boutique.

It's interesting how you see in this the depths of the colors, but also how she's also talking about a time in history that exists in America especially, and when you come in to view it, you have your own memories, your own experiences, so now you're adding on to the story and that's the beauty of the art process, but also of printmaking 'cause printmaking is a way of disseminating information and to enlighten you.

This exhibition that you curated is really showing the importance of female artists, what they birth to the world through the works of paper.

- Bringing new life to barren spaces here in Old City and on South Street.

That's the mission behind art fronts.

- The art front partnership is a public art project and it's a partnership between business and the arts community in which artists are commissioned to transform empty storefronts into illuminated exciting art spaces, which we call art fronts.

(upbeat music) These five women specifically were chosen because of their concepts which relate to feminism.

- I was asked to participate in this project and design something site specific for this storefront.

It's an empty storefront.

The name of this piece is polarity.

It's really about the divine feminine and about the dualities that exist within the universe, chaos and control, or life and death.

The divine feminine giving life and birth and healing to chaos and dysfunction in the world.

I love the kind of drama around dressing up in character.

The hairstyles kind of look like anime female warriors, and I wanted them to be very kind of fierce and fun.

I didn't want this to be too serious a piece.

I wanted it to be playful, but at the same time, speaking to very serious concepts around femininity.

- One of the things I really enjoy about having art in a public space is that there's a lot of people that aren't going to go into an art gallery or a museum, and these are people that I would like to reach with my art.

I like the idea of Homer's Odyssey and the story of the sirens that lured Ulysses.

They're an interesting metaphor for how earthly pleasures can seduce us and that can be good or it can be dangerous.

I used pyramids because I thought they were a good symbol for equality.

We talk about women raising to the top, and so a pyramid expresses that idea, for me.

- The installation's name is inside out and it has a lot to do with public and private space and trying to converge them on the street.

I decided to choose a hand standing for the idea of pillars of strength, painting it silver and aging it was also the idea of lineage and women who worked with their hands.

The pieces are more like monuments and then I embellished them with adornments that have some kind of sense of jewel except they're made out of window screen wire and aquarium tubing.

So that also presents a paradox.

Identity today we see it through the lens of multiplicity.

However, I think women stand strong and we also allow ourselves to have other personas and can dress for different occasions and fit in different environments.

So I wanted this piece to speak to a range.

- We are here at 27 North Third Street, Manufacturer's National Bank, at the site of Continuum, which is Meg Seligman's new installation for the (re)FOCUS exhibition.

The piece itself is about the juxtaposition between these feminine figures with the more masculine facade of the building.

These cycles of rebirth symbolized within the hologram as it breaks the two dimensional field.

This installation is unlike any that we've done before in that it's interacting with the outside world, with the exterior, which is really cool to be able to put our art from the interior and show it to the rest of the city.

(calm music) - A lot of my artwork deals with women's bodies in relationship to the built environment and what do I mean by that?

It can be buildings, but it could also be fountains and other structures, and immediately I got the vision.

Okay, I want to do something with the form called a caryatid.

Those are the female forms that take the place of structural columns in buildings.

The male figures are usually called either telamons or atlantids, and they're the ones that are struggling like this.

And what makes it different with the caryatids is they look like they're not exerting any effort.

They're just standing there holding up buildings.

They're also sort of a symbol of life holding up the social structure and this type of wallpaper with all of the plants and all of the lushness is also a symbol of life.

Things blossom, they grow.

Caryatids a lot of times are almost invisible.

You see these women in the place of columns, combination of strength and grace, but I hope people will think a little bit about what women do that's invisible and needs to be focused upon.

(calm music) - When you think art in Philly, you think of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

In 2024, the museum celebrated female artists with four distinct exhibitions.

- The Philadelphia Museum of Art is very pleased to be engaged in Women's History Month.

We involve work by women artists all of the time.

We've embraced women in leadership roles throughout our history.

We have works on view in the permanent collection with paintings by Georgia O'Keefe, Francis Simpson Stevens, and Edith Clifford Williams.

In conjunction with the (re)FOCUS Project, we're very pleased to be shining a light on three installations at the museum, an exhibition of photographs called In the Right Place.

Diane Scultori, Engraver in Renaissance Rome and Seeing with Empathy, the Female Gaze in American modernism.

In addition to having works throughout the galleries that are by women artists.

(upbeat music) - This exhibition brings together work by three photographers, Melissa Shook, Barbara Crane and Carol Taback.

They were all thinking about photography in similar ways.

There was an interest in all three in seriality, looking at one place and working in one place and returning to it again and again over the period of months or years.

For Melissa Shook's project, which was a series of self-portraits that she made over a period of nine months, most of that work was made in her own apartment.

It's a moment when people are giving a lot of critical eye to male photographer's depictions of female bodies, and there are artists including Melissa Shook, who are looking at that long history of photography, seeing that work in galleries around them and trying to navigate a path forward where they can picture themselves in a way that they feel is more representative.

Barbara Crane is a photographer who worked for a long time in Chicago and was in her first decade of work as a photographer when she made the series that's on view in this gallery called People of the North Portal.

And for that series, Crane positioned herself and a large format view camera on the top step of the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago and photographed people coming in and out of that space.

You get this wild mix of people in a space that is otherwise very ordinary and that you might not think about as a public space.

The third photographer is Carol Taback and she actually was not trained as a photographer but as a designer and painter and was primarily working as a designer and book illustrator in Philadelphia when she discovered the photo booth at the Woolworth store in Center City and became so enamored with the medium that she bought a photo booth for her home studio and she's taking multiple strips of the same subject and then arranging those strips into grids.

Often the pattern repeats almost to the point of abstraction.

All three of them, to the best of my knowledge, were single parents at the time that they were making pictures.

This is often something that's undervalued when we talk about women artists, but I think there is a real interest from each of them in trying to find a space that works for a project that can have depth and meaning to them as artists.

- Diana Scultori was an Italian renaissance artist who is particularly notable for being the first woman in Europe to work as a professional engraver.

This is a moment in time when women were not particularly present in the art world.

However, she came from a family of artists.

Her father was an engraver, a painter, and a sculptor who worked at the court of the Gonzaga family, in Mantua, they were the Dukes of Mantua and he trained Diana and her brother Adamo in the work of engraving, which is the art of incising images into copper plates and then printing them on paper.

What's really exciting about this project is that we own one of the largest collections of work by Diana Scultori in the country.

The vast majority of them have never been on view before.

Like many engravers at the time, Diana worked primarily from images created by other artists.

For that reason, she had access to imagery that was not typically what women of the period would be engaging with.

You can see that she has some female nude figures here that she likely would not have depicted had she not been working from examples by another artist.

The image on the right that we have here is an impression of the same image printed from the same copper plate, but many years later, but it shows just how popular her work remained, well after she died, her plates were purchased and passed on by subsequent publishers and it continued to be printed even when the image was no longer as strong as the original one.

As visitors walk through these galleries, I hope they come away with an understanding that women have been active in the art market, in the commercial art world, as professional artists for centuries.

(calm music) - For this installation, the goal was to find works of art that were women artists representing women subjects in all different ways, all from the first half of the 20th century, which was such an important moment for women's history.

If you think about 1920s being the year when white women received the right to vote, there were other landmarks for women at this period, but it was a moment when women artists really struggled for a claim.

So this work is really quite radical in its day for the way the woman artist is being self-reflexive, turning a romantic gaze on her subjects, looking at the people around her, and kind of commenting on society mores.

So from the museum's perspective, women artists always are part of the story and they appear in the galleries in different ways and it serves as a bit of a teaser.

Looking ahead to the exhibition, Mary Cassatt at Work, which includes works from the permanent collection, but also includes works lent from collections around the country and abroad.

Focusing on the seriousness of Mary Cassatt's pursuit as an artist, it's a really fresh take on an important artist who has Philadelphia roots, but an international reputation.

- [Announcer] You still have time to catch Mary Cassatt at Work.

It's the first large scale exhibition of the artist's work in the United States, in 25 years.

Cassatt, a Pennsylvania born artist, was the sole American member of the French impressionist movement.

Her work depicted the social, intellectual, domestic, and working life of modern women.

The exhibit runs through September 8th.

- That's our show.

Thanks so much for tuning into this special women in the arts edition of "You Oughta Know".

Goodnight everyone.

(upbeat music)