Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Plates
- Acknowledgements
- Section A Introduction
- Section B Continuum, 1952–1961
- Section C Abundance, 1961–1971
- Section D Alternatives, 1971–1988
- 1 Disorientation and dissent in the art world
- 2 Alloway and the politicization of art, 1968–1970
- 3 Changing values, 1971–1972
- 4 Artforum and the art world as a system
- 5 1973 and a new pluralism
- 6 The uses and limits of art criticism
- 7 Criticism and women's art, 1972–1974
- 8 Women's art and criticism, 1975
- 9 The realist ‘renewal’
- 10 Photo-Realism
- 11 The realist ‘revival’
- 12 Realist revisionism
- 13 The decline of the avant-garde
- 14 ‘Legitimate variables’
- 15 Earth art
- 16 Public art
- 17 In praise of plenty
- 18 Crises in the art world: criticism
- 19 Crises in the art world: feminism
- 20 Crises in the art world: curatorship
- 21 The co-ops and ‘alternative’ spaces
- 22 Turn of the decade decline
- 23 Mainstream…
- 24 … and ‘alternative’
- 25 The last years
- 26 The complex present
- Section E Summary and Conclusion
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Platesection
24 - … and ‘alternative’
from Section D - Alternatives, 1971–1988
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Plates
- Acknowledgements
- Section A Introduction
- Section B Continuum, 1952–1961
- Section C Abundance, 1961–1971
- Section D Alternatives, 1971–1988
- 1 Disorientation and dissent in the art world
- 2 Alloway and the politicization of art, 1968–1970
- 3 Changing values, 1971–1972
- 4 Artforum and the art world as a system
- 5 1973 and a new pluralism
- 6 The uses and limits of art criticism
- 7 Criticism and women's art, 1972–1974
- 8 Women's art and criticism, 1975
- 9 The realist ‘renewal’
- 10 Photo-Realism
- 11 The realist ‘revival’
- 12 Realist revisionism
- 13 The decline of the avant-garde
- 14 ‘Legitimate variables’
- 15 Earth art
- 16 Public art
- 17 In praise of plenty
- 18 Crises in the art world: criticism
- 19 Crises in the art world: feminism
- 20 Crises in the art world: curatorship
- 21 The co-ops and ‘alternative’ spaces
- 22 Turn of the decade decline
- 23 Mainstream…
- 24 … and ‘alternative’
- 25 The last years
- 26 The complex present
- Section E Summary and Conclusion
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Platesection
Summary
Women artists featured strongly in Alloway's writings of the late 1970s and 1980s. Michelle Stuart, one of the artists involved with Artpark, commissioned him to write an essay for the catalogue for her 1985 exhibition. Between 1975 and 1988 he provided forewords or introductions for Heléne Aylon, Lucy Sallick, Anne Healy, Kazuko Miyamoto, Joan Semmel, Cecile Abish, Marjorie Strider, Mary Joan Waid, Ursula Von Rydingsvard, Ann Chernow, Selina Trieff, Anne MacDougall, Eileen Spikol, Diane Burko, Emily Barnett, and a show of four sculptors, Maureen Connor, Donna Dennis, Irene Krugman, and Eileen Spikol. He also wrote catalogue pieces for The Roots of Creativity: Women Artists Year 6 (1976); Women Artists from New York (1978); Independent Studios 1 (a women's studio collective, 1981); and Fabrications—American Fiber Art: a New Definition (1980). As an acknowledgement of his status as a champion of women “alternative” artists, Alloway was invited to write an essay on “non-established artists” for the book to accompany the major touring exhibition Making Their Mark: Women Artists Move into the Mainstream, 1970–85, first held at the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1989 and featuring almost ninety women artists. However, he withdrew when he saw the curators’ provisional list of artists complaining to them that “artists of the alternative spaces were under-represented. In their place, as it were, was a plenty [sic] of women artists comfortable to art gallery preferences. (You will have no difficulty finding an art critic to write on this aspect of taste…)… I am sorry you felt you had to stay with women authenticated by the Art Dealers’ Association…”
In his Nation column, he discussed the work of Leatrice Rose, Jackie Ferrara, Donna Byars, Margaret Grace, Carol Kreeger Davidson, Nancy Spero, Cecile Abish, Kazuko and Lydia Okumura, Irene Krugman and Joan Semmel, Mary Miss, Michelle Stuart, Judy Chicago, and Rosemary Mayer. And in mainstream art magazines, he wrote about Cecile Abish, Paula Tavins, and Maureen Connor in Arts Magazine; Carolee Schneemann in Art in America; and in Woman's Art Journal, Irene Krugman, and the Views by Women Artists exhibition (1982). He even contributed to a Sylvia Sleigh catalogue writing “Notes as a Sitter” in Sylvia Sleigh Paints Lawrence Alloway, an exhibition of 1983, the thirtieth anniversary of his first-ever catalogue foreword for Sleigh's show at Kensington Art Gallery in London.
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- Art and PluralismLawrence Alloway’s Cultural Criticism, pp. 419 - 421Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012