Conversation with Michelle Stuart, New York, 2003

Michelle Stuart reflects on her involvement in feminist and political activism starting in the late 1960s, initially motivated by the anti-Vietnam War movement. She became increasingly active in feminist circles after meeting figures like Lucy Lippard. “I think a lot of us were feminists to start with. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have decided to engage ourselves with a pursuit that was certainly not going to yield any money.” Stuart helped establish the Women’s Art Registry, which collected slides from across the country to give women artists exposure. “I thought that what we really needed was dissemination of information… a lot of women didn’t even know how to get their images out and be seen… Curators, other artists, or critics could go in and find anybody they wanted.”

As feminist organizing expanded, Stuart participated in initiatives like the Heresies Collective, while others worked to pressure universities to hire women artists, often in temporary roles when male professors were on sabbatical. “Before we got together, that was not happening at all to anybody.” Activist efforts also pressured museums like the Whitney to show more women, and by the 1980s MoMA began including more women artists.
Stuart shares her artistic path from the 1950s, explaining that while her parents didn’t have the means to send her to university, they gave her freedom. She enrolled in art school, which she later left. She was interested in Mexican murals and archeological sites, leading her to move to Mexico and work as an assistant on Diego Rivera’s Teatro de los Insurgentes. She then spent three years in Europe before moving to New York.

Stuart highlights how difficult it was for women artists in 1960s New York: “They wouldn’t even come to your studio… You had to schlep stuff over to the gallery if they were even going to give you five minutes.” She explains that the feminist movement provided “collective courage and solidarity,” giving isolated women artists a community and the strength to push their work into public view.

Stuart describes her early works drawing lunar surfaces and later earthworks—pounding soil into paper to reflect the landscape’s color and spirit—including Niagara Gorge Path Relocated and Stone Alignments, Solstice Cairns. “I wanted to reiterate not only the path of the falls in the earth, illuminate the earth in the strata, but also show that with the passage of time, the change has taken place.”