Conversation with Cheri Gaulke, Los Angeles, 2002

Cheri Gaulke openly embraces her feminist and lesbian identity, despite few of her students identifying as feminists, because she believes they need alternative role models.

Gaulke reflects on her time at the Woman’s Building and the Feminist Studio Workshop, where she found a transformative community. She explains, “It was about how making art from a room of one’s own would change the kind of art we would create.” This environment allowed women to engage with politics and spirituality while gaining practical skills beyond traditional art training, such as grant writing, building walls, and creating alternative art spaces. She co-founded two collaborative groups: Feminist Art Workers and Sisters of Survival (S.O.S.), using art to address social issues. S.O.S. focused on the Cold War nuclear threat, and she recalls staging a performance piece, Shovel the Fence, in front of Los Angeles City Hall, critiquing Reagan’s civil defense policies, which gained national media coverage.

Gaulke addresses the gender disparity in the art world, which drove her to create spaces where women could strategize for change. She regrets the underappreciation of the feminist art innovations from the 1970s and recalls the struggle to keep the Woman’s Building open during the Reagan era, leading to its closure in 1991: “A building that once housed an entire program for performance art, galleries, and classrooms gradually had to be chopped up and sold off because we couldn’t afford to be what we once were.”

The conversation also touches on the commercialization of feminist movements by consumer culture. Despite this, Gaulke sees renewed interest in feminist art history, particularly among younger women at institutions like Cal Arts, and stresses the importance of documenting this history for future generations.