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''Womanhouse'' (January 30 – February 28, 1972) was a feminist art installation and performance space organized by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, co-founders of the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) Feminist Art Program. Chicago, Schapiro, their students and women artists from the local community participated.〔Revisiting Womanhouse〕 Chicago and Schapiro encouraged their students to use consciousness-raising techniques to generate the content of the exhibition.〔Recalling Womanhouse〕 Only women were allowed to view the exhibition on its first day, after which the exhibition was open to all viewers. During the exhibition's duration, it received approximately 10,000 visitors. == Origins== The Feminist Art Program began at the California Institute of the Arts in 1971 after an experimental year at Fresno State College under the name Women's Art Program. The students in the program were admitted as a group when Chicago and Schapiro were hired at Cal Arts after Chicago found that the Fresno State College Art department was reluctant to embrace her vision of a new kind of female centered art. It was their intention to teach without the use of authoritarian rules or a unilateral flow of power from teacher to student.〔The Education of Women as Artists: Project Womanhouse〕 The Feminist Art Program was slated to occupy a new building but found itself without adequate space at the start of the school year in 1971. The lack of appropriate studio space paved the wave for a collaborative group project set to highlight the ideological and symbolic conflation of women and houses. The end result of this project was the ''Womanhouse'' installation, built by the students in an abandoned Victorian house just off of the CalArts campus. The program utilized a method of teaching that relied on group cooperation. Students would sit in a circle and share their thoughts on a selected topic of discussion. The circular teaching method was intended to provide a "nourishing environment for growth" and to promote a "circular, more womb-like" atmosphere.〔 The goal of these discussions was for each woman to reach a higher level of self-perception, to validate their experiences, as well as the "search for subject matter" to incorporate into artwork and to address their individual aesthetic needs. However, many students fostered resentments towards Chicago and Schapiro, claiming they were suffering from their own power trips. Chicago insisted her students feelings were the result of their own internalized sexism and unconscious manifestations of their difficulties dealing with female authority figures.〔Balducci, Temma. "Revisiting “Womanhouse”: Welcome to the (deconstructed) “Dollhouse”." ''Woman's Art Journal'' 27, no 2. (2006): 17-23〕 The project's goals, as professed by Schapiro and Chicago, were to help students overcome some problems of being a woman. These included "a general lack of assertiveness or ambition", an "unwillingness to push themselves beyond their limits”, “lack of familiarity with tools and artmaking processes”, and an “inability to see themselves as working people". It was thought that by teaching the women to use power tools and proper building techniques, they would gain confidence and subsequently "restructure their personalities" to be consistent with their artistic goals. It was Schapiro and Chicago's belief that "society fails women by not demanding excellence from them."〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Womanhouse catalog essay )〕 These techniques were to result in an "exclusively female environment" that included a greater community of female artists. The goal of this community was to expose the students to "established" female artists not limited to Schapiro and Chicago.〔Womanhouse Catalog Essay〕 Paula Harper, an art historian for the California Institute of Arts Feminist Art Program, is credited for suggesting the idea for ''Womanhouse''. Schapiro supervised ''Womanhouses dramatic works, while Chicago focused on other media.〔Recalling Womanhouse〕 Their intention was to transform a domestic environment into one that fully expressed the experiences of women.〔 "Womanhouse began in an old deserted mansion on a residential street in Hollywood and became an environment in which: “The age-old female activity of homemaking was taken to fantasy proportions. Womanhouse became the repository of the daydreams women have as they wash, bake, cook, sew, clean and iron their lives away." Before creating the art environments and pieces, the students had to do extensive reconstruction on the house which had been empty for many years. They have to fix broken windows and furnitures.〔Chicago, Judy. Womanhouse catalog essay.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Womanhouse」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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