The Women's Work Issue Women's Work. Pen and Brush. 2019 | Page 10

FOREWORD
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by janice sands
TO SURVIVE AND EVEN FLOURISH, WE
SEE THAT WOMEN HAVE YET AGAIN,
FOUND SOURCES OF SUSTENANCE AND
SELF-SUFFICIENCY.
As Pen and Brush (P+B) enters its 125th year
presenting contemporary art, literary fiction, and
poetry created by women, we find ourselves, perhaps
not so oddly, first looking back to the late 19th
century and the conditions that defined appropriate
work for women and then looking to our 21st century
present, and what defines women’s work today. We
have as our guide Grace Aneiza Ali, who as curator of
Women’s Work: Art and Activism in the 21st Century,
assembled examples from five global women—Sama
Alshaibi, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Suchitra
Mattai, Miora Rajaonary, and Ming Smith—who define
and redefine woman’s work through their artistic
practice.
As this anniversary period exceeds a century,
it seems long enough to tempt us to “compare and
contrast” exhibitions presented by P+B artists in the
late 1890s with that in Women’s Work today.
Women exhibiting at P+B in its early days
responded to their environment, which initially did not
include suffrage, but already showed women thinking
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about how the impact of an artistic practice would
affect their domestic roles. Their art was traditional
for the era, but there were many examples of interest
in other cultures and how their motifs and materials
might be incorporated to express an expanded
worldview.
For Women’s Work, Grace Aneiza Ali uses a
curatorial touchpoint—the recent 21st century call
to action aimed at women from the political arena. It
explodes the framework confining women’s issues
to only one definition of the domestic or even the
gendered, and instead places women’s work rightfully
and firmly in the conversation around global issues of
justice and activism central to everyone’s survival.
We have given thought to what we learned
about women’s work from the P+B artists who
exhibited in the years before the suffrage amendment
was ratified, and were initially surprised by their
resistance to suffrage. Looking deeper, we realized
P+B women found the ways and means to achieve
what they set out to do—create an organization that
was wholly theirs, where art and literature created by
them could be openly shared, reach a public audience,
and receive critical acclaim. They were able to buy the
property that secured the future of this organization
(which they were later able to incorporate), reflecting
a seriousness and commitment as forward-thinking
women who make, create, and build for the future.
The timeline of the century and a quarter’s
history provides an almost unbelievable but direct
link to the current lives and work of the five artists
in Women’s Work. Each has given us a way to see
their experiences, fears, realities, and conquests
through work with traditional fabrics, film and
video, photography, and collage. They represent and
respond to an often harsh and hostile environment
that represses individuality, works to maintain male
dominance, fetishizes women, and renders individuals
and whole groups of people invisible.
To survive and even flourish, we see that women
have yet again, found sources of sustenance and self-
sufficiency.
Women’s Work may be viewed as a progress
report, demonstrating the reach, variation, and cultural
commentary women bring to their work. It reminds us
that as societies move through time, women adapt to
the context that informs their contemporary moment
in their artistic practice. So “compare and contrast”
seems to rest on the significance of that context when
we try to define women’s work and artistic endeavor.
Without context, we risk doing that work an injustice
and a greater injustice to the women who create it.
Janice Sands
Executive Director
Pen and Brush