SESSION: Feminism, Art, and Politics: Critical Engagements with Heresies (1977-1993)

Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics was published in New York by the Heresies Collective between 1977 and 1993. This pioneering art magazine fundamentally challenged the male-dominated structures of the time by providing a platform for feminist voices in the arts. The Collective’s innovative embrace of varied formats—from artist pages and poetry to theoretical essays and political manifestos—and radical publishing practices—including recruiting distinct editorial collectives and hosting public debriefs— pushed conventional academic boundaries, challenged existing editorial platforms, and critiqued conventional art institutions. Heresies played a role in shaping the nascent field of feminist art history and was an innovative and expansive site that fostered critical feminist discourse around art, theory, and activism. The goal of this session is to build a community of Heresies researchers working in a range of disciplines, fields, and perspectives and including art practitioners, curators, art historians, archivists, digital humanists, and feminist theorists. Topics of particular interest include: the interplay between art, political action, and feminist publishing; the complex dynamics that shaped the publication’s efforts to develop intersectional and anti-racist perspectives on art, gender, race, class, and sexuality; and, finally, the use of innovative digital methods for studying the Heresies collection archive (http://heresiesfilmproject.org/).

Session Convenors:

Michelle Meagher, University of Alberta, Canada

Session Speakers:

Clara Bundschuh, University of Vienna

Sophie Hamann, University of Vienna

Digitizing Heresies: Network Analysis and Quantitative Methods in Feminist Art History

As a collective-run magazine that brought together artists, writers and activists from
various feminist movements, Heresies occupies a pivotal yet under-examined position in the history of feminist art. Current scholarship on the magazine relies on anecdotal evidence and qualitative approaches, lacking systematic quantitative analysis. This research project/paper aims to address the lack of quantitative analysis of feminist art magazines as archival sources and acknowledges the need for reproducible digitisation frameworks for feminist and art-historical periodicals. Our goal is to answer the question of how feminist art magazines can be digitised for quantitative research, and to identify the networks that emerge when digital methods are applied to Heresies. To this end, we are using Optical Character Recognition to create a searchable text corpus from the print issues, and we are developing a structured database that captures contributors, roles, themes and collaborations. Additionally, we use network visualisation tools to map relationships between contributors. The results of the analysis reveal patterns in how different feminist movements intersected, showing the central figures and cross-pollination between the issues and feminist currents in the magazine. Open data democratises access to structures that are often invisible in both traditional feminist research and art history. With this research, we aim to contribute to preserving and making accessible scattered periodical archives. Digital and quantitative methods can reveal collaborative structures that are often invisible in traditional art history.

Tatjana Schaefer, The Courtauld Institute of Art

Heresies’ Politics of Visuality and Feminist Painting

Founded as a black-and-white journal, Heresies set out to be an ‘idea-oriented’ counterpart to the glossy magazine that promoted art as commodity. Given this word-driven, politically charged identity, it was clear from the get-go that visual contributions to Heresies would be compromised in colour and texture. However, the founding collective understood this circumstance to be a chance for artists to experiment in the print-specific medium of page art. My paper takes this intention as a point of departure to investigate the relationship between visual content submitted to Heresies, its placement in the journal and entanglement with written contributions, and its relationship to the artist’s painting practice outside of Heresies. I present two case studies addressing different moments in the journal. The first one centres on May Stevens’ page art in Heresies’ inaugural issue, which addresses women’s perpetual silencing in patriarchal history. I demonstrate how Stevens’ piece strongly connects with writings by political prisoners published in Heresies1, and how the blurred print aesthetics of her page art were then transferred into painted abstractions that address feminist consciousness and collective amnesia. In the second case study, I zoom in on Emma Amos’ contribution to Heresies’ Racism issue. This page-art piece saw Amos introduce inscriptions over her original print, announcing a critical feminist shift in her visual practice, which was already focused on representing Black female confidence but was now substantiated by an additional layer of text on intersectional discrimination. My research thus foregrounds the discursive, cross-referential origins of women’s politicised painting practices.

Lexington Davis, University of St Andrews

Conjuring the “Great Goddess”: Feminist Iconography and Ideological Conflict in Heresies

In 1978, the Heresies Collective published their fifth issue, ‘The Great Goddess’, which envisioned feminist approaches to spiritual practice. Featuring artists and writers who advanced the goddess as a challenge to patriarchy, the issue became emblematic of tensions that fractured the feminist art movement: between embodiment and structuralism, universal womanhood and intersectional critique. This paper re-examines the ‘Great Goddess’ issue in dialogue with wider feminist debates about essentialism and race taking place in the 1970s and 80s, situating the Heresies issue as an ambitious, yet contentious experiment in feminist world-making. Through close reading and visual analysis of the issue’s contributions, this talk examines how goddess imagery functioned as both a liberatory symbol of feminist potential and a site of struggle. I analyse this issue in relation to editions on ‘Lesbian Art and Artists’ (no. 3), ‘Third World Women’ (no. 8), and ‘Earthkeeping/Earthshaking’ (no. 13), which respectively propose queer, decolonial, and ecofeminist approaches to art and theory. With attention to artworks and essays that appear in these issues of Heresies —including contributions by Lucy Lippard, Gloria Orenstein, Audre Lorde, Mary Beth Edelson, Ana Mendieta, Betye Saar, and Monica Sjöö—I trace how debates around identity, ecology, and decolonisation that unfold in Heresies unsettled understandings of the goddess as a unifying symbol of feminist sisterhood. By charting these tensions, I argue that Heresies served as a primary site where the stakes of goddess feminism were negotiated and transformed through debates about essentialism, race, ecology, and sexuality.

Amara Antilla, Independent curator

Radical Intimacy: The Artist Sketches that Defined Heresies

This essay will analyze the unique visual language and political potency of selected collages and “doodles” that featured prominently in Heresies Magazine (1977–1992). By focusing on these informal, quickly made submissions by artists, this paper argues that Heresies mobilized an alternative, non-hierarchical space essential for feminist expression, standing in stark contrast to the capitalist and often male-dominated institutional frameworks of the established art world. Characterized by cut-and-paste aesthetics, rapid execution, and raw handwritten scrawls, these informal submissions allowed artists to circumvent the aesthetic conventions of their primary, formalized practices. This approach exposed the artist’s inner life, transforming the magazine into a testing ground that prioritised process over a polished final product. Ultimately, the essay will demonstrate how the medium of the “doodle” provided a critical counterpoint to artists’ primary practice, visually reflecting the urgency and intimacy inherent to the communities and topics discussed within Heresies.

Jana Smith Elford, Medicine Hat College, Canada

Michelle Meagher, University of Alberta, Canada

The AdArchive Project: Digitally Reanimating the Advertisements in Heresies

This paper explores what it means to digitally reanimate the ephemera of feminist art magazines in online research spaces and how digital tools can enrich the study of feminist art history. In particular, we focus on the qualitative research potential of the advertisements in Heresies: A Femininist Publication on Art and Politics, which we approach as a digital database or archive of the feminist movement. Unlike mainstream magazines, Heresies did not advertise for conventional goods and services, but instead only offered exchange advertisements for other feminist organizations. The AdArchive project team has represented the data in all 200 advertisements from Heresies and eight other feminist magazines in an open-source, accessible digital archive to explore the network of people, places, and organizations connected to Heresies through its ads. LINCS ResearchSpace, a visualization tool for exploring the ads, allows users to see place maps of addresses, an event timeline, network visualizations, and digital reproductions of these original ads from the magazine. This presentation introduces the AdArchive project and discusses our digital approach to analysing and exploring cultural artefacts from the recent feminist past. We argue that advertisements, though underexamined, are content-rich components of the magazine, helping to expand understanding of the networks that sustained feminist art and shaped the broader feminist movement. We explore what it means to have a feminist praxis when building a digital archival environment, how feminist users may approach digital tools, and the use and value of such resources for accessing feminist art history.

Ashley McNelis, University of California, Riverside, USA

Heresies: Still Ain’t Satisfied— A Reflection on Working Collectively