Feminist work in Hippie Modernism

I started writing my Exhibition Review all wrong so I decided to paste what I wrote about Sheila Levrant de Bretteville here:

Pink and Everywoman

Sheila Levrant de Bretteville is an American artist and graphic designer whose feminist principles drive her work. She worked as an instructor at CalArts where she met Judy Chicago, one of the leading ladies of feminist art at the time, and Arlene Raven, a feminist art historian who co-founded various feminist art organizations in Los Angeles. The three of them founded the Feminist Studio Workshop and the Los Angeles Woman’s Building, which was a nonprofit feminist cultural center.

close up of Pink

De Bretteville also created a feminist newspaper called Everywoman in 1971 in which all of the women featured in the paper got two full spreads to work with. This piece was displayed in a glass case below Pink, an offset lithograph on paper created in 1971. Both Everywoman and Pink are very minimal in color, using only grey and pink. For Pink, the responses to the color by different women were stitched together in a quilt like graphic. Another minimalistic quality is the usage of such a grid system, however the powerful feminist messages within the work conceptualize the piece. Strong images of young women and girls were sparingly placed next to phrases such as “Little girls don’t know why, but, little girls are pink,” and, “Pink is childish. I’m not pink now.” Some associated the term to love or a memory of their childhood. Some messages embraced pink, some rejected, some spoke of the journey through both such as one woman saying “And then I HATED PINK. Now pink has become a symbol of liberation for me.” De Bretteville wanted to show how much of a strong association women tie to feminism through the color pink and how social constructs shape women’s depictions of a simple color.