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In the early 1970s women's separatist art collectives like Artemisia in Chicago (1973-2003) played an essential role in supporting and nurturing the careers of a whole new generation of women artists. Artemisia was established in 1973 after Joy Poe, then a graduate student at the Art Institute of Chicago, visited AIR, the first woman's cooperative gallery in New York City, that May and concluded the same could be done in Chicago.1 Upon her return Poe enlisted the support of Barbara Grad, Phyllis MacDonald, Emily Pinkowski, and Margaret Wharton, and they formed an interview committee. Together they visited the studios of 150 women artists and then held a subsequent meeting of 40 women, where an additional 15 members were chosen: Phyllis Bramson, Shirley Federow, Sandra Gierke, Carol Harmel, Vera Klement, Linda Kramer, Susan Michod, Sandra Perlow, Claire Prussian, Nancy Redmond, Christine Rojek, Heidi Seidelhuber, Alice Shaddle, Mary Stopper!, and Carol Turchan.2 The gallery officially opened on September 21 at 226 East Ontario Street, placing it in the center of the contemporary art scene. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA), was located across the street, and the commercial galleries Phyllis Kind and Marianne Deson also occupied spaces in the same building.3 Further, Artemisia's immediate neighbor was ARC Gallery, a second women artists' cooperative, and they both sought to challenge the concept of the woman artist as a hobbyist and dilettante by providing a professional venue for their members.4 Taking their name from the seventeenth- century Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1597-c. 1651), "whose best work had been credited to her father," the members of Artemisia were determined to make their own names known to the art world of Chicago and beyond.5
Artemisia Gentileschi did not merely serve as a namesake for the gallery. The art critic Franz Schulze noted that the members' appropriation of Gentileschi's depictions of heroines engaged in violent acts reflected the group's militant feminist stance in its early years.6 The artist's painting Judith and Holof ernes (1611-12) was used in a 1974 advertisement for a lecture by Judith Shamberg entitled "Attitudes and Obstacles: Women Artists in History."
Therefore, it is worth considering briefly how the conflicts facing the female protagonists Gentileschi painted paralleled the societal conditions facing the Chicago women artists, ultimately stimulating...