In the fall of 1971, Faith Wilding was a young MFA student participating in the California Institute of the Arts’ first iteration of its Feminist Art Program. Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, who codirected the unit, hoped to galvanize their students by encouraging them to tackle a major project while working through their own issues as women. Within months the students created Womanhouse, a now-legendary installation that took up an entire mansion in Hollywood. Wilding and the other members of her cohort labored throughout the southern California winter to renovate the house, which had been in disrepair, and conceptualize and install their pieces.
“Imagine what once was amazing jungle, now it’s like thousands of miles of soy plant,” Wilding says. “The kind of devastation that that’s wreaking not just on nature but on the people who used to live there and make their living off the forest and small patches of land.”
In their introduction to the Womanhouse catalog, Chicago and Schapiro describe how the students worked together to create environments throughout the property. The kitchen wall, for example, was covered in fried eggs that slowly morphed into breasts; elsewhere, an overflowing garbage can full of used menstrual products was placed in an otherwise sterile bathroom.
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