YALE: History of An Art School

Unknown to most, the first women students to attend Yale University weremembers of its School of Art, present upon its inauguration in 1869. Despitethe auspicious beginning it would take 121 years before the School awardedtenure to a female professor, and 147 years for the School of Art towelcome its first woman dean. Assembled from hundreds of hours ofinterviews with notable women and non-binary graduates, comes the firstoral history of a fabled, if frequently misunderstood institution. Once abastion and now a vestige of 20th century modernist master narratives, thevoices of 50 years of women graduates complicate an already complicatedlegacy, revealing the life of an art school careening into the 21st century,speaking plainly to the long and still ongoing struggle for feminist integrationand representation in the arts. This sweeping narrative of the education of acontinuum of women artists and designers traces its way through theincendiary politics of the radical sixties, the formation of cultural studies,identity politics, and intersectionality in the seventies, the AIDS crisis, theculture wars, and the neoliberal escalation of the eighties, through to ourfully globalized, hyper-capitalized present.

Interviews by Marta Kuzma with: Barbara Chase-Riboud, Abigail Child, Judy Pfaff, Joyce Baronio, Maya Lin, Roni Horn, Jessica Stockholder, Lorraine Wild, Alice Aycock, Rochelle Feinstein, Sarah Oppenheimer, An-My L?, Samia Halaby, Joyce Owens, Wangechi Mutu, Anoka Faruqee a.o.