A Documentary Herstory of Women Artists in Revolution

I Am Abandoned documents a little-known, but visionary performance by Barbara T. Smith. Taking place in 1976, it featured a conversation in real time between two psychoanalytic computer programs (known today as two of the earliest chatbots) alongside a staging of Francisco Goya’s The Naked Maja (1795–1800) and The Clothed Maja (1800–1807), in which the artist projected an image of the famous painting on top of a female model. The publication includes a full transcript of the “conversation” between the two programs; documentation and ephemera from the performance; Smith’s reflections on the night; and an afterword by scholar and artist Mashinka Firunts Hakopian.

I Am Abandoned was part of the exhibition The Many Arts and Sciences at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and rather than simply celebrate new technology, Smith also sought to challenge what she saw as a “built-in problem” that “computers were only a new example of the male hypnosis.” In collaboration with computer scientist Dick Rubinstein, she enlisted the computer science teams at Caltech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to mount a conversation between a program named DOCTOR, which was designed to be a surrogate therapist, and another named PARRY, which was trained to mimic a paranoid schizophrenic patient.

While the computer operator worked in the next room, each new page of the conversation was projected on the wall where a model dressed as The Clothed Maja reclined beneath the text, with a slide of the nude version of the same painting, The Naked Maja, projected onto her. The audience was rapt with attention for the livestreamed conversation. The performance went on for nearly two hours, before the model eventually grew furious from being ignored (abandoned) by the computer operator, stormed over, and attempted to seduce him. Shortly after, the gallery director pulled the plug on the entire event, claiming it distracted the audience for too long from the other works on view.

To revisit I Am Abandoned today is to see the artistic and truly liberatory potential that art can have when it intervenes in new technologies. Much like the original performance, in which the model grew alienated from the proceedings, what gradually emerges are the stakes these new technologies present. Against today’s backdrop of AI and a still male-dominated tech field, Smith’s early work with emerging technologies, and in this case chatbots, is prophetic and hints at the contemporary conversation around the gendered and racialized machinic biases of our current computational landscape. Though Smith, like many women of her generation, was overlooked by the landmark surveys of art and technology during the 1960s and 70s, her career incisively probed new technologies, using them to question gender dynamics, community, and self. Her projects from the Coffin books (1966–67), created with a 914 Xerox copier in her dining room, to performances like Outside Chance (1975), which created a small snow squall in Las Vegas out of 3,000 unique, computer-generated snowflakes, and the interactive Field Piece (1971), where participants’ movements altered the soundscape of a fiberglass forest, all exemplify her open-ended approach to art and tech. “Each person lit their own way,” Smith remembers, “And produced their own soundtrack.”

Barbara T. Smith is an important figure in the history of feminist and performance art in Southern California. Her work—which spans media and often involves her own body—explores themes of sexuality, traditional gender roles, physical and spiritual sustenance, technology, communication, love, and death. Smith received a BA from Pomona College in 1953, and an MFA in 1971 from the University of California, Irvine. There she met fellow artists Chris Burden and Nancy Buchanan, with whom she co-founded F-Space in Santa Ana, the experimental art space where many of her performances were staged. Smith’s work has been exhibited since the 1960s in solo exhibitions, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2024), the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2023), and Pomona College Museum of Art (2005), and featured in group exhibitions, including how we are in time and space: Nancy Buchanan, Marcia Hafif, Barbara T. Smith, Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena (2022), State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970, Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana (2012); WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2007); and Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1998). Smith is the recipient of the Nelbert Chouinard Award (2020), Civitella Ranieri Visual Arts Fellowship, Umbria, Italy (2014); Durfee Foundation’s Artists’ Resource for Completion (2005, 2009); Women’s Caucus for Art, Lifetime Achievement Award (1999); and several National Endowment for the Arts Grants (1973, 1974, 1979, 1985). The Getty Research Institute acquired Smith’s archive in 2014 and published her memoir, The Way to Be, in 2023. Her survey catalog, Proof: Barbara T. Smith was published by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2024.

Created by Mary Heilmann in 1999, The All Night Movie beautifully wraps a memoir inside of a monograph, creating an artist book in which each page is designed as though it were a painting. The artist delicately utilizes color, text, candid photographs, reproductions of paintings, and song lyrics that unfold seamlessly to create an immersive visual experience. Heilmann has described the book as “the story of my life, told in words, painted images and photographs.”

Across eight chapters, Heilmann recounts her life, from childhood in California through New York in the 1990s, providing intimate insight into the development of her work, friendships, and formative life experiences. Snapshots by the artist and others provide a portrait of Heilmann’s evolving artistic community, which included Gordon Matta-Clark, Pat Hearn, Dicky Landry, Jack Pierson, Keith Sonnier, Pat Steir, William Wegman, and Jackie Winsor, among others. And this is just the first half of the book. Included with the artist’s memoir is an essay by Jutta Koether and a survey of paintings from 1972-1999. This highly revered and extremely scarce publication was co-designed with Mark Magill and is reproduced here as a facsimile edition. The All Night Movie was originally published by Hauser & Wirth and Offizin Verlag.

Mary Heilmann was born in San Francisco in 1940. She studied at the University of California at Santa Barbara, San Francisco State University and the University of California at Berkeley before moving to New York in 1968. Heilmann began her career creating sculpture before quickly pivoting into abstract painting once on the East Coast, experimenting with bright colors and unusual geometries that bridge two-dimensional and three-dimensional elements. She has been the recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation Award as well as a Guggenheim Foundation award.

Salvation is a previously-unpublished artist book by Jimmy DeSana that he conceptualized shortly before his death in 1990. The publication contains 44 of the artist’s late photographic abstractions that quietly and poetically meditate on loss, death, and nothingness. Depicted within the works are images of relics, body parts, flowers, and fruits that DeSana altered using collage and darkroom manipulations to create pictures that are both intimate and other-worldly. Salvation provides a nuanced and sophisticated counterpoint to the prevailing work around HIV/AIDS at the time, which tended to favor bold political statements.

Variations of many of the works in this book were first presented at DeSana’s last show with Pat Hearn Gallery in 1988. Shortly thereafter, the artist began assembling a maquette of Salvation, using black and white images as place holders for the color works that he intended to comprise the final layout of the publication. Sadly, he was unable to fully realize Salvation in his lifetime, but on his deathbed, he dictated instructions to his longtime friend Laurie Simmons for completing the work; instructions which she noted on each page of the single-copy maquette. With these notes, Simmons was able to match extant slides  and sequencing. Simmons’ studio chose color gels from DeSana’s archive for each corresponding black and white image in the assembly of the publication. Thankfully, due to this recuperative work, Salvation—long-considered to be DeSana’s last major work—is now available for the first time, with every step taken to honor and embody DeSana’s original vision.

Jimmy DeSana (1949-1990) grew up in Atlanta, GA, and received his bachelor’s degree from the Georgia State University in 1972 before relocating to New York’s East Village in the early 1970s. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include The Sodomite Invasion: Experimentation, Politics and Sexuality in the work of Jimmy DeSana and Marlon T. Riggs, Griffin Art Projects, Vancouver, Canada, 2020, and Remainders, Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY, 2016. DeSana’s work can be found in numerous public collections including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others. A major retrospective of DeSana’s work was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, in 2022, accompanied by a catalogue co-published by the Brooklyn Museum and DelMonico Books.

Otherhow brings together four decades of writings, lectures, interviews, and documentation of work by the artist Joseph Grigely. Deaf since the age of ten, his art and writing have long questioned and made use of various modes of communication—photographs, handwritten notes, lipreading, newspaper headlines, paintings, and TV captions—to examine and scrutinize the ableism embedded in cultural and media production. From his brilliant series of postcards addressed to Sophie Calle, where he began to formulate a theory on the intersection of disability and art, to his epic lecture “On Failure,” which brings together the poet Keats, “the first woman of fly tying” Helen Shaw, and the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky to the same table for a conversation on beauty, Grigely’s writing is erudite, but clear; righteous with fury, but dryly humorous.

An underlying theme throughout are modes of access and how issues of accessibility and their resolution provide a benefit to everyone, not just the disabled. Chapters devoted to art, access, and advocacy underpin the interconnected nature of these issues in a maddening, but ultimately enlightening manner. Letters of complaint, faxes and emails, unpublished op-eds, exhibition proposals, statements on equality and access; each provide a glimpse into how Grigely’s work has been shaped by—or constructed from—the “tangled process” of opening access.

Joseph Grigely, artist, educator, and activist, is currently a Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He holds a Doctorate in Philosophy from Oxford in English literature and has taught at Gallaudet University, Stanford University, and the University of Michigan. Exhibiting widely in the US and Europe, his most recent show In What Way Wham? was presented at MASS MoCA in 2023–24. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Tate Modern, and the Stedelijk Museum, among others.

COOP documents Swedish artist Fia Backström's (born 1970) performances of two recent scripts, continuing her exploration of language, marketing, disorders and performance. The first script operates according to two distinct logics: a four-part linear base structure and text material that was chosen and read during the performance through chance movement of the performer's body across a grid.

This publication was especially designed to reflect this type of unpredictable and spontaneous movement. Mathematical symbols have been embedded into the text and these symbols link to ones on the upper corner of pages with nonlinear material. These indicate where the text could be inserted during a performance, thus incorporating the form of performance into the book. The second script serves as an epilogue to the first and was performed by four voices, reading from beginning to end without assigned lines, sometimes simultaneously.

Tense is a never-realised publication, written and composed by Lucy Lippard and Jerry Kearns in 1984, that only now has been released in a very limited run on our imprint. The book accompanied the exhibition Top Stories, which took a closer look at the 29 issues of the prose periodical with the same title, founded in the late 1970s by Anne Turyn.

Top Stories was dedicated to fiction by emerging women artists and writers from that time. Tense was originally intended to become part of the series as well, but never made it to print. It was only recently – during the making of the exhibition at Amsterdam’s Kunstverein – that the original mock-up was retrieved from the editor’s archives and finally sent off to the printer.

This bootleg edition collects scanned copies of Monique Wittig's writing. It includes; The Lesbian Body, Les Guérillères, The Opoponax, and Lesbian Peoples: material for a dictionary— In true bootleg style, punk enough to carry the truly radical words of Wittig: scans, a little grainy, with marginalia of unknown origins. Now, we can dress ourselves in the ravishingly erotic, violent splendorous brilliance to become baby Wittigs.  

This edition was assembled out of a deep love of Wittig's work by Chloe Chignell.

Monique Wittig was a French author and feminist theorist particularly interested in overcoming gender and the heterosexual contract. She published her first novel, L'opoponax, in 1964. Her second novel, Les Guérillères (1969), was a landmark in lesbian feminism.

Making a fanzine is an act of rebellion, even more so if it is published and produced by a woman. The grrrls of today use them to inspire countless young people around the world, to take control of their lives and to create their own culture. These homemade publications are a quick and cheap way to spread their ideas and dismantle the usual stereotypes. Traditionally hand-drawn, photocopied, and stapled together, the format of fanzines are now as diverse as their subject matter, with online platforms and social networks fast becoming the norm. The fanzine is more alive than ever!

Gemma Villegas runs her graphic design studio based from Barcelona. She works in close dialog with commissioners and collaborators on a broad range of projects, including visual identities, exhibitions, publications, and digital platforms, overseeing the creative process during all the phases of a project. Her work is characterized by a fresh and powerful visual language focused on detail with special attention to typography.