Minnesota's hot mamas: an interview with Joanna Inglot

Genders, June, 2008 by Jennie Klein

[1] KLEIN: In your book WARM: A Feminist Art Collective in Minnesota you chronicle the history of the Women's Art Registry of Minnesota, a woman's art collective and gallery based in Minneapolis. In the introduction, you write that "thirty years after the founding of the WARM collective no studies about it had been written or published, even though the group has been well-known in Minnesota and recognized nationwide as one of the major feminist art cooperatives in the United States (xiv)." I wonder if you could begin by talking about how and why you became interested in WARM and what motivated you to propose an exhibition of 12 members of the WARM collective to the Weisman Art Museum of the University of Minnesota?

[2] INGLOT: I first heard about WARM when I began teaching art history at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul. One of my colleagues in the Art Department told me that the first registry of slides of a feminist art collective called WARM had been housed in my office. Since that moment I have been haunted by the spirit of WARM and I felt compelled to learn more about the collective. I began to meet artists who once belonged to the group. I got to know their work. Over time I developed a strong sense of professional commitment to document the work of this remarkable group of women who have gone practically unnoticed in the field of feminist art history. I was teaching a course entitled "Women in the Arts" at the same time and came across a photograph of the WARM Collective in Norma Broude and Mary Garrard, ed., The Power of Feminist Art, but that was it. I was surprised to discover that although many feminist circles in the country had heard of WARM and that the collective was well known in the Twin Cities there were no significant art historical analyses or historical studies that examined the nature and the contributions of the collective to feminist art movement and/or cultural life in Minnesota. Moreover, I realized that beyond the importance of this group for feminist art history that the members of WARM had produced some very good work. After seeing the work of many of the artists associated with WARM I was struck with the quality. I remember thinking that their art was as good as anything I was teaching about in my Women in the Arts class. I think it was that recognition that motivated me to propose an exhibit to the Weisman Art Museum. Since the museum does not have a large exhibition space, I had to limit the exhibit to 12 members. I selected long-standing members whose work gave a good cross-section of work produced by the collective.

[3] KLEIN: How did working on the exhibition "WARM: 12 Artists of the Women's Art Registry of Minnesota" and book/catalogue differ from writing your first book: The Figurative Sculpture of Magdalena Abakanowicz: Bodies, Environments, Myths? Did you encounter any challenges by shifting your emphasis from a well-known artist to a group of feminist artists that had almost disappeared from art history/history?

[4] INGLOT: My experience of working on these two books was quite different although surprisingly there were still many similarities. Abakanowicz was well-known but scholarship on her work was rather skimpy. Abaknowicz's work and her persona were veiled by the myth of the outsider loner artist who worked in the deep isolation of Communist Eastern Europe. Yet she is someone who has become a leading voice for artists behind the Iron Curtain. One of my major goals was to de-mythologize the artist and to present her work in the context of Polish sculpture and in dialogue with the international art scene. I also addressed the complexity of the artist's attitudes toward contemporary politics and the troubled history of her native country. In that book I wanted to draw attention to the lack of scholarship on the art of Poland and the marginalization of the entire region of post-World War II East-Central Europe caused by Cold War biases that impelled critics and art historians to see Eastern Europe as a uniformly backward and culturally isolated region, mimicking the developments of the Soviet Union. The political climate in which WARM developed was obviously quite different. I noticed, however, that the history of WARM also suffered from similar cultural and regional marginalization. The contemporary art produced in the Midwest, including Minnesota, was and still is often seen by critics and art historians as parochial, derivative, and unworthy of close scrutiny. Therefore, in this project I felt it was important to challenge this general outlook in order to present this group in a larger national context. I wanted to demonstrate the lively artistic and feminist environment that developed in the Twin Cities during the 1970s-1990s. In both cases, I had to create a context for an artist/group of artists and recreate the cultural climate in which they worked. But, of course, working with one artist versus a collective is quite different. The WARM project required many more negotiations, which sometimes were difficult or even impossible to achieve.