Why this Minneapolis feminist art collective still matters 50 years later
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Fifty years ago this month, 1,500 people flooded a new art gallery in downtown Minneapolis. It was 1976, and the air was filled with cigarette smoke and chatter from the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd. People who were in attendance say the atmosphere was buzzing, because something was different about this space: Every piece of artwork on display was made by a woman.
“It was so many people that they had to take turns coming in and out of the space,” artist Patricia Olson recalls. “It spilled out into the alleyway and out into the street.”
This was the opening of the WARM: A Women’s Collective Art Space, a feminist gallery, in the Wyman Building.
“Everybody at the next gallery meeting just kind of sat back and said, ‘What the heck was that?’” Olson says. “It was overwhelming, and we felt that we had arrived.”
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A WARM front
WARM stands for the Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota, a feminist art collective that artists Susan Fiene and Lynne Lockie had launched three years earlier.
On April 10, an exhibition marking the 50th anniversary of the gallery opened at the Kickernick Gallery, which is just across the alley from where the original WARM gallery once stood. “LEGACY: The Women of WARM Gallery” features the work of 73 of WARM’s original 90 members, from tiny sculpture to massive paintings and a virtual reality experience.
“During the winter of 1973-74, we created a phone tree to locate other women artists,” Fiene recalls in the exhibition catalog. “WARM needed structure for the gallery project. We hammered out the constitution on my dining room table.”
Members created WARM as a platform for women artists when galleries and museums were barely showing work by women at all. They created a mission statement: “To establish women's artistic and cultural experience as a valuable and integral part of society.”
WARM would go on to become one of the most prominent women’s art collectives in the country, drawing the attention of the groundbreaking feminist artists Judy Chicago, Betye Saar, Alice Neel and Miriam Schapiro, the latter of whom attended the 1976 gallery opening and reported that “it is the most elegant of the five such collective art galleries in the United States and that it is very professional.”
The “Legacy” exhibition has provided an experience for the members of WARM, as well as the hundreds of students and artists they mentored, to reflect.
“It never occurred to me when I was a young woman, making things at my dining room table and then in my basement, while I was raising three little kids, that I could actually become an artist,” says artist Harriet Bart. “Through WARM, I learned it was possible through cooperation and hard work.”
Mona Lisa and other stories
Bart and Hazel Belvo are old friends as well as artists whose work has been collected by leading art institutions, from the Minnesota Museum of American Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Walker Art Center to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Library of Congress and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
They sit next to each other, with a stack of old photos and other WARM ephemera, in Belvo's airy home studio up on a hillside in Golden Valley. Bart opens a pamphlet with the “Mona Lisa” on its cover and reads.
“‘If the ‘Mona Lisa’ had been painted by a woman, the world would probably never have seen it,’ which I think is really true,” Bart said. “So, if you believe a creative talent must not be wasted just because it belongs to a woman, help make sure it doesn't happen. Become a member of the most controversial art gallery in the Twin Cities.”
Bart and Belvo remember how, in the 1970s, even local galleries and museums were not representing women. Bart ticks off data from exhibitions at the Walker Art Center: “These are solo shows: 1979 — five men, two women. 1980 — seven men, one woman. 1981— six men, one woman,” Bart says. “Then the group shows: in 1979 there were 75 men, 15 women; 1980, 67 men and 12 women; and in 1981, 171 men and 68 women.”
“Numbers speak,” Belvo says.
WARM, Belvo and Bart say, wanted to change those numbers. They point to the Walker Art Center exhibitions of late: In the past year, there have many blockbuster solo art exhibitions by women, including Dyani White Hawk’s “Love Language” and Christine Sun Kim’s “All Day All Night”
“This is a really important movement, a very important time in the history of women and art, and in particular in our area,” Bart says. “Those of us who know the story are fading away.”
‘Most unnatural and most fabulous’: Warming to the art of consensus
A few days later, and a few days before the exhibition opening, Bart joined other WARM members Patricia Olson and Vesna Kittelson at the Kickernick Gallery, surrounded by the artwork of the feminist collective: Quimetta Perle’s textile featuring Georgia politician Stacey Abrams; Marty Nash’s bold, abstract acrylic painting; Joyce Lyon’s pond surface in oil stick; and Vicki Lee Johnston’s mysterious nestlike sculpture made of steel and sheep hair.
They reminisce about the exhibitions, the grant writing and gallery sitting that was part of a member’s duties, and the visiting guest speakers of the feminist celebrity kind — such as art historian Linda Nochlin, who had penned the seminal feminist essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” just two years before WARM formed.
Members also created the triennial publication, the WARM Journal, which featured the work of local poets and writers.
“One of the problems back in the mid-70s was that women's work was not being written about. When it was written about, it was not written about in any sort of way that made sense from our point of view as artists,” Olson says.
“If you don't understand a woman's life, you don't understand the work that women are making,” Bart adds.
There were also monthly member meetings, which many say became foundational to their future careers.
“Those Saturday meetings were endless, and we sat in our directors chairs in the circle, and we worked on any given topic or subject that needed to be dealt with to reach consensus,” Bart says. “I learned a lot about trust and listening: Instead of just listening to my own voice, listening to the other voices and how we could do things together that we couldn’t do alone.”
“We did not want to have a hierarchical organization,” Olson adds. “There were absolutely no guidelines for putting together an organization like this. We were feeling it out, which was both exciting and wonderful, and it was consternating at the same time.”
Kittelson had recently arrived in the U.S. from what was then communist Yugoslavia when she joined WARM. She says these meetings were eye-opening.
“The process was fascinating, unknown to me, and the first signs of my comprehension of democracy,” Kittelson says. “It was natural here, but to me, it was most unnatural and most fabulous.”
‘Where would I be without them?’
For the next 15 years, the gallery was run collectively by its 90 members. It closed in 1991. Members point to a few causes: The rent increase at the Wyman Building and the progress WARM had made. Many members went on to exhibit their work across the country and teach at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, the University of Minnesota, St. Catherine University and more.
“Many of these people stayed in touch,” Olson says. “They became colleagues in other projects. They formed deep friendships and deep aesthetic connections with each other.”
Even with the gallery closure, WARM continued to mount exhibitions and ran a mentorship program through 2018. That same year, archivist and artist Heather Carroll, a mentee of WARM, curated an exhibition at St. Catherine University, “Roots and Fruits: Exploring the History and Impact of the Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota.”
“I am definitely a fruit of WARM. Where would I be without them? They've been my teachers, my mentors, my friends,” Carroll says. She has also been compiling an ongoing WARM oral history project for the Minnesota Historical Society, which she will present May 28 at the Kickernick.
“I'm looking back to look forward. What can we learn from the women of WARM and the way they did things and bring it into the now so that we can do better?” Carroll says.
Some WARM members have died since the gallery closed in 1991, while others left Minnesota long ago. Many, however, continue their art practices — like Bart, who recently moved into an art studio in the Kickernick building. Much of the art in the “Legacy” exhibition was made by WARM artists in the past few years.
A 50-year crescendo
On April 12, dozens of WARM members came from across the state and country to attend an opening reception at the Kickernick, which also had a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd.
“I'm feeling exhilarated,” Patricia Olson says. “It probably rivals the 1,500 that showed up at the original opening 50 years ago.”
“It's like a crescendo, a 50-year crescendo,” Belvo says.
Member Quimetta Perle traveled to Minneapolis from the East Coast, where she’s still making art.
“I've gotten to see a lot of my friends and colleagues from 50 years ago,” Perle says. For Perle, WARM was “a gallery in which I could show absolutely anything I wanted without any censorship whatsoever, and that was so important and so thrilling.”
Member Dani Roach recalls how difficult it was to balance a career working in libraries and her artistic pursuits when she became a member in the 1980s.
“A number of the other artists had full-time jobs too, and you saw that it could work, that you could squeeze some time to make your work, to sit at the gallery, to go to meetings,” Roach says. “I look back on those years — I have no idea how I did it, and I'm so glad I did it.”
‘We could do this too’
Painter Nicole Drilling studies a frame covered in glass doorknobs with the text “Easy” within, a piece by WARM member Susan Bacik.
“Look at all these people here. They touched so many lives and made so many things possible through the power of coming together and deciding their own fate,” says Drilling, tears in her eyes. “This is very inspiring.”
Drilling was an MCAD student and a mentee of MCAD professors Patricia Olson and Elizabeth Erickson, who passed away in 2024. Drilling doesn’t see this kind of support system for women artists today.
“These women were like, ‘We're not getting shown anywhere. The only way we do it is if we do it ourselves, and we do it together,’” Drilling says. “These times absolutely call for that. The show is very timely for taking a moment to recognize that we could do this too.”
