This summer there was a local retrospective for Carol Vernon, a long time Southwestern Oregon Community College art teacher. During the preparations, I was shown the picture they were planning to use for publicity - a young Carol was resolutely looking directly at the camera, clutching, embracing her copy of Georgia O’Keeffe, by Georgia O’Keeffe. Someone commented that it was odd she was photographed with a book, not one of her pieces. But I knew why. One look at the picture and I was immediately transported back to 1976.
I was finishing my first year of graduate school. It had been a challenging year. In the 30's, early in her career, Louise Nevelson was told she had “to have balls to be a sculptor.” That sentiment was alive and well in 1976. That spring, I impulsively cut a slab of walnut into the silhouette of a plump swimming suit and mounted it on mahogany legs fitted with maple high heels. I rubbed white paint into the grain of the mahogany. By the end of the week, the finished piece was squirreled away in the corner of my work area where it could not be readily seen from the common area of our shared grad studio. The next Monday, the head of the department visited. Clearly word was out. He circled my new piece, paused, and pronounced he had nothing to say, “There was no art history precedent for it.” And he left. I was stunned. Less blunt but the same message given to Nevelson - I was not making, nor was I equipped to make sculpture. A paper doll past was irrelevant, useless for a sculptor.
I sat staring at the piece for the longest time. As I gathered my things to leave, one of the other grad students poked his head around the corner and quietly said, “I don’t get it either. But he is wrong.... it is art”. Jan Zach, the chair of my graduate committee, stopped by a couple of days later. In his usual effusive half-Czech, half-English way, he urged me to make more, bigger and bigger. He was convinced that the piece was the start of my thesis work. But nothing of substance grew from the tiny balsa wood studies that followed.
In desperation for a context from which to build my graduate thesis, I surveyed the University of Oregon Architecture and Allied Arts Library for information on women artists. I found one picture and two magazine articles. But by the fall, some of the fruits of the feminist movement were reaching Oregon. Black and white paperbacks on Nevelson and Kathe Kollowitz had been published. Judy Chicago spoke at the U. of O. and Miriam Shapiro lectured at O. S. U.
The Georgia O’Keeffe book showed up in the college book store just before Thanksgiving. It was a full colored, oversized monograph on a woman artist, with an unprecedented $75 price tag. For comparison, I had bought the Nevelson book, Dawns and Dusks, for $7.95 and Kathe Kollwitz: Woman and Artist for $5.50. I spent Christmas Day curled around my very own copy, reading it from cover to cover. The book sold out in record time, shocking the publishing world and providing impetus for rushing long-neglected manuscripts on other women artists to market.
For me, Carol Vernon and countless other women artists coming of age in those chauvinistic times, the book was instantly our most prized possession. Carol’s copy was at her retrospective, looking worn and well loved, just like my copy. We all still had to struggle to find our own paths, but the O’Keefe book was proof we could hold in our hands that a woman artist had found her way, had found a place in the art world.
I will forever be grateful to O’Keeffe for not allowing her work, her life be relegated to a black and white paperback. Instead she continued to work and patiently waited for the publishing world to meet her terms. She was 89 when the book was published, but when her story was told, it was with her own words, in a blaze of color, and bigger than life. The size of the first edition was wonderful to look at, but difficult to shelve, later editions were downsized to a more conventional coffee table book size.