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WARM

A Feminist Art Collective in Minnesota

2007
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Author:

Joanna Inglot

WARM

The first comprehensive history of Minnesota’s most influential feminist arts organization

In 1976, the Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota opened a gallery in downtown Minneapolis—and introduced the Twin Cities to a feminist approach to art. WARM, the first history of this group, features twelve Minnesota artists, representative of the more than one hundred women who belonged to the organization and worked in a variety of art media.

Joanna Inglot's documentation of the Women's Art Registry of Minnesota proves that the collective-based activism of the feminist art movement didn't take place just in New York and California. Literally 'in the middle of it all,' WARM has had an impressive and lasting effect on art, artists, and the art scene in Minneapolis. Inglot's book is required reading for anyone interested in feminist collectives or feminist art history.

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Harmony Hammond

In 1976, the Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota opened a gallery in downtown Minneapolis—and introduced the Twin Cities to a feminist approach to art. WARM was a significant presence both nationally and locally, offering educational workshops, a mentoring program, and an alternative exhibit space for Minnesota women artists. Its longevity and success rivaled those of feminist art collectives in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, and renowned artists and critics such as Miriam Schapiro, Judy Chicago, Harmony Hammond, and Lucy Lippard participated in WARM’s programs and exhibits.

WARM, the first history of this important group, includes an essay that places WARM within the national feminist art movement. Twelve Minnesota artists are featured, representative of the more than one hundred women who belonged to the organization and worked in a variety of art media, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, textiles, graphic design, and installation art.

Distributed for the Weisman Art Museum

WARM

Joanna Inglot is associate professor of art history at Macalester College.

WARM

Joanna Inglot's documentation of the Women's Art Registry of Minnesota proves that the collective-based activism of the feminist art movement didn't take place just in New York and California. Literally 'in the middle of it all,' WARM has had an impressive and lasting effect on art, artists, and the art scene in Minneapolis. Inglot's book is required reading for anyone interested in feminist collectives or feminist art history.

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Harmony Hammond

Joanna Inglot's book WARM gives us a clear and rich explanation of how Minnesota women artists became feminists. Among other ways, they changed their world by discovering that Consciousness Raising meant bringing to light—sisters who were finding their identity and sharing it so that women could bring their brilliance above and beyond the male canon.

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Miriam Schapiro

A warm welcome to Joanna Inglot's important contribution to feminist art history, which puts WARM back on the map where it began and belongs. The book's local focus within the broader context of the national women's art movement is significant at a moment when those memorable times are in danger of being forgotten—until the advent of the next, inevitable, wave of feminist art.

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Lucy R. Lippard, author of The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Feminist Essays on Art

Joanna Inglot's trailblazing book about WARM, the important collective of women artists working in the Twin Cities, is an indispensable addition to any feminist art library. As the first feminist art cooperative in Minnesota and one of the largest and most active artist-run galleries in the country, WARM's history needed to be documented.

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Maura Reilly, curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum

Inglot’s accessible text is useful for a range of levels from the undergraduate to the specialist in art history or women’s and gender studies. She beautifully balances the collective history of WARM and the individual narratives devoted to its members, while deftly interweaving the impacts of Minnesota history and larger feminist debates, to construct a social historical analysis that will serve as a model to future scholars writing about women artist’s cooperatives.

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Woman’s Art Journal

Indeed, it is the meticulous scrutiny Inglot brings to her subject that makes this publication such a valuable resource.

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Feminist Collections