"The artists’ and critics’ interviews presented here chronicle the founding years of the feminist art movement in the 1970s. While focusing on the events of that decade and the following, these narratives also discuss the impact of the civil rights, anti-war, and women’s rights movements."
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The Women's Philharmonic was a professional orchestra from 1981 to 2004 based in San Francisco for the promotion of women composers, conductors, and performers. It has presented works by more than 160 women composers, including 134 premieres and 47 commissioned works. This incomparable collection includes over 25 linear feet of music scores to orchestral works, many of which were performed by The Women's Philharmonic at concerts and at the New Music Reading Sessions, and music scores to chamber works. Among the 500 composers represented in the collection are Wilhelmina von Bayreuth, Francesca Caccini, Lili Boulanger, Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, Florence Price, Camilla de Rossi, Germaine Tailleferre, Libby Larsen, Ellen Taafe Zwillich, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Amy Beach, Gwyneth Walker, and Joan Tower. The collection contains 1250 cassette and DAT recordings, over 40 reel-to-reel tapes, 95 video recordings, and CDs of The Women's Philharmonic concerts, New Music Reading Sessions and pre-concert talks, along with approximately 30 LP recordings of works by women.
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Hernandez is an artist of the first generation of Chicano and Chicana artists who participated in the Chicano art movement that began in the late 1960s as part of the Chicano civil rights movement. Her collection represents more than twenty-five years of involvement in many of the most important historical activities of this period, including the farmworkers' movement, the feminist movement, international environmental movements, and the art movement itself, including the visual, literary, and performing arts. A California Bay Area artist, Hernandez is primarily known as a printmaker and pastel artist. She has also created a lesser-known body of photographic and performance work.
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Laura Aguilar is a photographer whose works are mostly portraits. Professor Chon Noriega of UCLA's Department of Film and Television writes that Aguilar's work documents "social groups and identities that remain invisible in mainstream culture: Latina lesbians, black couples, obese people, et al." She cooperates with her subjects so that "her work is not about power differentials between photographer and subject as is often, if implicitly, the case with...the social documentary tradition."
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brings together historical materials from a variety of California institutions, including museums, historical societies, and archives. Over 120,000 images; 50,000 pages of documents, letters, and oral histories; and 8,000 guides to collections are available.