By Rhianna Grove

When Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party was completed in 1979, after five years of work by Chicago and hundreds of collaborators, the feminist art world was set abuzz. Debates revolved around a central question: if women were “allowed” to create art on the scale of The Dinner Party, where should it go? Should women artists aim for mainstream gallery exhibitions, as Chicago did, or focus on alternative feminist art spaces?

Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1979. Along the three 48-foot tables are 39 place settings, each dedicated to a prominent woman in history (such as Virginia Woolf and Sojourner Truth) or feminine figures from mythology (like the primordial goddess and the Amazons).

Many felt that alternative art spaces, while indispensable for cultural production, could “only be minoritarian”—that is, widespread change could only occur within mainstream cultural institutions. Despite this, feminist artists, either by choice or necessity, often opted for establishing collectives, galleries, and exhibition spaces that specifically catered to themselves and their communities.

The First: Powerhouse Art Gallery

Founded in 1973 by eight Montréal artists—including Elizabeth Bertoldi and Pat Walsh—Powerhouse was Canada’s first women’s art gallery. Created after the founders were unable to secure mainstream exhibition space, the gallery provided a vital space for women to create, collaborate and share skills, hosting landmark shows like Artfemme ’75, the largest mixed-media women’s art exhibition in Canada at the time. Despite financial struggles and critical skepticism, Powerhouse continues to support women and gender-diverse artists in Montréal over fifty years later.

“A feeling of warmth, companionship, understanding and camaraderie [sic] pervades the whole gallery whether it’s vernissage (show opening), a workshop or a group discussion. Powerhouse existed before International Women’s Year, during it and will continue” (Upstream, Vol. 2, No. 6, p. 22).

Flyer for The Female Eye (1986), a three-week lecture series at Powerhouse Art Gallery by Montréal’s women’s photography group Oculus, covering 150 years of women photographers, including Julia Margaret Cameron, Florence Henry, Dorothea Lange, and Diane Arbus.

Building Networks: Partisan Gallery

Partisan Gallery, formerly at 2388 Dundas Street West in Toronto, is most notable for partnering with Women’s Perspectives ‘83, a series of cross-disciplinary art exhibitions that took place in May and June of that year. Women’s Perspectives featured the artwork of forty-eight visual artists, as well as music, theatre, films, readings, forums, and more. This month-long, city-wide exhibition was an invaluable opportunity for women to meet other artists and gain media exposure in an otherwise masculinist professional environment. A full list of participating artists can be found here.

Poster advertising Bag Lady Prosperity Dance and Benediction, a performance by Virgin Territory and The Chong for Women’s Perspective ‘83.

The illustrations highlight themes of women’s homelessness, displacement, and societal marginalization.

Paving the Way: A Space Gallery

A Space Gallery has been a hub for alternative art in Canada since its founding in 1968, first as a commercial gallery, before incorporating as a non-profit in 1971. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, A Space pioneered policies on artist fees, anti-censorship, anti-racism, and access, and has been recognized as a national leader in politicized multidisciplinary art practices. Originally located at 204 Spadina Avenue, the gallery continues to operate out of 401 Richmond, nearly sixty years later. 

Through its exhibitions, A Space foregrounded underrepresented artists and art forms, using its platform to interrogate social, political, and cultural norms in Canada’s art scene.

 Poster by Susan Sturman; a full account is in Graphic Feminism: Graphic Art of the Women’s Movement, 1970–86.

In 1986, A Space hosted Graphic Feminism, an exhibition organized by the Canadian Women’s Movement Archives that showcased sixteen years of women’s movement issues—choice, racism, equal pay, daycare, lesbians, violence against women, and more—through graphic art and design produced from 1970 to 1986. The materials—including posters, flyers, buttons, magazine covers, and books—functioned simultaneously as historical documents, propaganda, and art whose meanings shifted with context, highlighting the often-overlooked role of art in political movements.

“It is difficult to understand how art contributes to social change. Perhaps this misunderstanding is also due to the co-optation of the arts by commercial interests and the historical alignment of the ‘high’ arts with wealthy patrons” (Graphic Feminism).

Black Wimmin: When and Where We Enter

In 1989, A Space hosted Black Wimmin: When and Where We Enter, the first Canadian touring exhibition to address the marginalization of Black women artists and challenge Eurocentric views that dismissed ethnocultural art as “second-rate Outsider art.” It was also the first Canadian exhibition to exclusively feature Black women artists from Toronto, Ottawa, Kingston, Montreal, and Edmonton. It was curated by members of the Diasporic African Women’s Art Collective (DAWA), a collective of Black women artists formed in 1984.

Pictured here is Grace Channer—African-Canadian lesbian artist, DAWA co-founder, and former art director of Our Lives: Canada’s First Black Women’s Newspaper.

Grace Channer in her studio, Long Time Comin’ (1993). 

After A Space, Black Wimmin was also shown at Houseworks, in Ottawa, Ontario; Xchanges in Victoria, British Columbia; Articule, in Montréal, Quebec; and Eye Level, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Black Wimmin was commemorated in 2019 with the group exhibition Practice as Ritual / Ritual as Practice, also presented at A Space. 

Don’t Remain Silent

In 1991, A Space hosted a group exhibition commemorating the December 6, 1989 Montréal Massacre at L’École Polytechnique. First shown at The Women’s Common of Metropolitan Toronto on June 6, 1990, the massacre’s six-month anniversary, the exhibition Don’t Remain Silent: Montreal Massacre Commemorative Group Art Exhibit ran at A Space from March 16 to April 13, 1991. The opening featured performances by Susan Sinclair, Honey Novick, and F Word, and an artist talk co-sponsored by the Women’s Art Resource Centre (publisher of ​​Matriart) with participating artists Katherine Zsolt, Pam Patterson, Carol Watson, Irene Kindness, and Ruth Koski Harris.

Kelley Aitken, Fifteen Women, mixed-media on board, 1990. Aitken was one of the featured artists in Don’t Remain Silent.

For a full account and images, see Don’t Remain Silent: Montreal Massacre Commemorative Group Art Exhibit, a catalogue published by Susan Beamish in 2023. See also a poster for “Playing House”, an exhibition featured in A Space in 1995, that re-examined the domestic environment.

Supporting Self-Determination: Native Women in the Arts (NWIA)

Although alternative galleries aimed to support all women artists, they often reflected the exclusionary biases of the dominant white, cisgender art world. As a result, Black women, Indigenous women, and women of colour created their own collectives, such as Native Women in the Arts (NWIA), which sought to “build networks that help break down isolation, forge connections, gain access to resources, and support cultural self-determination” for Indigenous women across Turtle Island. NWIA organized events and workshops to promote Indigenous women’s art, including a Pow-wow at Kingston’s prison for women in 1993. It continues to support First Nations, Inuit, Métis women, and other Indigenous gender-marginalized artists. 

“Well, as an Indigenous woman artist […] there wasn’t a lot of space for that unless we were recycling and refrying the Pocahontas image. I mean […] you’re either Pocahontas, or you’re an ancient, wise museum piece, and I wasn’t really looking to be either.” – Monique Mojica, interviewed by Amy Gottlieb

You can learn more about Indigenous women’s art activism in this interview with Monique Mojica, a Jewish-Indigenous playwright, performer, and co-founded of the Native Earth theatre company in Toronto.

Masks from Native Earth, a Toronto-based Indigenous theatre company, Spirit of Turtle Island Native Women’s Festival.

Conclusion

These galleries and collectives were more than exhibition spaces; they were radical sites of community that challenged mainstream art institutions and expanded what could be recognized as valuable cultural production. Yet, their reach was often limited by the pressures of survival, with some favouring commercial viability and widespread appeal over intersectional feminist solidarity. Marginalized women faced a dual exclusion, forced to choose between conforming to existing arts spaces or building new ones in which they were free to be themselves as women and artists. The legacy of these galleries is a powerful testament to the necessity of spaces that honour the artistic freedom and self-determination of all women and gender-diverse artists.

Rise Up aims to include a wide range of items in our collection. These materials are an essential part of our feminist history and experiences. If you have resources related to feminist art collectives, galleries, and studios, including, but not limited to, film, music, photos, buttons, posters, or other resources to share, please contact us.