Elles was one of the best shows I have seen SAM put on. It was amazing.

¡ño!

I hated the Elles exhibit and am glad to see it go. It was embarrassing that this is what we women could cobble together as "art."

The fact that it inspired such a strong feeling in you like "hate" proves it's success.

Didn't like it. The art was all about women and not art made by women. (And it wasn't all that good or interesting.) I didn't hate it; I was mostly bored.

This was a lovely & insightful article, Jen. Thanks for it.

this made me remember...so great to hear the thoughts on no, maybe, no, embarrassment, no, (in)appropriateness...all things I struggled with while saying yelling moving no during the performance...things I struggled with while giving a tour of the Elles:SAM section of the exhibit later as the genderfucked being I am, wanting to say yes to the work of some personal heroes, but ?!?! feeling a terror a nausea, that these huge forces were all lumped together and the context was a fragile controlling shrinking energy...Wondering how my grandparents felt seeing signs up everywhere not so long ago that said NO you can't come in, NO use the back door, always thinking about people saying NO to the museum a place art may go to die or belong to anyone but the artist...and the dangerous territory of segregating anything based on an identity marker. Thanks for this, mentioning, including the thoughts of people I want to have their own solo shows/performances in giant spaces, maybe all over that museum (and everywhere) Mylinda Sneed, Mimi Allin, Tonya Lockyer loved the writing Jen Graves thank you

my mother too retold the news in the car on the way to dance & violin lessons, all during junior high & high school, all the gruesome stuff, people getting cut out of their tents & dragged away, rapes and killings. i lived in boston in my late 20's & walked everywhere, along the charles under the dark trees, across the bridge at 2am. i used to imagine monkeys in the trees with knives ready to jump down on me. it's red flag thinking. it protects me. i'm aware of the threats & know how to test a situation. but are they real threats? how does my ever-ready attitude constrain me? don't i also need to cultivate comfort & strength to see & face the world as it is? last year, when i asked my friend what he thought about when he was alone in the woods, he said, "why didn't i bring a chick with me?" i told him i think of foul men with sores up their legs coming out of the woods to get me. is that a personal or a gender difference? it makes me realize what different experiences we have out in nature & in the world, about what is & what isn't dangerous & how we respond & feel we fit in. no doubt our culture creates this fear & our parents & then we ourselves enforce these differences. i came across peace pilgrim last year in my research & found in her a woman ready to see the good in everything & everyone, unafraid even of the things we're taught to fear (truck drivers, prisoners, ex-cons). what did this do for her? it have her the ability to shape her world & it gave her a sort of continual peace & ultimately made her a safe person in a safe world. i wonder could the woods become vaginal & do all women have little penises like someone once told me? i'd like to think they do. i like having the option of no. i've seen so many women for whom no is not an option. i have often felt i didn't have access to no. perhaps that's because i didn't know how to see myself or wasn't comfortable in the world. hmm, for no to be an option, it will have to be practiced, like an instrument. art seems a good place to begin.

I almost missed this exhibit. Went the last day and loved every piece of it, feeling so at home there among these great women and their work. I was really knocked out by how much of the show was photo-based work and deeply sad to see that so many women only had a stage because they had been married to male artists or had been their lovers. I laughed when I saw the show card about the video wedged into the floor of the many orifices of one artist's body. Watching people discover the Guerrilla Girls for the first time touched me. I stopped to chat with one woman visitor who was so overcome she could barely speak, she looked like she was having an episode and kept muttering "it's all here." Great great great exhibit. Still so much to do in the world for women, for art. "One is not born a woman, one becomes one," Simone de Beauvoir. Thanks for the great curators and organizers of the rarest of moments in the art timeline - a place devoted to women.

My band played the donor party Jen writes about. We were two songs into our set when a man in the audience walked up to our singer and stopped her with some cryptic comment that she didn't understand. When she asked him what he meant, he responded, "I think you should unplug and go home, little girl. You sound horrible. This is bullshit."

When this is the level of criticism that creative women continue to receive from their audience, belittling, condescending, gender-based put downs, is it any wonder that "being a woman" becomes the subject of so many female artists' work?

This all brings to mind the Le Tigre song "Gone B4 Yr Home." The male part goes:

"Now baby, I know I make about twice the money you make

and I'm never called a stupid whore or a fake,

and I don't structure my life around the fear of murder, dismemberment, or rape

but I hardly see what that has to do with OUR relationship."