About the Women Artists News Database

The Women Artists News database is a project of the estate of Judy Seigel (1930-2017), a pioneering alternative photographer and painter whose wide-ranging reach included writing; she was co-founding editor of this central publication of the Second Wave feminist arts movement with publisher Cynthia Navaretta in 1975, along with founding editors Pat Passlof and Donna Marxer, and design director Susan Schwalb (who joined shortly after).

Written by and for women artists for more than 17 years, WAN's 600 plus contributors chronicled the creativity, politics, and protests of a movement battling for recognition in a canon that had all but shut out women. Ultimately reshaping today's art world and the very definition of what counts as "art," contributors included Adrian Piper, Cassandra Langer, Faith Ringgold, Joan Semmel, Joyce Kozloff, Lowery Sims, Lucy Lippard, Martha Edelheit, Mary Beth Edelson, May Stevens, and Miriam Schapiro, among many other now-legendary names.

Launching in 1975 as the Women Artists Newsletter, the journal was later published under Navaretta's Midmarch Press. In 1978, the title changed to the Women Artists News to reflect its growing content and reach, with circulation eventually reaching 10,000.

From the earliest days, the journal covered women organizing and protesting for basic inclusion in establishment galleries and museums, while forging their own institutions—cooperative galleries and nonprofits. WAN was in the forefront featuring these women artists, critics, and organizers while elevating creators of traditionally female "crafts"—quilting, ceramics, textiles, and decoration—long denigrated as anonymous domestic arts. The publication covered the full range of women’s explosion of creativity, from film and photography to the “happenings” and performance art breaking out nationwide.

By the 1980s, the journal published themed issues alongside regular news, profiles, how-to articles, events calendars, and gallery and museum reviews. Themed issues tackled timely controversy and debate, such as:

• Political Art (Fall 1981)
• What Price Art? (Winter 1985)
• Beyond Art & Politics: Nairobi Conference (June 1985)
• Son of Janson, Book & Exhibit Reviews (Spring 1986)
• Pornography: Looking for Mr. Good Censor (Sept 1986)
• Art Life Outside New York (Feb/Mar 1987)
• Craft Today: High Art/Low Art (June 1987)
• Women at the Cutting Edge: Art for the Nineties (Fall 1988)
• Whatever Happened to Art Criticism (Winter 1988/89)
• Women of Mexico; Exhibits, Books, Symposia (Winter 1991)

WAN ended regular publication in 1992 with the loss of New York State funding amid backlash to the feminist movement. The publication continued with special book review issues until 1998. Unavailable in JSTOR as far as we can determine, we hold a few of these issues in the Judy Seigel estate archive and hope someday to digitize and add them to the database.

Creating and Using the WAN Database

The estate spearheaded the WAN Database Project to make this primary source of the feminist art movement in the voices of the women themselves more readily accessible today for scholarship and research. With a team from NYU's Research Technology Services with Jovita Gandhi as the lead and independent developer Kim Moser, the project digitized 94 issues and 3,000 articles from 1975 to 1991 using Claude AI. The Feminist Institute’s Allison Elliot got us going with crucial document wrangling of the original issue PDFs.

After we OCRed the PDFs, Anthropic's Claude AI—first Sonnet, then Opus—reassembled the difficult-to-digitize columns, boxed articles, sidebars, and article jumps from the original journal's layout into full-length stories. Special thanks to Gandhi for dogged persistence with numerous strategies over many months to instruct Claude to correctly assemble the complex copy layout. With AI as the "middleman," we strongly recommend checking digital content against the original PDF (linked on every article entry.)

WAN is searchable by keyword, author, section, and date. Content is downloadable as text or PDF. When using this database for citation, always check digital content against the original PDF through the link provided on every entry.

On a Personal Note

I'm Judy Seigel’s daughter, Jessica, her estate director and WAN’S 1970s teen distributor who in high school bicycled through downtown Manhattan dropping off the publication to NYC bookstores. Today, I'm a journalism professor at NYU and independent journalist, along with managing my mother's archive. Though teen no longer and my mother has passed on, I’m thrilled to once again serve as WAN’s distributor, bringing the publication into the digital age for a new generation. This time, my bicycle is not needed, but deep thanks are to NYU data scientists Jovita Gandhi and Sajid Ali, developer Kim Moser, and the Feminist Institute’s Allison Elliot.

— Jessica Seigel, Director, Judy Seigel Estate

We welcome your feedback: wan@judyseigel.com.