Sarah Myers

In the 1980s, feminist art collectives DISBAND (1978–1982) and Carnival Knowledge (1981–1985) merged art, performance, and activism to protest patriarchal culture and censorship and defend sexual liberation and reproductive freedom. This dissertation examines the activities of these collectives based in downtown Manhattan between the years 1978 and 1985 in light of the fracturing of the feminist movement and social organizing within the art world in response to the Culture Wars. The collectives’ collaborative efforts—from multimedia exhibitions to interactive performance series—were acts of defiance in the face of public defunding of the arts and material violence against women’s bodies led by the Christian Right and Moral Majority under President Ronald Reagan. The centering of sexual politics in their artmaking reflected the internal divisions within the feminist movement between antipornography feminists and those who considered sexual expression a key tenet of women’s liberation. Feminist artists involved in the collectives—including Martha Wilson, Barbara Kruger, Cecilia Vicuña, Barbara Hammer, Josely Carvalho, and Martha Edelheit—exhibited, curated, and performed in a diverse array of venues in downtown New York where nightlife, theater, music, performance, and visual art co-existed. Alternative art spaces such as Franklin Furnace, P.S. 122, and the Kitchen provided physical space and community for these artists to experiment across disciplinary boundaries and exhibit their work without fear of censorship. This study will expand scholarship on the alternative arts scene of downtown New York by foregrounding the importance and impact of feminist collectives while also contributing to a recent shift towards historicizing 1980s feminist art collectives across the U.S. In focusing on collectives rather than individuals, I demonstrate how collaboration was utilized as a feminist tool for enacting social change and coping with cultural loss and political upheaval. In positioning collectivity as central rather than peripheral, this study proposes that group work is critical to the history of feminist art in the U.S., which has traditionally privileged individual authorship and de-emphasized the significance of collaboration.