General Resources for Women’s History

• The Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative
• Women and Art & Design
• Women's History Month: U.S. National Archives
• Feminist Rebels in the Global South
• RISD Archives and Special Collections Departments hold records, books, and lantern slides for the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture, the first school of its kind for women.
• Smithsonian Institution hosts the Virtual Women Filmmakers Festival at SAAM online (throughout March 2021) feat Cecilia Vicuna, Coco Fusco, and Mariam Ghani
• Faculty member Jaleen Grove's ID: An Illustrator Dataset uses Tableau to enable visitors interact with and sort historical illustration data, and features tools specifically geared toward understanding the visibility of women illustrators.
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Cyberfeminism Index

Explore this constantly growing index of sources, images, and information gathered by Mindy Seu and commissioned by Rhizome.

Selected reads for Women's History Month:

• Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader (check out Hyperallergic's Illustrated Guide to Linda Nochlin’s “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”)
• Recasting the vote : how women of color transformed the suffrage movement
• Butch heroes
• The selected works of Audre Lorde
• Breaking ground : architecture by women
• Drawing power : women's stories of sexual violence, harassment, and survival : a comics anthology
• Embodied avatars : genealogies of black feminist art and performance (ebook)
• Women in graphic design 1890-2012
• Making kantha, making home : women at work in colonial Bengal
• Martha Rosler : irrespective 
• Infinite Radius: founding Rhode Island School of Design (print copies available to borrow or buy at Fleet Library)

Zines

Discover self-published work by women in RISD's Zine Library. Browse zines spanning topics like Activism, Art, Body Politics, Comics, Food, DIY, Feminism, Gender, Health, Relationships, Poetry, Race, Labor, and more.

Explore works by women video and performance artists via RISD’s newest streaming subscription: Electronic Arts Intermix 

Works by Eleanor Antin  * Ellen Cantor * Barbara Hammer * Joan Jonas * Stanya Kahn * Shigeko Kubota * Sondra Perry * Pipilotti Rist * Martha Rosler * Carolee Schneemann * and more! 

The library has a large collection of DVDs which includes feature films, documentaries, TV series, animation, video/performance, and more. FYI, we loan out mini DVD players you can connect to your laptop via USB.

NANCY ELIZABETH PROPHET

American sculptor Nancy Elizabeth Prophet (1890-1960) was the first woman of color to graduate from RISD, in 1918. While we have several of her sculptures in the RISD Museum and books about her and her work in Fleet Library, Rhode Island College holds the largest collection of historic photos of Prophet and her work, and Brown University's Hay Library has her diary from 1922-1934, when she was studying and working in France before returning to the States to teach at Spelman College (1934-1944). The diary has been fully digitized and can be explored online here. It served recently as a touchstone for Simone Leigh's contribution to the RISD Museum's Raid the Icebox Now exhibition and publication.

REMEMBERING ALUMNA ESTERA MILMAN: ART HISTORIAN, CURATOR, RESEARCHER OF THE AVANT-GARDE

Estera Milman received her BFA at RISD in 1970 in Painting/Printmaking and Film. In early February we received the sad news that she had passed away, in Boston, on January 27. Library staff had learned about Estera's visionary contributions to the study of alternative art movements of the later twentieth-century in December 2018 when her health was failing, and her daughters, Mica and Nira Pollock, had asked if Fleet Library might be interested in a selection from her comprehensive library on this topic. Our visit to meet with them at Estera's house in New London, CT, led us to a day-long encounter with books and ephemera on and by many of the greats of Dada, Fluxus, No!Art, and other post-WWII avante-garde art movements. There was also an archive of correspondence and notes compiled by Estera in the course of founding Alternative Traditions in the Contemporary Arts (ATCA) at the University of Iowa. We were delighted to advise on the placement of the library and archives and honored to receive a selection of Estera's books for Fleet Library, which we hold in memory and celebration of her life and achievements. 

We encourage you to read remembrances of Estera here and here, to explore how she "pushed ideas of art and space beyond the museum walls" on her “inter/arts” website, and to browse the selection of her books now available to the RISD community.

STAFF PICK: DELORES HUERTA

In honor of Women's History Month, Anne Butler, of our Visual + Material Resource Center has directed us to Dolores Huerta, a community activist in the fight to bring justice and dignity to agricultural laborers, and cofounder of the National Farm Workers' Association (NFWA), which became the United Farm Workers' Union (UFW). Huerta, awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, coined the slogan, Sí, Se Puede (Yes, We Can). Now in her nineties, Huerta continues her community work today. To learn more, check out the DVD Dolores, and Jose Montoya's Abundant Harvest, a book of nearly 2,000 drawings along with paintings, poems, sketchbooks, video footage, music, and other ephemera.