The Woman’s Building, a Los Angeles-based feminist art and culture collective, operated from 1973 to 1991. In November of 2016, Lauren Bon, Vice President and Director of the Annenberg Foundation, invited a group of Woman’s Building artists to participate in a six-month archiving residency at Metabolic Studio, the Foundation’s art activism and social design initiative, located in downtown L.A. The Metabolic Studio site details the scope and aims of the project:
From 1975 to 1991 the Woman’s Building was located in the Beaux Art Building on North Spring Street in downtown LA, adjacent to Metabolic Studio, which has been situated at 1745 N Spring Street since 2006. Lauren Bon invited the Woman’s Building to return to Spring Street, within Metabolic Studio from November 2016-April 2017, in order to continue the long-term task of preserving and re-animating the Woman’s Building’s critical role in the development of feminist culture and expression.
The Special Project in Archiving sought to further preserve the history of the iconic feminist art organization, both through traditional archiving methods and by encouraging a new generation of artists to engage that history. For the six month archiving residency, Metabolic Studio opened up an archiving room to artists who were active at the Woman’s Building, providing support to digitize, document, and preserve private collections. Among the material gathered and hosted by this temporary archive were the personal collections of Nancy Buchanan, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Clsuf, Nancy Fried, Anne Gauldin, Mary-linn Linn Hughes, Maria Karras, Helene Ly, Sue Maberry, Phranc, Arlene Raven, May Sun, Leslie Starus-Labowitz, Cheryl Swannack, and the Woman’s Building Slide Archive.
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