Women's Caucus For Art Honors AICA-USA Co-President

Judith Stein

February 11, 2020

AICA-USA extends a heartfelt congratulations to co-president and longtime member Judith Stein, who has been named a recipient of a Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award. Stein will be honored along with four distinguished recipients at an award ceremony in Chicago this Saturday, February 15. The ceremony will take place at Film Row Cinema, 1104 S. Wabash, Columbia College from 7:30-9:00pm and is free and open to the public. Doors open beginning at 7:15pm. Stein's fellow 2020 honorees are Joyce Fernandes, Michiko Itatani, Judy Onofrio, and Alison Saar.

The WCA Lifetime Achievement Awards were first presented in 1979 in President Jimmy Carter’s Oval Office to Isabel Bishop, Selma Burke, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, and Georgia O'Keeffe. The Awards were the first awards recognizing the contribution of women to the arts and their profound effect on society.

Judith E. Stein is an art historian and curator of twentieth century art who has often written about feminism and women artists. Her 1981 doctoral thesis on the neoclassic iconography of Sappho was one of the first feminist dissertations in art history at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1973–1974, she helped organize Philadelphia Focuses on Women in the Visual Arts (FOCUS), a month-long, city-wide celebration of art by women. An early editor of the Women’s Caucus for Art newsletter (1975–1977) and a member of the WCA national advisory board (1979–1981), Stein began her career as an art critic for Art in America by reviewing Judy Chicago’s first East Coast exhibition in 1974; a decade later she reviewed Chicago’s Birth Project for The New York Times Book Review. Her study of Cecilia Beaux, the first woman to teach at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, was the first feminist discussion of the artist’s work and career (Feminist Art Journal, Winter 1975–1976).

As chair of the College Art Association’s Committee on Women in the Arts from 1992 to 1997, she initiated a series of awards to women in the arts. She served on the advisory board of Philadelphia’s Leeway Foundation for women artists, (1994–2002) and was the first curator of Leeway Founder Linda Alter’s collection of art by American women artists. Stein wrote the keystone essay for Making Their Mark: Women Artists Move into the Mainstream, 1970–1985 (Abbeville, 1989) and “Collaboration,” for The Power of Feminist Art (Harry N. Abrams, 1994). She curated The Likeness of Being: Contemporary Self-Portraits by Sixty Women (DC Moore Gallery, New York, 2000), and co-curated Picturing the Modern Amazon: The Hypermuscular Woman (The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 2000). Feminists Who Changed America, 1963–1975 (University of Illinois Press, 2006) documents her career.