A Good Painter ... for a Woman

It was 1970. My male colleagues didn’t know what to make of me. I was a new addition, a painter, possibly a competitor, who lived on the Upper East Side and had two little kids. And my work was selling like crazy. How did this happen? Those young men came mostly from the Midwest. Looked at from their perspective, it’s clear that it wasn’t about the quality of my art, but rather a broader question of, “How do we get rid of her?” They had little experience treating women as equals. At the time the concept existed in only a few major U.S. cities: New York, LA, D.C. Not that it was practiced that much there.