Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
Women in Design: The Next Decade.
It’s a poster for a conference held in Los Angeles in 1975, “for women who work with public visual and physical forms,” as the piece advertises — that is, women artists and designers. The abstract vista suggests a wide open landscape, a distant horizon, a place of limitless opportunity. But the repeating image, the shape of the symbol of femininity derived from the Roman sign for the goddess Venus, is also quite literally about nuts and bolts.
The ingenuity of the design and the keen eye toward pragmatic ends encapsulates many of the ideas at work in “Sheila Levrant de Bretteville: Community, Activism, and Design,” a retrospective show of the artist’s work running now at the Yale University Art Gallery through June 23. In addition to giving viewers a sense of De Bretteville’s consistently striking design work, the show offers a glimpse of what long-time commitment to a social cause looks like, and in the process, a sharp-edged perspective on what has changed in the struggle for greater equity between women and men and what has not.
As an accompanying note states, de Bretteville “is well known for her important and early contributions to the field of feminist design and education.” She graduated from the Yale School of Art in 1964. In 1971, at the California Institute of the Arts, she developed the first women’s design program. “In 1973,” as the note continues, “with the artist Judy Chicago and the art historian and critic Arlene Raven, de Bretteville established the Woman’s Building and the Feminist Studio Workshop — the first independent art school for women and women’s culture — in downtown Los Angeles.”
She became director of graduate studies in graphic design at Yale in 1990 and was the first woman given tenure at the Yale School of Art the following year. Her lifelong engagement with feminist activism and the connected issues of immigration and racial equity (she is now 83 years old) is also reflected in a series of public art installations, from murals in Los Angeles to installations in Russia and New York to the redesigned entryway to Hillhouse High School here in New Haven, “representing a shift in scale and focus from the printed page to the urban environment.”
Pink, detail.
Many of the pieces in the show date from the 1970s, when de Bretteville designed much of the printed materials for the Woman’s Building. In 1974’s Pink, she pushed against the stereotypes people had of the color by asking women of all ages to draw or write what the color meant to them, then created a quilt-like design from them. The multiplicity of associations de Bretteville collected, ranging from love to hate, a stew of memories, thoughts, and feelings, is typical of the designer’s work. What’s most striking about Pink is how up-to-date it feels, 50 years later.
De Bretteville knew in 1973 that the crew behind the Woman’s Building had its work cut out for them. As she wrote then, “I have become increasingly aware of the extent to which our visual environment reinforces repressive attitudes when it could offer alternatives. By basing our design arts on an ideology which encourages the direct voice of the individual women in society, we can point out the contradictions inherent in patriarchal, one-directional channels of communication. We can present our ideas, feelings, and needs directly to a larger audience than the loft, gallery and museum-going elite, when we make our communications using mass media technology.”
Her designs were as bold as her language, with emphasis on the word “direct,” thanks to a clean, pointed, highly disciplined visual style. One piece involved pink circular stickers, designed to be stuck on the packaging for Massengill disposable douches promising the “scent of country flowers.” Each of the stickers conveyed a straightforward message: “Your vagina smells fine now naturally.” Similarly, de Bretteville first came up with the eye-bolt femininity symbol as a necklace, made of actual pieces of hardware, in the early 1970s. She still wears one today, a note informs us, and gives them out as gifts.
Courtesy Yale University Art Gallery
From her first pieces to her latest, though, the strength in de Bretteville’s work lay in its clarity of communication, its ability to convey a multitude of voices that were sometimes but not always, and not necessarily, the designer’s own. The entryway to Hillhouse High School, a note tells us, is “inspired by kente cloth,” and “to gather the texts” in the piece, she “conducted archival research, interviewed students and alumni, and partnered with the poet Elizabeth Alexander, who led a workshop at the school. She created art to call attention to “overlooked histories” and to draw attention to the AIDS crisis.
The show itself, quite rightly, is intended to honor the work of a brilliant designer who turned her craft to amplifying the voices of people too often not heard loudly enough. But there’s a tough lesson just below its surface. The problems de Bretteville and her peers identified in the early 1970s, and the way they are articulated, sadly feel all too modern. In the work of a lifetime, de Bretteville’s generation of activist artists carved out more space for the “alternatives” to the “repressive attitudes” in our “visual environment” that she articulated in 1973. In that sense, the work has been worth it, and there’s a legacy to carry forward. But there’s little doubt that those repressive attitudes still prevail, everywhere we look, an avalanche of visuals telling women how to appear and how to act. The pace of progress can feel excruciatingly slow (can we all please acknowledge that 1991 is an embarrassingly recent year for the School of Art to give its first woman tenure?).
Yet the energy to push for equity remains. At the end of the show is installed a grid of pink sticky notes, intended to replicate de Bretteville’s 1974 piece. On it, visitors have written and drawn their associations with the color pink. The parallels to the 50-year-old piece in the show are striking and sobering. But glimmers of the possibility for change appear, too. In both pieces lies the simple idea that the overtly political push for equity is, on another level, not political at all. It’s as simple as seeing people for who they are, as fully as possible.
“Sheila Levrant de Bretteville: Community, Activism, and Design” runs at the Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel St., through June 23. Admission is free. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.