Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art: Feminist Art Base: Joan Arbeiter

Joan Arbeiter is an artist drawn to people, nature and the ironies of her pre-feminist circumstance.

Her art has focused on Women Artists, Street People, The Vanishing Vista, Friends and Neighbors, a Job Search, Familiar Faces, The Artists Palate, and Portraits of the Artist. As A Young Girl Fulfilling Society's Limited Expectations, an on-going series. Portraying her images in the media and size she finds appropriate, Joan weaves into her art a text of personal, political and/or social significance relating to her subject.

The artist is co-author of Lives and Works: Talks With Women Artists, Vol 2 (1996,1999) with Beryl Smith and the late Sally S. Swenson. She has been published, quoted, reviewed or reproduced in Manhattan Arts International, Spirit Taking Form by Nancy Azara, Language Visual Art, Frontiers, Women's Art Journal, World Hunger Year Magazine, catalogue essays and publications of Douglass College and Rutgers University and on radio, TV and the internet.

Her feminist consciousness was awakened in 1979 at the New York Feminist Art Institute, where in Nancy Azara's Visual Diaries class she learned to connect being an artist with being a woman. These sensibilities continued to expand during her association with the Women's Caucus For Art, and with the artists who exhibited in the Women's Artist Series at Douglass College and who later became the subjects in her book.

Joan attended Douglass College, received her BA from Brooklyn College and MFA from Pratt Institute. An art educator for 30 years, she directed the Joan Arbeiter Studio School and was artist-in-residence for the New Jersey School of the Arts. Joan joined the faculty of The duCret School of Art in 1978, where she continues to teach.

Joan is an exhibiting artist at Ceres Gallery, NY, and The Varo Registry [www.varoregistry.com] Active as curator, consultant, lecturer, moderator, and juror, she is a member of ARTTABLE and an honorary member of the Board of the Women's Studio Center from whom she received The Elan Award for mentoring.

Joan Arbeiter's work has been seen in more than 20 solo exhibitions and 100 group exhibitions. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Noyes Museum and in public and private collections throughout the country.

For me feminism is life-affirming and open-minded. It is the lens through which I perceive my artistic practice and my personal and political circumstance.

I have seen how vital the feminist movement is to the world at large and have come to understand how my own life and art may be considered relevant in this wider context.

A tremendous effort has brought us this far and I am grateful to the many incredible feminists for their art, their scholarship, their leadership and their support.

Here's to the next wave! The door is closing if we don't keep pushing against it.