WSW Circular Newsletter

We came together at the Women’s Studio Workshop in its 50th year, in July of 2024. We are curious, hopeful, amateur, experienced, invested, desiring, creative, nostalgic, critical, ravenous feminists of all genders.

This (we)manifesto inherits and extends earlier (wo)manifestos, feminist interventions into patriarchal language and naming. Our workshop, “What’s Still Good About Yesterday’s Liberation?” took as its starting point the 1987 WSW workshop on feminist criticism—of which there is little archival information or institutional memory. Like many archive holdings, the 1987 booklet compiled and annotated by Josephine Withers offers its materiality and opacity. Our contact with the WSW archive points to the dual meaning of speculation: to see and to imagine.

We gather under the conceit that the time of feminism is then, now, and always. We are here to tell you that we are all stewards, students, and actants of feminist pasts and futures.

This newsletter is our missive to the past and future, our utopian wish. Let it be mailed, copied, shared, stolen, cut up, changed, or re-used in the feminist present in which it finds you.

Feminist care values ties that bind, urging compassion, empathy in mind, centering lived truths & moral ground. How is this practiced? Where is it found?

In mutual aid, collective care, sanctuary spaces everywhere, processes of reconciliation, accountability in creation.

Sharing knowledge, skills, & more, resources open, hearts restored. In daily acts, big or small, embodying care, answering the call.

What can you do, starting today? Live these values in every way!

How do you grieve something you’ve never had? How do you hold something you’ve never touched? We don’t have the answer.

Let your loneliness push you into ravenous curiosity. Visit an archive, read old newsletters, befriend elders, make art, and distribute zines.

Mourn the loss of physical space, but imagine what will come next. Don’t let your grief keep you from enacting a better future. Don’t close your eyes to the work happening now.

This newsletter project has been a collaborative effort using a collage-based process of deep looking and listening. Some graphics have been sourced from WSW newsletters, scrapbooks and archival materials. Writing was often done in collaboration and after group discussions. Individual parts are gathered and deconstructed so they can be reassembled into a new whole.

Our process for this newsletter is grounded in feminist traditions that reflect our hunger for world-building. We engage with:

feminist criticism to name how race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and immigration status are used to support state violence and systemic oppression of marginalized people– and to strategize our interventions
feminist ethics of care to center relationships in our work and position ourselves and our collaborators in an affective web of mutual responsibility [Caswell and Cifor, 2016]
citationality to increase accessibility and acknowledge the labor that goes into cultural production.
utopia as fuel for our wildest desires
manifesto as a grounding force to put action to our desires

“We will do what art can be”

We disrupt and dismantle with art and education— as honest creation stirs desire for change.

We shift our rhythm, peeling back the protective mask of privilege— a new, vulnerable, revision.

“you mingle and your work mingles”

We come together in a circle; without authority, against professionalization, sharing skills to emphasize the process of experimentation. With ideas. With materials.

Always taking actionable steps to hold space — pulling the margins toward center.

Land acknowledgments are an intentional device meant to incite actions toward the identification and removal of colonial structures in our lives. Women’s Studio Workshop acknowledges that its founding is built upon exclusions and erasures of many Indigenous peoples, including the Munsee Lanape peoples, on whose land this institution is located. Indigenous people are not relics of the past, but continue to survive amidst ongoing colonial violence and dispossession. We may ask ourselves: how do we plan to take action to support Indigenous communities? To support the land back movement? To confront white supremacy in all its systemic manifestations. To pay reparations. Community is made by all of us, and we invite your continued participation in envisioning what that can be.

This workshop was convened during the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinian people. The destruction of Palestinian lands, cultural institutions, libraries, and universities are intentional acts to eradicate Palestinian history and memory. As feminist critics, we stand firmly against Zionist violence, and are committed to speaking out. You can learn more and make a donation to Operation Olive Brand and Crips for eSims for Gaza, a disability-justice led initiative.

Jess Braden
M. Dillie
Allison Elliott
Leslie Fandrich
Josie Wenig

Teacher: Jeanne Vaccaro
Archivist: Faythe Levine
Print & Tech Manager: Erin Moore
Designer: Cassandra Gillig