When I decided to study art history instead of English literature, it was because using words to analyze visual objects made more sense to me than writing about writing. It wasn’t until I had already spent a year teaching that I came to understand the important lessons I had learned from studying art history. Most significantly, it helped me to See Better. It brought back the sparkle and glitter of the world. It trained my mind to formulate problems and find solutions. It made me think about psychology and creative energy. It put me in touch with the spiritual, and gave me an inkling of cosmic consciousness.

I came to the above realizations while sitting in the nave of the church of St. Madeleine in Vézélay, on one of many unorthodox pilgrimages. (When seeking shelter at the Pax Christi in Vézélay I was asked if I was on an “orthodox pilgrimage.”) Not surprisingly, and also because I loved to visit the Cloisters as a college student in New York City, my first area of expertise was in the middle ages. My Master’s Thesis was Witchcraft Motifs in Northern European Art of the Sixteenth Century – not exactly medieval, but as far back as one could go to study witchcraft iconography. My doctoral dissertation was An Archaeological Investigation of the Winchester Psalter (BL Cotton Nero C IV). I loved spending days in the Student’s Room of the old British Library, pouring over priceless illuminated manuscripts, each of which resonated with a mystical aura. Three articles followed from that work: “An Archaeological Reconstruction of a Previous State of the Winchester Psalter,” “No Exit: Structure and Organization in a Twelfth Century Last Judgement Cycle,” and “The Winchester Psalter: A Re-ordering of Its Prefatory Miniatures According to Scriptural Sequence.”

During the early 1970s I became deeply involved with the Women’s Movement and began to proudly define myself as a feminist. In the early 1980s I began teaching about women artists, and at the same time began to hear their voices through their writings. Ultimately I felt the need to come out of the scholarly closet and devote my energies to the study of women artists of the 19th, 20th, and now 21st centuries. As a graduate student I had a secondary concentration in Modern Art, and for the past twenty years I have devoted my research solely to women artists of this period. My two critical anthologies are Voicing Our Visions and Voicing Today’s Visions. Both of these volumes contain writings by women artists, as well as analytical essays. They both emphasize the process of coming to voice. I also wrote a short monograph on Mary Cassatt, and served as a consultant and author for The Dictionary of Women Artists, along with completing other writings. My current project, The Gendered Artist, is a series of essays that explore strategies used by women artists to maintain their artistic authority.