Women & Their Work: Why W&TW?

Some people wonder why Women & Their Work even exists. Is there really a need, they ask, for an organization that promotes female artists exclusively? That may have been fine for the Seventies, in the heyday of women's lib, but haven't those times passed? What's the point of such an organization today?

With Women & Their Work turning 30 next year, the pioneering cultural organization is choosing to tackle these questions head-on, in the two-hour panel discussion Women & Their Work: Why Then, Why Now, to be held this weekend at W&TW's home on Lavaca. The free event, which honors the late Rita Starpattern, the visual artist who co-founded W&TW and served as director for its first eight years, will feature an impressive gathering of artists, curators, and cultural professionals discussing the state of feminism and women's art over the last three decades, as well as W&TW's role as a central space and showplace for Texas women artists, nurturing them and opening doors for their work to be shown elsewhere both locally and nationally.

Kay Turner, former member of the seminal rock band Girls in the Nose, now adjunct professor at New York University and folklorist for the borough of Brooklyn, returns to town to lead the discussion with artist and UT professor Margo Sawyer, choreographer Deborah Hay, art historian Saundra Goldman, Fluent-Collaborative founder and former Austin Museum of Art Director Laurence Miller, artist Connie Arismendi, artist and Texas State University assistant professor Joey Fauerso, and artist and Glasstire Editor Rachel Cook. If that crew can't answer those questions in an informed and lively manner, who can? A reception will follow.

Women & Their Work: Why Then, Why Now will take place Saturday, Nov. 3, 3-5pm, at Women & Their Work gallery, 1710 Lavaca. For more information, call 477-1064 or visit www.womenandtheirwork.org.