When the email send button was hit in December 2014, there were great hopes for starting the New Year and the new January 8, 2015 Bay Area Women Artists’ Legacy Project meeting with enthusiasm, energy, and bold ideas.

The ten artists who first came together to find a common path for securing their legacies in art shared many desires for securing bodies of work and lifetimes of art practice. Ambitious visions of collections, storage, conservation, study, and residencies were all laid forth with optimism.

Though many desires were beyond the scope of the assembly, the women were able to set forth a path that would lead to an expanding mapping of the art and activities of these rich contributions to the cultural heritage of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Beginning with establishing the parameters of the group –  numbers, maturity, exhibition history – many voices came together. A website was developed with artworks and statements from each of 29 artists linking to their personal websites for in-depth documentation. In this manner the Bay Area Women Artists’ Legacy Project could serve as a directory for future study and as a curatorial tool. 

A design for the book, Bay Area Women Artists’ Legacy Project – 2020, surveying the work of each of the artists, was self-funded with a commissioned introductory essay by a local art historian. BAWALP then placed donated copies in the art libraries of museums, art schools and institutions.

This format was then used as a template to begin a series probing the decades to assemble the art and histories of individual periods, each with a commissioned scholarly introduction. 2020, The Seventies, and The Eighties were displayed on an added webpage with links for ordering print-on-demand copies of the books. As The Nineties and future volumes become available, they too can easily be added.

Facing the COVID19 global pandemic, the artists paired off to conduct virtual artist’s interview videos that were published on a newly established YouTube channel. The website was again expanded to list and link the videos. These informal oral histories constitute an intimate and vulnerable document of this extraordinary time.

As contact opened, videos recording materials and process were then made in individual artist’s studios and added to the website and public channel. This expansion of documentation can serve for future conservation and registration questions.

In building a roadmap through the complex landscape of painting, printing, sculpture, photography, film, and fiber, BAWALP is establishing measures to enable future curatorial and scholarly endeavors. In coming together, these projects have been realized in a way that contextualizes these many art practices in their time and place.

In seeing myriad possibilities when we join forces, BAWALP has opened their process by contributing to the Joan Mitchell Foundation legacy planning workbook, Voices of Contemporary Art’s VoCA Journal, and the College Art Association Annual Conference. BAWALP has hosted artists to assist their founding of similar groups and stands in support of preserving histories and cultures.

BAWALP is most grateful for the encouragement of our peers and the consideration of all who may use this resource in the future.

– Jan Wurm 2023