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CAREY LOVELACE ON ARLENE RAVEN
ARLENE RAVEN cut a complex swath through the world before she died this past summer on August 1. Indeed, she was an activist as "pluralistic" as the 1970s feminist art community from which she emerged-a quality perhaps most clearly recalled when one considers a 1983 landmark exhibition she curated at the Long Beach Museum of Art in California, titled "At Home," which brought together many of the artists and ideas she had championed for the previous decade. The show included Suzanne Lacy, who pioneered massive group performances on social themes; West Coast-based performance artists Rachel Rosenthal, Eleanor Antin, and Susan Mogul; ecovisionaries Helen and Newton Harrison, whose Lagoon Cycle, 1974-84, was an early rumination on global warming; and Betye Saar, who skewered racism in works such as her 1972 assemblage The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, where the pancake-mix icon wielded a rifle. All of these artists were born out of the tumultuous 1970s, a decade of relentless politics and the invention and reinvention of new forms of art. The catalogue for "At Home" was itself unusual-a cacophony of photographs and captions, artists' commentaries, and analytic text, all running simultaneously, as if asking readers to make their own paths through the work.
While best known as a writer in the "advocate critic" tradition, Arlene was also a charismatic lecturer, an art historian, a founder of radical institutions, a generous and inclusive editor, and a lesbian whose Susan Sontagian glamour helped bring attention to the often marginalized worlds she sought to make visible. With (appropriately) raven hair, a firm jaw, and chiseled features, the Baltimore-born Arlene Corkery (née Rubin) exuded a kind of streetwise toughness. Involved in '60s radical politics, including a stint with Students for a Democratic Society, she got a BFA in painting from Hood College in Maryland in 1965 and an MFA from George Washington University two years later, then switched to art history and started a Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University that she completed in 1975. Fascinated by the early Women's Lib movement, she began working on one of its first publications, Womyn: A Journal of Liberation, and in a women's clinic in the same building. But having married her master's thesis adviser, she was too busy...