A Model of Mutual Aid within Protest: Betsy Damon, Alison Knowles and The Lesbian Art Show

Lesbian, feminist artist Betsy Damon was among the eighteen artists included in The Lesbian Show (1978), one of the first exhibitions of lesbian art curated by Harmony Hammond at White Columns on Greene Street, New York City. Damon’s sculptural installation for the show was titled Ancestors, which, like her famed street performance 7,000 Year Old Woman, honored all the women who had come before her. Ancestors was comprised of a set of life-sized plaster body casts of her collaborators, her community, seated together on a bed of sand around a ring of colored bags filled with flour. Carrying the giant body casts into the gallery, Damon explained, was a process of “bringing the ancestors back.” In a performance organized for the show, Damon’s flesh and blood community performed in various poses amidst the plaster casts, among them her friend, Fluxus artist Alison Knowles. Enamoured with Betsy’s bags, Knowles proceeded to borrow them for years for her own works including Bean Bag, Printed Editions, 1978. This small act of mutual aid set within a groundbreaking activist exhibition organized, as Hammond wrote, to make “lesbian artists visible to each other as well as to the women’s community”, is a microcosm of the commitment to community Damon’s life and work has evidenced to this day. To honor this act and Knowles’s and Damon’s lifelong friendship, I propose to present this paper in collaboration with my friend art historian Hannah Higgins, the daughter of Alison Knowles (while strictly adhering to the 15-minute time frame).