Who is Kate Millett?

To the person familiar with the last few decades of feminist activity, she is the scholar who in 1970 published Sexual Politics, helping shift the second round of twentieth-century feminism into high gear and prompting Time magazine to feature her on its August 31, 1970, cover.¹ To the reader of queer literature, she is a prolific lesbian writer, recounting her relationships with women in candid and sensuous terms, replete with astute cultural observations. To the political activist, she has been associated with numerous civil rights, feminist, and gay liberation organizations, including the Congress of Racial Equality, National Organization for Women, Columbia Women’s Liberation, Redstockings, and Radicalesbians; today, she is a continuously vigilant protestor of human rights and civil liberties violations around the world. To the residents of Poughkeepsie, New York, where she runs an art colony subsidized by tree farming, she is the lady who sells the best, most artistically shaped Christmas trees for miles around.

The full answer, then, to “Who is Kate Millett?” depends on exposure to the multiplicity of Millett’s careers. But ever since Sexual Politics, her first book, sold 80,000 copies in its first year,² critics and scholars have tended to give priority to her written production, which includes eight additional books to date. Millett’s career as an artist has generally received less notice, although one exception that gets to the heart of Millett’s work in art occurred recently.³

A blast of publicity arrived in the spring of 1996 with the traveling exhibition Old Glory: The American Flag in Contemporary Art.⁴ Included in the exhibition, a 1970 Millet piece protesting the Vietnam War and the violation of First Amendment rights drew the wrath of Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, and scores of citizens of Phoenix, Arizona, where it was then on view. The work, The American Dream Goes to Pot, consists of a wooden cell-like structure, which contains a commode. Draped across the rim of the seatless toilet bowl is an American flag, appearing as if it is about to be flushed down “the pot,” along with dreams of what many protestors of the era, like Millett, thought of as true patriotism.

The exhibition in which Millett’s piece first appeared was the People’s Flag Show, held in 1970 at the Judson Memorial Church in New York. The show had been organized partly in response to the arrest a few years earlier of art dealer Stephen Radich. In 1966-67 Radich held an exhibition of work by an artist named Marc Morrel, a former Marine who made antiwar sculpture out of U.S. flags. As a result of the exhibition, Radich was arrested for flag desecration. The 1970 People’s Flag Show likewise resulted in the arrest of some of its organizers, who were among the exhibiting artists. In that show, Millett’s piece was one of the targets, but as in the Radich case, it was not the artists in the Flag Show who were arrested—or, said more precisely, it was not as artists that the organizers were arrested. This was due to a legal technicality at the time sanctioning only the arrest of those who display a desecrated flag (i.e., a gallery owner and exhibition organizers)—a ruling artists felt was a violation not only of dealers’ and organizers’ rights but, by extension, their own. It was the preservation of First Amendment rights that artists like Millett saw as central to their freedom as Americans—a freedom warranting deeply patriotic sentiments.⁵

The goal of Kate Millett, Sculptor: The First 38 Years is to turn the surprise of Millett being an artist into the surprise of her art. The exhibition is itself incomplete, since, by Millett’s choice, only her sculpture is on view, not her silkscreen prints, drawings, or photographs, which have been exhibited more widely elsewhere. And as with most retrospective exhibitions, space limitations have meant that what is on view is only a selection. The last part of the artist-chosen title connotes an incompleteness, too. Indeed, there could be thirty-eight more years of work to exhibit one day.

1

For cover image, see Time Magazine

2

Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970). All citations will refer to the 1970 edition. Sales data from “Kate Millett,” in Current Biography Yearbook, ed. Judith Graham (New York: H.W. Wilson, 1995), 410.

3

Another more scholarly exception is Anne B. Keating’s "A World We Have Invented Here’: Exploring Community, Identity and Art in the Construction of ‘The Farm,’ Kate Millett’s Feminist Art Colony, 1978-1994" (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland at College Park, 1995). Regarding Millett’s career as artist, see chapter entitled "The Apprentice in the Sun," 329-406. My research, begun long after Keating’s, owes a great deal to her extensive, substantive, insightful scholarship.

4

The exhibition was organized by David S. Rubin for the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, June-August 1994. See exhibition catalogue, Old Glory: The American Flag in Contemporary Art (Cleveland: Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, 1994).

5

See David Rubin, “From U.S.A. to S.O.S.: Changing Perspectives on the American Flag,” in Old Glory, especially 27-32. Also see articles published in The Village Voice, 19 November 1970: Clark Whelton, “Bars & Stripes Forever,” 1, 20; John Perreault, “Flags,” 21-2; and Howard Moody, “From Symbol to Fetish: A Sermon on the Flag,” 1, 22. Thanks to Jon Hendricks, one of the arrested artist-organizers of the Flag Show, for details concerning the event (telephone conversation with the author, August 1996).