In honor of the fortieth anniversary of women at Yale, Miranda Lewis salutes influential artistic Yale alumnae.

As a current Yale student, a female member of the Class of 2012, it is easy to forget that women did not always make up 50 percent of the student body. Just 41 years ago, the Yale campus would have been an entirely different sight to its visitors: no groups of girls walked through Old Campus talking in low, tight whispers; few couples distracted themselves from homework at a table in the back corner of a dining hall. When women first entered campus 40 years ago this week, on Sept. 15, 1969, they changed the whole culture of student life in just one year.

Much important work has been done by female graduates of Yale, and as an art student at Yale, I hear the names of famous Yale artists echo in both regular conversation and in my art classes. Yale artists have been monumental and influential in their fields, and have inspired many Yalies, art students and otherwise.

Today, in honor of the 268 women of the class of 1973, Yale’s first class of women, I want to recognize and salute four female artists of Yale who have inspired me.

EVA HESSE, B.F.A. ‘59

Eva Hesse’s minimalist sculptures—made primarily with latex, string, resin, and fiberglass—are characterized by their vivid textures and emphasis on material rather than statement. Due to its intrinsic connection to the organic matter used to create it, her work stands apart from the work of a similar œuvre that came before her

Although her art is minimalist, it is not stark in comparison to its surroundings. Art critic Robert Hughes called Hesse, “the artist who did the most to humanize Minimalism without sentimentalizing it.” Hughes thought her work backed away from the rigid and masculine minimalist art that prevailed in the movement at the time.

Hesse composed, collected, or hung mundane objects in a manner that grants them a kind of motion while managing to remain stagnant. Made of strings hanging from the ceiling by wires, her piece “Right After” spans an entire room while appearing to be suspended in mid-air. The strings recall thick, gaudy, red theater curtains as well as gauze or spider webs.

Hesse’s work constantly opposes itself—it feels fluid, rigid and soft, fleeting and permanent, composed and yet completely random. She uses soft materials to create something that inevitably becomes stiff, or opaque materials that she manipulates to make transparent. As Hesse once said of her sculptures, “A lot of my sculpture could be called paintings, and a lot of it could be called nothing—a thing or any object or any new word that you want to give it.”

ANGELA WEST, M.F.A. ‘00

Non-royal prom-goers, wilting elaborate flower arrangements, preserved corsages, and leafy green backyards covered in kudzu or ivy provide the content of some of Angela West’s photographs. Hailing from Georgia, West depicts the South offering a new interpretation of the world that is so often photographed but so infrequently captured. Taking good pictures of “Southern lifestyles” can be so easy. Think of all the photos you’ve enjoyed of down-home roadside markets with hand-painted signs offering “HOME-MADE SKILLET CAKES—10 CENTS PER CAKE.” As sickeningly sweet as the inexpensive goodies they portray, these photographs do little to break the boundaries of the true life of Southerners. Contrary to popular belief, these small-town Southerners know exactly how “rustic” their homes and roadside stands appear to the passing cars full of photographers, and aren’t stuck in some time warp where farm-fresh goods and backwards ideals are all that matter.

West’s images, however, offer up a slice of Southern life that is able to bypass the cutesy and instead, she creates photographs that transcend their geographical location and in its place, convey universality. West’s series “Familiar Landscapes” is a set of photographs of typical backyards and driveways in Southern neighborhoods and small towns. She transforms these boring backyards into paradisiacal secret gardens, using spatial composition and layering of textures and colors, making them seem novel despite our familiarity with the scenes depicted.

The series “Sweet 16,” which portrays young girls donning prom dresses, gets just close enough to trite senior portraits or prom photos to make a commentary on them without actually resembling them; these day-lit portraits speak to the arbitariness of buying a fancy gown for a one-night-only event that is supposed to somehow both sum up and surpass everything that has happened in someone’s life up to that point.

With her poignant sense of irony and devotion to accurately depicting Southern life, West has carved out an important niche in a field suffocated by artists making a fraudulent case for the antiquated and picturesque South in their work.

NANCY GRAVES, ART ‘64

Inspired in part by Eadweard Muybridge and a childhood trip to a local science museum where she saw large animals taxidermied and preserved on display, Nancy Graves began creating life-size models of camels in the late ’60s. These camels, the first four of which she destroyed because they were off-putting, became a common thread in Graves’ work. Made from acrylic, hair, wool, and steel, the camels became the subject of two films she made in the early ’70s, and after she perfected her first camel sculpture, she continued to create more. The series of camel sculptures was first exhibited in the Whitney Museum of American Art in the museum’s first solo show made by a female artist. Graves used her camels to experiment with new textures and materials that she was constantly trying to incorporate into her work.

Graves spent a good portion of her adult life studying camels, filming them and imagining them as creations of her own mind. Graves claimed that she could not “imagine or perceive a camel until it is completed,” a statement many claim is meant to poke fun at artists and art critics who believe that truly creative art must come from the artist’s own imagination. Regardless, I have always liked the idea that Graves spent all day thinking about camels, pondering their size and absurdity, imagining that she had made them up. One of her later pieces, “Pleistocene Skeleton” is a man-made skeleton made to look like bones that is neither a skeleton of a once living creature nor a model of one. This piece illustrates Graves’ desire to create a living creature of her own “camel”—a model of natural innovation that could be celebrated and appreciated as much as human innovation.

MAYA LIN, SY ‘81, ARC ‘86

Maya Lin’s monuments and sculptures have come to represent an entire feeling or movement in many different arenas. While at Yale, Lin submitted a design proposal for a Vietnam War Veterans’ Memorial to an international competition, and her design ended up beating out all her the other competitors.

The design was a V-shaped piece of marble with the names of those killed engraved on its face. The marble was cut into the ground upon which it was built to represent the wounds of the soldiers killed in war. She received staunch criticism when the design was revealed to the public: Critics challenged her memorial for being overly austere and excluding any recognition of the soldiers’ heroic acts. To appease her more vocal critics, Lin agreed to allow a second bronze statue of three soldiers and an American flag to be built close to her memorial. Today, visitors flock to her original design in droves, and it is one of the most famous memorials in the United States.

Here at Yale, her monument to the female graduates of Yale college has grown to represent the Women’s Center, the feminist movement, and the rights of female students. The monument is often a source of humor or at the receiving end of crude jokes by Yale students. Sometimes it’s simply a meeting place or a ledge for tour guides to stand on while speaking to eager new-comers. Yale students sometimes forget what the table actually represents—the women of Yale since their first arrival in 1969. Etched into the surface of the table are the number of women who graduated from Yale every year from 1973 until 1993, the year it was created.

The table does not apologize for the years that women were not allowed at Yale, but rather celebrates the women who have graduated from this University and the wonderful work they have created. Lin’s work serves to remind us of the struggles of those who came before us, and the continued work and action we owe to their memory and legacy as students at this university.

These four women have inspired and informed my ideas as an artist, and this year I want to remember that, aside from directing my thoughts and awakening my creativity, they have paved the way for me to be here today. I often have a hard time reconciling the flippant attitude of many students—and, more often than not, the administration—towards the plight of women at Yale.

This year, however, I will do my best to keep in mind the fact that it was only 40 years ago that women even walked onto campus here, and despite the fact that the administration wrote the decision first allowing them to matriculate, it was inevitably the 268 who had the courage to come that first year, pushing past all the people fighting to hold them back, that has made all of this possible.

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