Janet Langsam: Improbable Feminist

It was great being featured in The New York Times…but I really didn’t care for the headline. I mean, really… “A Day in the Life of Nonstop Housewife”? Here I was, a leader in the community, exhibiting my artwork, teaching….That headline framed everything I was doing—everything I was—within the context of being a housewife. I was a housewife, and proud of that part of my life, but it was just one part of my life.

Janet Langsam, a married mother of three who lives in Queens and keeps a house, was inspired one day as she picked up her children’s toys. Unlike most of us who have picked up our children’s toys and binned or shelved them, wishing our children would learn to do that for themselves, on this day, Langsam picked up the toys, put glue all over them, adhered them to a backboard, and covered them in paint.

By the time the article “A Day in the Life of Nonstop Housewife” was published on January 15, 1972, Langsam was making paintings, assemblages, sculptures, collages, and drawings, working small in her house in Queens and large in the gymnasium of an old schoolhouse that she and her husband bought upstate and were converting. She showed her work at the time of the article in a group exhibition at a New York University gallery in Greenwich Village. She was chairing Queens Community Board 7. She was teaching painting to schoolchildren.

In the 1970s and 1980s, very few women succeeded as professional artists. Gallery representation was almost impossible for women, and they had few opportunities to exhibit and sell their work. Correspondingly, by the mid-1970s, Langsam shifted away from making her art to working on what she calls a “larger canvas,” ensuring that people had access to art and that artists had funding to make art.

Janet Langsam: Improbable Feminist surveys the artist’s body of work from its inception to the point at which she redirected her efforts toward making the world a better place through art. The exhibition tells the story in the artist’s own words.

The Friends of the Neuberger Museum of Art provides generous support for this exhibition.