by  Susan M. Rostan, MFA, EdD, NAWA

I first met Judith at NAWA’s annual luncheon in May 2024 at New York’s National Arts Club. These gatherings offer rare face-to-face interactions with fellow women artists, usually seen only in Zoom squares. Scanning the room for the guest speaker, I noticed a small, erect figure engaged in casual conversation at the leadership table.

When Judith took the microphone, her professorial command and passionate eloquence were captivating. Though images flickered on a nearby screen, her words painted vivid mental pictures, drawing me into a writer’s trance. Her reputation as a feminist and advocate for women artists came alive in that moment.

Judith K. Brodsky was Chairperson of the Art Department at Beaver College, Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, before arriving at Rutgers University in 1978. She conceived, founded, and directed a print and papermaking atelier at Rutgers, providing state-of-the-art technology and expertise for under-represented contemporary artists—women, Indigenous, and from diasporas of the African, Eastern European, Latin, and Asian communities – to create innovative works on paper. Judith’s interests in Art and feminism in Art led to academic writing. The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, which Brodsky co-wrote and edited with Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, was published in 1994. It was the first significant art history text focusing solely on American Art made by women.

In 2001, she retired as Distinguished Professor Emerita in Rutgers’s Department of Visual Arts. Still, she continued to be influential in her active role in the College Art Association and as Board Chair of the New York Fine Arts Foundation. In 2011, Judith became an Honorary Vice President of NAWA, and in 2016, she received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts at Rider University.

Her writing continued, and in 2012, she worked with Rutger’s colleague Ferris Olin, another NAWA Honorary VP, publishing The Fertile Crescent: Gender, Art, and Society. In 2018, they published Junctures in Women’s Leadership: The Arts, and in 2023, The Brodsky Center at Rutgers University: Three Decades, 1986-2017. In 2022, Judith published Dismantling the Patriarchy, Bit by Bit: Art, Feminism, and Digital Technology.

Together, Ferris, also a Distinguished Professor Emerita at Rutgers, and Judy founded and co-directed several initiatives and institutions, including the Institute for Women and Art, the Women Artists Archive National Directory, the Miriam Schapiro Archives on Women Artists, and the Feminist Art Project.

Enthralled by her narrative, I asked her for an interview to discuss her life as an artist. The next time I encountered Judith was June 10, 2024, and we were sitting in soft leather chairs at the Harvard Club in New York City. Here is our discussion, edited for clarity and length:

SMR: My interest is in how artists identify problems to solve, how their vision emerges and develops, and the changes that take place over time.
JKB:   I think very much the way you think. Everything I approach comes from my sense of my identity as an artist. I create things and put things together that might have disparate parts, and I figure out an order for them and never think of anything as being set. When I take on something, I consider what I can do to make it better and more interesting. It also has to have unity; some order that one creates in an artwork where everything eventually has to go together and fit to make something exciting. And I think that’s also part of it. What can I do to make something interesting, useful, and exciting?

My parents would say that I picked up a pencil and drew before I could walk and talk. Fortunately, I grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, where there’s a wonderful art school, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and Saturday morning classes for children in the area. From the time I was six, my parents sent me on Saturday mornings, and I loved it. I was lucky enough to have parents who would encourage that kind of thing with their children. It was something I looked forward to every week.

One year, we spent the whole first half of the year taking our name and learning how to design a font, and then actually drawing that font and making it look like a printed font. It was fascinating, and I think I enjoyed that so much because, in a sense, it was mark-making, and of course, I ended up as a printmaker making marks. This idea of making marks was in me from the very start. The most exciting class I took was a watercolor class I took in high school. It was taught by a woman named Miss Lawrence, and I have no idea what her first name was. She also taught the Foundation course for first-year students at the college. It was an excellent course because she included everything in it. We did still life, and she also taught us perspective, complicated perspective.

RISD sits on a hill, and so you look down a steep hill toward the center of Providence. She taught us how to deal with that hill and with something that was not just a flat landscape. The other thing she taught us that made us all feel very grown up was all the technical stuff of working with watercolors: which pigments were archival and which were not. To this day, I know that alizarin crimson is a color that fades, whereas cadmium red will last. That was excellent information; I think it was the first time I had technical information like that.

SR: Did you do oil painting as well?
JB: No, it was just always watercolor. So, I became a very accomplished watercolorist. She taught us how to stretch paper, how to do washes, and how to use sable brushes. And I gradually collected all my sable brushes of different kinds. It was exciting to own all this stuff, and I earned my pocket money as a teenager by doing watercolors of my parents’ friends’ little children. I would sketch them in different positions and do the watercolors right there. It wasn’t just a portrait of them but images of them playing around, sitting, or standing in the playpen, whatever they were doing. So that was a lot of fun. I also used to go out on Saturday afternoons with my bicycle and my little mayonnaise jar filled with water, watercolors, and pad to find places I liked to paint. I had a lovely, very private kind of experience as a teenager during those times when you wanted to dream or think or see what life is like. That was very important to me.

So then, when it was time to go to college, my parents didn’t want me to go to art school because they wanted me to have a liberal arts education. My father was a professor at Brown University, and I could have gone to Pembroke (the coordinate women’s college for Brown that merged in 1971) for free. My parents didn’t have that much money because professors didn’t make much money then. They would have liked me to go to Pembroke, but I threw a tantrum and said, “If I have to go to Pembroke, I’m not going to college.” I didn’t want to be known as my father’s daughter. I want to establish my own identity. I imagined people would say, “Oh, you’re Pappy’s daughter,” and expect certain things of me. And I just wanted to go and do whatever I wanted without thinking about living up to my father, living up to a particular idea that people had about me.

SMR: Were you thinking about continuing fine arts training as an undergraduate?
JKB: Yes.

SMR: But you went into a more academic discipline.
JKB:  Well, that was because I went to Harvard Radcliffe, and it was all art history. And I was also a very good student.

SMR: I assumed that, yes.
JKB: And my father had always talked to me about going to Harvard and Radcliffe, saying that might be something that I should think about. And he had some exciting ideas for me. He said “You may have to earn a living or whatever.” And when I was still in high school, he said, “You could probably be a translator”. The United Nations was new, and they needed translators. And he wasn’t thinking about my being an art historian, which would have been a little more aligned with what I was thinking, pragmatically. I was taking French, but one summer, he taught me German. I did my first year of German with him, another year in high school, and then I continued German at college. At college, I also took Italian for two years. So, I had a pretty rudimentary understanding of German and Italian. And my French to this day, is pretty good. I’m not speaking because I don’t have a chance to speak, but I can read a French newspaper, read a French novel perfectly easily. My father was an excellent teacher, fitting it into our life.

We would usually go to New Hampshire in the summertime because this was the old days when, you know, professors didn’t teach in the summertime. We had the time off and would stay in a modest place, and hike, swim.

Another summer, he taught me a course on understanding poetry. He gave me the lectures he gave to his students so that I would know how to read poetry. I was fortunate. Some people do these books about how horrible their childhoods were. I can’t do a book like that. I had a lovely childhood, even though I probably yearned to be elsewhere and do more at the time.

My parents were wonderful people, and we had an excellent relationship, but I wanted to live elsewhere from a very early age. I wanted to go to New York. I don’t know how I knew about New York. I looked at Providence and thought it was a pretty dull place. So clearly, I had some yearnings to do more than just the conventional life. I’m not sure I knew what a traditional life was, but I think everybody has some ideas about expanding one’s horizons and being part of a bigger world.

When I was at college, there were only two studio courses. And, of course, I took both of them. One was a drawing course with Hyman Bloom, a well-known expressionist artist. It was a very interesting course because it was all drawing, but we weren’t drawing from setups or anything. He said, “Start with your pencil and start drawing something.” And so I did these very elaborate drawings that were full of figures. I did a crowd of children, all from my imagination. I did another mythological one, in which Perseus rescues Andromache. I don’t know why I did these particular subjects, but it was, again, just something that happened with my pencil hitting the paper. And I enjoyed that. And I’m sure it advanced my willingness to work from my imagination. That would be a simple way of putting it.

There was also a sculpture course taught by Gilbert Franklin, the head of the sculpture department at Rhode Island School of Design. And that was a completely different kind of course. We modeled heads, Egyptian heads, and Renaissance heads in the museum. The wonderful part of that course was the technical aspect. He taught us how to make molds after sculpting something. At the end of that course, we got to do something original. I worked based on one of my drawings, which was the drawing with a group of children, and did three of the figures from that in some pose together. I had that for years, but I no longer have that sculpture.

The other thing that we did was do each other’s portraits. And that was fun, working clay and then casting in plaster. I did one student; she did mine, and then we exchanged them. So, we each had the portraits done of us, which was fun. And I had that for years, too.

Author’s note:   Judith married in her junior year of college. As a wife and mother later living in Princeton, New Jersey, she had “drawn a circle” on a map around her home to determine how far away she could go to school and still return home by the time her children returned from school. That’s how she decided to go to Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture. Her husband, David Brodsky, worked at Educational Testing Service and was able to manage any child-related emergencies. She had a studio at home, and it was at the Tyler School of Art, where she was taking her MFA, that she fell in love with printmaking.

While at Tyler, Judith and Diane Burko, both young artists and teachers navigating the art world, coordinated a committee of young women artists, art historians, curators, and educators to organize a citywide event featuring women artists. The result was FOCUS, a grassroots effort to raise the stature of female artists, often overlooked and ignored by the larger art world. The 1974 exhibition was one of the first large-scale surveys ever of women artists, curated by a distinguished group of women pioneer curators: Marcia Tucker, who had just founded the New Museum, New York; Cindy Nemser, art critic and founder of the Feminist Art Journal; Adelyn Breeskin, director, the Baltimore Museum; Lila Katzen, sculptor; and Anne d’Harnoncourt, director, Philadelphia Museum of Art. 

FOCUS was Judith’s introduction to organized feminism in the visual arts. She was already a feminist, but she hadn’t been an activist. Eighty-one artists participated, and Judith would note that the exhibition was weighted towards the group emerging in the 1970s, which was doing feminist work. The festival drew renowned artists like feminist artist Judy Chicago (NAWA Honorary VP) and abstract expressionist Lee Krasner. The festival’s success was not well-received by male artists. Judith would recall that a male artist sued them, complaining that he couldn’t get a show during that time because the galleries “were only showing women.”¹ In January 2024, Judith and Diane Burko coordinated a 50th anniversary exhibition, “(re)Focus: Then and Now with curators Gabrielle Lavin Suzenski at the Galleries at Moore and independent curator Marsha Moss. The centerpiece exhibitions featured work by the original artists. Among them were twelve NAWA members: Pat Adams (Honorary VP), Isabel Bishop, Nell Blaine, Mary Frank, Janet Fish (Honorary VP), Audrey Flack (Honorary VP), Jane Freilicher, Linda Howard, Joyce Kozloff (Honnorary VP), Louise Nevelson, Faith Ringgold (Honorary VP), and Miriam Schapiro (Honorary VP).

JKB:   At one point, my house and studio burned down. I lost all my art, including my casts. But we were all okay. And that’s when I stopped painting, mostly because I had already had a pretty successful career as a printmaker. I could collect my printmaking work because I had a lot of work out at different galleries. I reassembled almost all the prints that I had done in editions. I couldn’t do that with the paintings. I have no relics of my paintings up to that point.

I was then the mother of two children, and we lived in Princeton, New Jersey, where I spent most of my adult life. I knew people at the university who were doing studio art. They had a printmaking studio, and they invited me to come and use it, knowing mine had just burned down. So, I immediately started using the printmaking studio at the university. No one was using the etching presses and litho presses. In the studio was this incredible type collection by an art collector named Elmer Adler, a famous printed material collector. There were wood blocks that we used for the old typefaces and also the modern type.

My father retired from teaching and went back to writing poetry. I loved the poems that he was writing because they had lots of visual material. I asked him if I could do a set of prints to his poems. It occurred to me that I could also set the type and have the pages with the type and my prints. They weren’t illustrations but prints in response to what he was writing. It was a fantastic project. My father and I had several exhibitions. Being able to do that with one’s parent is just a delight. And I think he felt the same way about doing that with his daughter.

And that’s when I had the accident to my hand. I had these text blocks and was trying to run them through my etching press and keep them stable enough not to slip. I took the guard off the press to hold everything in place. Unfortunately, when I ran everything through the press, I also ran my hand through the press. I went to a neighbor who got me to the emergency room, and an incredible surgeon happened to be on duty in the emergency room. He asked me the right questions and said, “I can give you a cosmetically attractive hand, or I can give you a hand you can work with. What do you do?”  Well, this was the early 1970s.
SMR:  You already had a family, and were you teaching at that time too?

JKB:   Yes. I had just obtained my first tenure track for a full-time teaching position. Until that point, I had been doing other things. For the first few weeks, I was there with my hand up vertically in a sling, teaching printmaking.

To have a man in the early ‘70s before there is anything like the #MeToo movement say to me, “What do you do?”  was pretty remarkable. And I said, “I need to work, you know, because I’m an artist…” What he did was amazing because I was going to lose my forefinger anyway. He took the nerves on my forefinger, moved them over to what remained of my thumb, and said, “You’re an artist; you need your hand. You can’t do anything without a thumb, so I will give you a thumb that works.”

For years, I could make my thumb feel like a forefinger or like my thumb just by thinking about it. Now, when I feel it, it feels entirely like a thumb. I finally lost that feeling that it could be a forefinger. But it was a remarkable experience. I think it has to do with the fact that I think of my identity as an artist. I just kept on going.

A person who taught printmaking at the University of Pennsylvania, an incredible artist who was on a panel with me, said, “But you kept right on making prints.” I said, “Why not?”  He thought that having an accident like that would have prevented me from thinking about continuing as a printmaker. It never even occurred to me. I was startled by his question.

SMR:  Is that your dominant hand? Are you left-handed?|
JKB:   Fortunately, I’m right-handed. I had such an excellent surgeon and wonderful physical therapy that, in some ways, that hand is stronger than my right hand. And I use it, for instance, to carry a suitcase rather than my right. I use my left hand a lot, not to draw, but for many other things. Because I use it so naturally, most of the time people don’t realize that I have one less finger than normal.

SMR: I wouldn’t have noticed if you hadn’t brought it up.
JKB:  That was an interesting period because I had those two things, one right after the other, but I guess I’m a terrific repressor. I just kept on going.

SMR: Have you always done the same kind of printmaking, or did that change?

JKB:   That’s an excellent question. I like two things. I’m an etcher and a lithographer. And I like both of them because they are drawing. I’m not too fond of silkscreen. I did a couple of lovely woodcuts when I was taking printmaking, but I’ve never done woodcuts since then. But it entirely depends on what my project is at the time. For instance, there are projects where immediately I’d say, These have to be etchings. And then there are other projects which have to be lithos. When I’m involved with something that requires swaths of color, I’m more apt to decide to do lithographs. Because then I can get a beautiful swath of color, another one, and another one. But in both instances, I’ve reached a point where I like to work with registering plates. Initially, I did a lot of work with viscosity printing, which was invented by Stanley William Hader at Atelier 17 in Paris and was very popular in the 1960s and 1970s.

SMR: What is that process? Could you describe it?

JKB:   You print one plate but use your ink with different degrees of oil. You can ink up parts of the plate with less oily ink and then use an ink that has more oil in it to roll color over the surface. You can use stencils and roll color in certain places or etch your plate so that certain parts are higher than others. I probably had about 30 different brayers of different sizes to do that. And that was a lot of fun. But then, you could ruin it at the end of the day. But you could also ruin a plate or a print you were doing with separate images if you turned the paper the wrong way. So, it didn’t matter. I switched from viscosity printing to printing using a separate plate for each color. It seemed like a lot of work, but it was more manageable and cleaner. It was a little bit more structured.

SMR: Was it easier to visualize because you’re working in layers? That’s a different kind of visualization.

JKB:   Yes, because then you’re thinking separate colors. If you’re working with viscosity printing, you ink up according to what you feel like doing. And you have to mix the right colors. So sometimes I’m a colorist, and sometimes I’m not. The etchings are much more limited in terms of color.

But now I’m drawing completely. That’s because of the pandemic, isolation in my studio, and no printer access. And I had also given up my studio when I established my print center at Rutgers. I’d given it up not because I had access to a print studio. It was because, at the time, I also got lung cancer. I had never smoked or anything, so I felt it was caused by breathing in chemicals. At that point, I gave all my equipment to the university and began working with printers.

I would still draw on the plates and make all the decisions, but I wasn’t working with the chemicals anymore. So that was in the early 90s, and the cancer was caught early enough so that I didn’t need chemo or radiation. And when I finally got dismissed, the doctor said, “If you ever get cancer again, it’s not from this; you are cured from this.”        So I was very fortunate. And so, again, I just kept on going. At one point, I created a series called Diagrammatics. And I thought that no drawing is the object itself, no matter how representational. It’s a diagram of the object. So, if all drawings are diagrams of the object, it doesn’t matter whether they are just abstract or figurative forms. And so I made my peace with it, going back and forth. And I know you’re more representational sometimes because I looked at your work online. And sometimes you’re more abstract, so you know what I’m talking about.

SMR: Yes, exactly. It still feels the same because I’m still deciding what I’m doing, what I will use, and how I will use it.

JKB:   Exactly. The Diagrammatics were narrative. If I had to describe my work — as an overall thing for both the figurative and the abstract – I’d say everything is narrative. I worked with architects’ templates, all those things you can buy that give you different sizes of circles, different size triangles, and other kinds of shapes that are useful to architects. My idea was to make work entirely from things that created diagrams rather than making work from observation or photographs or anything figurative.

My thinking was that they were always in two parts. The upper part was the stanza, and the lower part was the refrain. One of the prints, for instance, had a whole bunch of dots all over it. And then a little residue of dots was at the bottom. So the question is, if they’re two separate parts and there’s the paper in between, how do the dots above get into the plate below? Everything was a narrative.

SMR: A conversation.
JKB:  Yeah, exactly. They were a lot of fun. I liked doing that. But then, I got involved with stuff outside the studio. And I feel that everything I’ve done outside the studio is part of my artistic practice. I mean, being a dean or associate provost. I never considered it anything but creative work and creating new things; I was always creating new programs.

SMR: Were you still teaching art at that time?
JKB:   When I became associate provost, I wasn’t teaching. But then I went back to teaching because I decided I did not want to become a university administrator for the rest of my life, even though it was creative. For instance, I organized a not-for-profit corporation in Newark to restore the parks. To work on a citywide scale is very exciting.

SMR: Did your art reflect your interest in planning in public spaces?
JKB:   That’s an excellent question. I have to think about that.

SMR: I know there was a series you did with more of an environmental focus.

JKB: That’s right. That came right after I stopped being a university administrator. I drove up and down the turnpike daily during my eight years at the Newark campus. That became my landscape. And that’s how I thought about it. I thought, You know, the way the gas storage tanks looked in the morning was completely different from how they looked in the evening. So that’s when I did the Meadowland Strikes Back series. And I had a lot of fun with that. And those were lithos. They have seven or eight different plates to get the colors I wanted. Some of them have hand coloring on them afterward.

SMR: And what was the work like after that?

JKB:  I returned to doing some abstract things in the series, The 20 Most Important Scientific Questions of the 21st Century. And some of those are abstract. I mean, what comes before the Big Bang? Who knows? So, that had to be abstract. And then later ones, like Are Men Necessary? Are Women Necessary? Those had to be figuration. So, I went back and forth depending on the question.

SMR: Did the question come first, before the imagery?
JKB: Yes, I read a series of questions in the New York Times at the time of the millennium. They captured my interest.

SMR: And what about before that, in previous work? Did you have a phrase?

JKB: Yes. I had started working on something called Memoir of an Assimilated Family. It was about 120 etchings. At that point, I worked with a superb printer who grew up in the former Soviet Union. He had this incredible training. He suggested I do some on a big scale, so I did some in full size. Photographs inspired those images.

My mother had died in her 90s, and going through her things, I found all these family photographs that she had organized. I have to say they’re now disorganized because I raided them all. They went back to the late 1890s and the early 1900s because her family had then immigrated to Boston from Lithuania.

I had to work on the computer because the photographs were so faded. I was able to bring them up pretty well. I was working from things that I had to manipulate with my etching needle, which was, of course, fun. The printer said that the big ones should be American. For instance, one of the big ones is my little brother, who at that time loved to play cowboys. There’s a picture of him with his guns. Nowadays, we’d be shocked.

My first husband grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts. They were second generation, but they were children of the (Great) Depression. Their families didn’t have any money. When he and his friends at school were 12- or 13-year-old boys, they decided they weren’t going to stay with their little fat bodies. They were going to become musclemen. And so they started working out. And so I had these wonderful photographs of them posing for each other, arms like this. I did full-length heights of them because I thought they were so funny. Changing their bodies was a metaphor for changing their lives.

That was a big project. And then, I had some beautiful exhibitions with that project. (The 42-page exhibition catalog for the Rider University Art Gallery show was published in 2003).

SMR: Since you’ve had one foot in art history and another in the studio, has art criticism played a big part in your life as a visual artist?

JKB: Not in my work, I don’t think, but in my writing. I’ve written over 100 essays for friends who had shows and always write from a larger perspective. I like to find connections to art history, so as a critic myself, I feel I’ve been active. In terms of my work, I have kept up with what is happening in the art world, so I feel my creative abilities are shaped by what I know, but I don’t consciously pay any attention to art criticism. For instance, when I had one of the Memoir of an Assimilated Family shows, an art critic wrote, Well, this is a happy family with nothing bad happening. He was less interested in it than he would have been. In other words, where was the essence of it? He didn’t understand so, I didn’t pay any attention to it. And in terms of my curatorial work, I think all of my curatorial work has always received good reviews. I don’t think I’ve ever had a bad review. Vivian Rayner at the New York Times was really good about reporting on the art exhibitions in New Jersey. Because I had done a lot of exhibitions at Rutgers, she usually came down and did a review. Ben Gennacchio, who took over from her, was also good about reporting on New Jersey exhibits. It’s not their fault that The New York Times just stopped reporting on New Jersey, period. They don’t do a lot of reporting at all.

JKB: I love drawing now that I’m back drawing again.

SMR: You’re working with pastels?
JKB: I’m working with oil pastels because you can scrape them away, put something else down, or work over them once they dry. It comes out perfectly well. I’m enjoying that a lot. All of the self-portraits I did were in oil pastels (Using photographs of her open mouth at different stages of teeth-straightening “to show how we decorate the body’s exterior to hide the interior functions, thus denying evidence of mortality.” ²). Now, I’m doing full-length figures and working with a garden theme from my garden. I have these incredible hydrangea trees in my garden, and they’re fabulous. That’s a theme: eight-foot-high sheets of paper with full-length figures on them and the hydrangeas in the background.

SMR: Is that a framing problem? I mean, that all has to be under glass, right? Are you working on paper?
JKB: I’m working on paper but coating it; otherwise, the paper will rot. I first protect the paper by preparing it with gesso. I also work on the computer first. I do a lot of drawing and working out the design on a computer, making it any size I want. I work the prints out on an eight and a half by eleven paper, cut the edges off, reassemble it on the drawing paper, and then coat it. So, I’m coating twice because I coat the drawing paper once.

SMR: So you’re doing this digitally, a digital collage?
JKB: Yes. It’s not detailed, really compositional.

SMR: Then you work over that? I’m just trying to visualize the process. Through your art making, did you use work from observation or totally from your imagination?
JKB: From all of that, as well as photographs, I firmly believe that photographs are fine. It doesn’t matter whether you’re observing from real life or a picture. It’s still your choices, your composition. Right? And they’re my photographs. So, I don’t have a problem with appropriation. And then, sometimes, I’m entirely abstract, too. However, I feel that my figurative work is also abstract.

Footnotes

¹ Baron, Violet (2016-08-09). “Beauty from Disarray,” Harvard Magazine.

²https://stateoftheartsnj.com/feminist-artist-judith-brodsky/