2020 Greene, Julia

Hi all! My name is Julia Greene and my pronouns are she/her/hers. I am a fourth-year World Arts and Cultures major and Visual and Performing Arts Education minor. I am not currently involved in any research but have conducted research assistance in the past with Professor Aparna Sharma, a professor and documentary filmmaker in my department. I am from Van Nuys in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley and attended two years of community college at LAVC before transferring to UCLA in the fall of 2018. Many of my interests fall outside of my major and include labor rights, housing and tenants’ rights, and education (art and otherwise). I have worked in arts education for the past two years and will be co-teaching a residency program for 5th-grade students at the Hammer Museum this coming February. I also happen to be taking LGBTQS 183: Queer Arts in LA with Professor Lopez and am deeply excited to be able to take these two courses concurrently. Readings:

Both “Conditions for Producing Chicana Art” by Sybil Venegas and “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” by Linda Nochlin present the role of class/socio-economic status in their consideration of the status of Chicana artists. They both work to cement the notion that being an artist is an opportunity that is often only afforded in the presence of economic stability/security and that even if one is economically mobile, the maleness and whiteness of institutions will always work to grasp onto the notion of the “genius artist.”

Nochlin’s text worked to investigate and, ultimately, collapse the question which serves as its title: “Why have there been no great women artists?” It was so exciting for me to read Nochlin’s exploration of the underlying assumptions of this question. The work she does to demythologize art history felt like a great and ever-important starting point for this course.