Archives of the First Majority Gallery

America’s susceptibility to celebrity extends even to the arts. We laud the famous to the skies while neglecting those who have never gained the spotlight. We gladly pay premium prices for concert seats to hear a performer we know by reputation and ignore first-rate regional talents. We turn in a literary journal to the names we recognize and never get around to the rest. In order to succeed in the arts one must be as clever about publicity as about one’s art. In this way most artists work in darkness and leave no trace. The merit of an aesthetic work does not entail its longevity.

All the more do those who embrace counter-cultural ideals and eschew conventional markers of achievement prepare their own obscurity. Ted Joans was always just too hip for the mantle of fame while Allen Ginsberg found it fit him well. Patti Smith doggedly pursued every opportunity for advancement, so we can say her name today, while dozens of other punk poets are forgotten.

During the 1970s my wife Patricia Seaton, sometimes called “Ia,” was an exhibiting member of the First Majority Gallery in Berkeley, a pioneering all-female gallery in Berkeley. In a few decades the First Majority, has all but vanished from memory. Virtually nothing of its history is recorded online beyond its place in a few artists’ résumés and scans of old journals listing shows. Surely such grass-roots artistic formations have their own story to tell of the cultural history of our time. I record below some haphazardly surviving records concerning the group which were kept in increasingly battered cardboard boxes through all the artist’s travels and subsequent ventures. Having witnessed so very much of lesser importance preserved apparently forever in digital form, I list these documents here to record available details of one small and twisting tendril winding through the history of the age.

Reading the guest book comments for Patricia’s show, I am struck by the number of visitors who thought the work pointed important new directions. They felt the presence of something meaningful, beautiful, and novel in the arts. Decades later their enthusiasm cannot be recaptured, but it is possible to preserve a few fragmented traces of what once excited it.



Multiple copies exist of some documents.

call for submissions for two group shows during the summer of 1975 signed Ginger, Janet, Judith, Rosalie, and Sheila.

call for submissions for a group show inviting work “whether or not you consider yourself to be an artist,” on the theme of the Great Mother scheduled for April 24, signed “Rosalie, Sheila, Ia, Ginger, and Evelyn.”

call for submissions for a show on the theme “Illumination: words, pictures, & light” opening June 24, 1975.

letter dated June 18, 1975 signed Patricia Seaton indicating a wish to join the collective.

note accepting Seaton’s work for group show July 12, 1975.

“An Interior Landscape” Nov. 3-Dec. 7 (1975) poster with drawing by Ia and, following the title, the words “women’s environment . . .mental contours . . .collective art work.

“Spirits Clothed in Flesh” Jan. 27-Feb. 8 (1976) with drawing by Ia from a painted plate and, following the title, the words “paintings, drawings, ceramics, phantoms demonic & delicious."

“A Women’s Art Show” Oct. 1-Oct.31 (1975) with drawing perhaps by Janet Cannon-Unione including Virginia Atkin-Murray, Janet Cannon-Unione, Evelyn Hinde, Patricia Seaton, Sheila Seguin, Judith Sutliff, and Judy Todd.

Catalogue for “Spirits Clothed in Flesh” including three drawings by Ia.

press release for a slide lecture on “Patriarchal Mutilation of the Great Mother” by Lili Artel on September 18 and 25, 1975.

press release for “Spirits Clothed in Flesh” Jan. 27-Feb. 28 with remarks attributed to Euterpe of Chicago.

Women’s Art Center Newsletter, Winter 1976, with notice of Ia Seaton show, labeled gallery copy.

“The First Majority: Conversation with Sheila Seguin and Ginger Atkin,” four-page document citing a founding statement from February 1974 and list of the current collective members: Ginger Atkin, Rosalie Cassell, Evelyn Hinde, Patricia Seaton, Sheila Seguin, and Judy Todd. The document discusses the gallery and its vision, past shows, the current “Internal Landscape.”

announcement of an April 1 showing of tapes from “Just Us” and from International Women’s Video letters and of a program “Meet the First Majority” on April 25. Both are noted as “women only” events.

poster for the April 25 “Meet the First Majority” program, including “women only.”

poster for first show opening Feb. 15 with a group show including Virginia Atkin-Murray, Janet Cannon-Unione, Rosalie Cassell, Ellyn Rabinowitz, Diane Rusnak, Sheila Seguin, and Judith Sutliff.

poster for “Hindsight,” sculpture and environment by Evelyn Hinde with a drawing (by Hinde?) September 14-October 18 (1975?).

poster for “Bay Area Women: part 2” August 10-September 4, 1975 with unsigned drawing.

poster for “Ghost Images,” paintings, prints, and photos by Judith Sutliff with photo by Sutliff June 15-July 10.

poster for show featuring “The Drawings, Paintings, and Poems of Janet Cannon-Unione and Virginia Atkin-Murray with unsigned drawing.

poster for “Camilla Hall: her paintings, drawings, poetry” March 16-April 15 with drawing by Hall.
poster for Paintings and Sculpture by Sheila Seguin May 17-June 12.

poster for “Witch’s Retort” art by Rosalie Cassell and Judy Todd March 6-April 3, 1976 with unsigned drawing.

poster for the “Great Mother” show including Lina Allertons, Diane Rusnak, Pat Henshaw, Karen Berkan, Lougran O’Connor, Benita Mirabelli, Elizabeth Ennis, Maxene Galkin, January Nice, Leslie Markham, Nan Parry, Sara Sunstein, and Rossi Stewart, April 24-March 29, 1976.

poster for “Bay Area Women” July 12-August 7 with unsigned drawing.

poster for “Womanrise” Amazon art by Virginia Atkin, Dec. 23-Jan. 27 with drawing by Atkin.

poster for video evenings Feb. 9, March 11, and March 25 featuring the Just US Video Collective, the Iris Video Collective and CCAC Women’s Video, the latter two to admit women only.

poster for open poetry readings (women only) in the gallery starting April 9.

poster for lectures Sep. 2 by Evelyn Hinde on Käthe Kollowitz [sic], Sep. 18 Lili Artel in the Great Mother, and Sep. 25 Lili Artel on “Fragmentation of the Great Mother in Patriarchy.”

text of proposal to Berkeley City Government for grant, dated December 1975.

report to Berkeley Civic Arts Commission detailing programs in the First majority Gallery space, undated.

photocopy of new story “First Majority: more than just a gallery” September 1975.

press release following the gallery’s first show opening February 15, 1975, discussing the history of the project, two pages.

“The First Majority: Evolution of a Women’s Gallery in the East Bay” discussing the first show, February 15, 1975, copied from an unknown journal.

copy of article by Brenda Kahn from The Daily Californian February 25, 1975 “New Gall;eryto Shpwcase Women Artists Only.”

Calendar of First majority events for January through March showing numerous programs undocumented elsewhere.

unspecified: letter from Chico State professor asking for slides of “Octopus Woman” for a course on Women and the Arts, newspaper announcements of shows, visitor book with comments for “Spirits Clothed in Flesh,” six pages from what seems to be a gallery sitter’s book, list of Bay Area media outlets, poster for “Persona, a women’s art show" in the Berkeley Library.

Sherman Paul

     Riding my bicycle as I do for twenty-five miles every possible day, I have little doubt that one motive which has brought me to this discipline, so unlikely for one like myself who has little regard for athleticism, is my memory of Prof. Sherman Paul. During the sixties many intellectuals were in sympathy with my distaste for sports and exercise of all sorts, but Paul, whom I knew at the University of Illinois when I was an undergraduate and at Iowa during graduate school, used to swim laps every morning at a community pool before donning a suit over the whitest of white shirts and lecturing on campus, always looking healthy and well-turned out. He made no point of this activity; it was simply part of a sensible life to him, and ultimately even I was impressed.
     Thinking I needed no guide to my own culture, I never studied much American literature, so I took no classes with Paul except for the two semester survey of the subject required of English majors in which I enrolled during my sophomore year (1964-5). I remember his literary approach, but, even more vividly, the day he halted class to denounce me and my friend Ray Miller for coming to class wearing jeans. “You disrespect me, the institution, and the field of study,” he claimed. “At Harvard,” he recounted, “on an exceedingly hot summer day, I once took off my suit coat in the library and hung it on the back of my chair. Within minutes I was knocked on the head by the cane of Samuel Eliot Morison who let me know I was flouting decorum in a way that would simply not do in Cambridge.” With his deep belief in the potential of Whitmanic radical democracy, Paul doubtless felt that the land grant University of Illinois was failing to strive after the highest standards if it did not insist on similar practices. “Professors had style in those days,” he continued, “as did students.” A few years later, he commented ruefully that the entire class faced him in denim. “I used to be able to read people’s socio-economic class at a glance,” he said, “now I have to wait until they talk.”
     The year I studied with Sherman Paul was the year of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley and its briefer epigone the Filthy Speech Movement, both of which the genteel Prof. Paul admired. With the same competitive impulse with which he had invoked Harvard’s dress code, he asked us, “Why doesn’t something like that get organized here? If this can happen in California, it can in Illinois.” Those who find some discontinuity between these suggestions should have a look at photographs of the free speech demonstrators over fifty years ago. Virtually all the men among the student body including the demonstrators wear sport coats and most of them narrow ties as well, odd-looking now. To Paul the dignity of intellectual work was wholly consistent with the thinker’s obligation to stir things up and challenge the powers that be. Identified throughout his career with what Paul Rosenfeld long before Earth Day or Green parties called the “green tradition” in American literature, he was a learned radical.
     I recall the day he asked each student to bring to the next meeting a definition of literature, a task that seemed simple until I began writing. What does, in fact, distinguish the aesthetic text from all others? I now have an answer, but it took some years of study to develop. I might trace my investigations of what now strikes me as a very significant and controversial issue to the stimulation of that classroom exercise.
     I have always thought that every teacher, from preschool through dissertation committees, teaches not only subject matter but also how to engage with the work of the mind in an energetic, effective, elegant, and meaningful manner. Though I doubtless could have gone much further into Hawthorne and Emerson under his tutelage, I learned a great deal from Sherman Paul on that larger humane topic of how to live, so significant for anyone who pursues the humanities, yet so rarely acknowledged.