Paula Hays Harper, Art Historian, Is Dead at 81

Paula Hays Harper, one of the first art historians to bring a feminist perspective to the study of painting and sculpture, and the co-author of a major biography of Camille Pissarro, died on June 3 in Miami. She was 81.
The cause was cancer, according to the University of Miami, where she taught from 1983 until her retirement last year.

In the early 1970s, Dr. Harper provided the creative spark for a project that became a milestone in women’s art. As a lecturer at the California Institute of the Arts, outside Los Angeles, where the first feminist art program at a major art school had just begun, Dr. Harper suggested that the 21 students in the original class collaborate on a project about what house, home and domesticity meant to women.

The idea clicked, and working with the two artists who had founded the program, Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, the students transformed a rundown mansion in Hollywood into “Womanhouse,” one of the biggest and most celebrated exhibitions of art by and about women ever assembled.

One performance piece in the show consisted of a woman who sat in front of a mirror, applying and removing makeup over and over again. Ms. Chicago’s “Menstruation Bathroom,” seen through gauze, had an overflowing wastebasket of used sanitary products and a shelf of feminine hygiene deodorants.

more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/arts/design/paula-hays-harper-feminist-art-historian-dies-at-81.html