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The Women’s Wing / 135holding hands in an attitude of mutual support. My body concealed Chuck’ssexual parts while his hand rested on my waist in a gesture of affectionate protectiveness.”32 However tender the portrait may be, Neel was no doubt lookingat the broader social picture. In place of the brave rhetoric of Nemser’sopening FAJ editorial—“Women Artists, we now have our own place to beour own selves in print. The battle has begun . . .”, 33 Neel advances the viewshe expressed to Nemser in Art Talk: “I don’t think we should ƒght each other. . . Both men and women are wretched and often it’s a matter of how muchmoney you have rather than what your sex is.” 34 Neel’s visual argument is,apparently, that women are put forward now, but they are still hesitant andvulnerable, and must join hands with men to affect social change. Neel thusstripped Nemser of her militant rhetoric in order to substitute her own feministviews.Between 1971 and 1973, Neel was consistently included in important exhibitionsorganized by New York–based cooperative galleries such as the A.I.R.(Artist-in-Residence founded 1972) and SoHo 20 (1973). The largest and mostsigniƒcant of these early exhibitions was the “Women Choose Women” exhibition,organized by WIA (Women in the Arts) and held at the New York CulturalCenter from January 12 to February 18, 1973. The jurors—Pat Pasloff,Ce Roser, Sylvia Sleigh, Linda Nochlin, Elizabeth Baker, Laura Adler, andMario Amaya—selected and hung a total of 109 works, including Neel’s PregnantWoman (1971). Douglas Davis’s review in Newsweek criticized the exhibitwith some justiƒcation as too large and lacking in focus. 35 As at the conferences,the ideal of equality prevailed at exhibits curated by and for womenin these years. Neel’s painting was the only one reproduced with Davis’s article;it was provided with the caption, “Breaking Stereotypes.” The one consistenttheme of the exhibition was the exploration of women’s sexuality, andNeel’s nude looked shocking even in the context of work by emerging artistssuch as Martha Edelheit, Hannah Wilke, and Joan Semmel.Another link in Neel’s feminist art network was the painter-curator JuneBlum, who, while at the Suffolk Museum in Stony Brook and, after 1978, atthe gallery at Valencia Community College in Florida, consistently includedNeel’s art in her group exhibitions. 36 Neel painted Blum in 1972 (ƒg. 128), asdid the feminist artist and critic Pat Mainardi. The contrast in their approachesexempliƒes the differences between Neel’s social realism and the idealized visionsof an essentialized womanhood characteristic of the early years of feministart. The two portraits were reproduced in Feminist Art Journal 3/2 (summer1974), along with a transcript of an interview with Mainardi, Neel, andMarcia Marcus. 37 In response to Judith Vivell’s question, “What are you peopledoing in the twentieth century painting portraits?” Neel replied: “I’m writinghistory!” whereas Mainardi answered, “I painted [Blum] four times beforeI realized that an idea was emerging—Wonderwoman!” 38 Neel created an im-