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The Women’s Wing / 139“Three American Realists: Neel/Sleigh/Stevens” exhibit held at the EversonMuseum in Syracuse. The same month, after participating in a panel discussionat the Everson, Neel juried a watercolor exhibition for the WadsworthAtheneum in Hartford. (Lengthy interviews with Neel appeared in local papersin both Hartford and Syracuse.) In October, she participated in “Close ToHome,” an exhibit of thirty-three still life artists at the Genesis galleries. OnOctober 31, she was included in a New York Times article, “The Art of Portraiture,in the Words of Four New York Artists,” which accompanied the exhibit“Modern Portraits: The Self and Others” at the Wildenstein gallery. Octoberalso saw the premier of the ƒlm Alice Neel by Nancy Baer, at the Second InternationalFestival of Women’s Films at Cinema Studio in New York. In November,she was included in a show of fourteen members of the Visual ArtistsCoalition (founded 1973) at Adelphi University’s Alumni House in GardenCity, Long Island. On January 9, 1977, after the opening of the Los Angelesshow in December, “Alice Neel: A Retrospective Exhibit” opened at the WashingtonCounty Museum of Fine Arts in Hagerstown, Maryland.Without question, Neel was now an integral part of the art establishment,but as the above list indicates, she was part of the women’s art establishment, anetwork that continued to present work in alternative exhibition spaces ratherthan in prestigious New York museums or galleries. So, too, the majority ofreviews of her exhibitions remained conƒned to the women’s pages (the socalled“Living” sections) of newspapers rather than the arts section. Despiteher growing reputation, her citizenship in the artworld, like that of mostwomen, remained “second class.” Yet the written record, the prerequisite forthe entry into history, had been established.The female members of Neel’s New York art network are primarily the activistswho sought Neel out in order to include her in their projects. The verynumbers of these professional women attest to their increasing importance inthe artworld, especially when compared with the dearth of female representationin Neel’s proletarian portrait gallery. As with her portraits of male artists,many of her female sitters are androgynous. The androgynous woman hadenjoyed as wide a cultural currency throughout the century as the male artistaesthete,tracing her historical roots to the Modern Woman—the slim, activeideal that emerged in the 1920s—and beyond that to the nineteenth-centurytradition of the female bohemian artist in pants. According to Joanna Frueh,by the 1970s the new generation of feminists “adopted androgyny as a symboland enactment of male/female and feminine/masculine equality.” 51Most of Neel’s androgynous portraits were painted in the mid-1970s, whenthe debates about the relationship of androgyny to feminism were most vociferous.For Jungian psychologist June Singer, whose book Androgyny: Toward aNew Theory of Sexuality was published in 1977, androgyny simply mooted all