Monica Majoli, Millie Wilson and Susan Silton gain visibility in LA after decades of queer women’s artistic erasure
In the late seventies, when the LA-based artist Monica Majoli was 12, she began spending her afternoons at Sisterhood Bookstore, a feminist bookstore in Los Angeles that has long since closed. She would stay all afternoon “searching for my tribe”, she says. One day, she found a photograph of the Ovulars, a group of feminists who held photography workshops at a lesbian commune in rural Oregon between 1979 and 1983. Through photography, the Ovulars were documenting and self-fashioning a vision of lesbian life in real time.
They are at the center of Monica Majoli: Countervision, which brings her new drawings into the June L Mazer Lesbian Archives, presented by Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), alongside material from Sisterhood and the Ovulars. Some of Majoli’s drawings sit in a five-drawer flat file for visitors to handle; others are embedded within the Mazer’s holdings.
