Janet Langsam: Improbable Feminist

Upcoming: Spring 2025

It was great being featured in The New York Times…but I really didn’t care for the headline. I mean, really… “A Day in the Life of Nonstop Housewife”? Here I was, a leader in the community, exhibiting my artwork, teaching…. That headline framed everything I was doing—everything I was—within the context of being a housewife. I was a housewife, and proud of that part of my life, but it was just one part of my life.

Married with three kids, living in Queens and keeping house, inspiration came to Janet Langsam one day as she was picking up her children’s toys. Unlike most of us who have picked up our children’s toys and binned or shelved them, wishing our children would learn to do that for themselves, on this day Langsam picked up the toys, put glue all over them, adhered them to a backboard, and covered them in paint.

By the time the article, “A Day in the Life of Nonstop Housewife” was published on January 15, 1972, Langsam was making paintings, assemblage, sculpture, collages, and drawings, working small in her house in Queens and large in the gymnasium of an old schoolhouse that she and her husband bought upstate and were converting. She was showing her work at the time of the article in a group exhibition at a New York University gallery in Greenwich Village. She was chairing Queens Community Board 7. She was teaching painting to schoolchildren.

In the 1970s and 1980s, very few women were able to succeed as professional artists. Gallery representation was almost impossible to come by for women and, therefore, they had few opportunities to exhibit and sell their work. Correspondingly, by the mid-1970s, Langsam shifted away from making her own art to working on what she refers to as a “larger canvas,” making sure that people had access to art, and making sure that artists had funding to make art.

Janet Langsam: Improbable Feminist surveys the artist’s body of work from its inception to the point at which she redirected her efforts toward making the world a better place through art. It is a story told in the exhibition through the artist’s own words.

Generous support for this exhibition is provided by the Friends of the Neuberger Museum of Art.