“New truths begin as heresies.” This truism provided the title for Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, one of the most influential feminist journals of the last fifty years. Published between 1977 and 1993 in New York City, Heresies presented texts and projects by some of the most notable activists, artists, scholars, teachers, and writers of the era. Emerging from the ferment of international, national, and local movements for social justice—including civil rights, women’s equality, gay liberation, decolonization, peace—the journal’s ethos was grounded in a joyfully contentious pluralist feminism. Each issue was crafted by a new editorial collective of volunteers who organized it around a particular theme related to art, theory, and politics. This collective ethos meant that over the course of its run, hundreds of individuals participated in the production of the magazine, enacting a collaborative feminist practice of meaning-making. As stated in the inaugural issue, “We are not only analyzing our own oppression in order to put an end to it, but also exploring concrete ways of transforming society into one that is socially just and culturally free.”

Heresies: Still Ain’t Satisfied introduces the journal to a new audience. The exhibition highlights select editorial content to convey the breadth of the journal’s visual and intellectual explorations, its collaborative mode of production, and its radically reflexive process of evaluation—in short, the dynamism of engaged feminist world-making. Critically, this exhibition will serve as a platform for a series of discursive events and conversations that will expand on the journal’s lessons, including its feminist and do-it-yourself mode of working, and generative collaborations with multiple stakeholders. Programming organized in collaboration with those who work at, study within, and live alongside UCR will engage with some of the most acute issues of our time, and consider how feminist-informed art and politics can most productively shape new truths.

Digitized copies of all journal issues are available at heresiesarchive.org.