It’s a poster for a conference held in Los Angeles in 1975,“for women who work with public visual and physical forms,” as the piece advertises — that is, women artists and designers. The abstract vista suggests a wide open landscape, a distant horizon, a place of limitless opportunity. But the repeating image, the shape of the symbol of femininity derived from the Roman sign for the goddess Venus, is also quite literally about nuts and bolts.
The ingenuity of the design and the keen eye toward pragmatic ends encapsulates many of the ideas at work in“Sheila Levrant de Bretteville: Community, Activism, and Design,” a retrospective show of the artist’s work running now at the Yale University Art Gallery through June 23. In addition to giving viewers a sense of De Bretteville’s consistently striking design work, the show offers a glimpse of what long-time commitment to a social cause looks like, and in the process, a sharp-edged perspective on what has changed in the struggle for greater equity between women and men and what has not.
