THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT
Betsy Damon
“I think that it’s really important for women to believe in their own highest thinking.”
Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, February 2026
BD: I’m Betsy Damon, but I was born Elizabeth, and I was born December 31st, 1940, in New York.
JW: Tell us a little about your childhood before you got involved in any women’s issues.
BD: I come from a New England family, Boston. My father lived most of his time in Turkey. My mother’s from a very prominent Boston family. My father was sent to Turkey when the war broke out. And there was something called the Office of War Information, and I don’t think very many Americans spoke the languages he spoke. But his dad had gone to Turkey, and he had all these connections. He loved art. He got involved in all different ways to make money. They were all involved in Robert College, which was started then by Protestants. We came back in ’48 to Washington.
Where my father was — I only found this out after he died. He wrote the 200-page white paper to start the United States Information Agency cultural exchange programs all over the world as a way to foster democracy. And then the Americans demolished it totally until it was just nothing. I found out that it was what it had become, to nothing.
JW: Did you have siblings?
BD: I am the oldest of 4.
JW: How did you get involved in the women’s movement?
BD: The minute I heard about feminism, it took me 1 hour, you know.
JW: I see. What’d you do?
BD: Patriarchy was, you know, inherent in everything. I wanted to be an artist my whole life. And I won prizes when I was really little. But it was a very bad career to have. I mean, no one told me there were art schools. No one told me. My highly educated family didn’t.
I was successful young, but as soon as I had a child, everybody told me I had to give up everything. My mother said, you can’t be a wife, a mother, and an artist. And I said, well, I give up wife.
JW: How did you put that into action?
BD: Well, I kept on being an artist. The man I married was a professor, and at that time he ended up at Cornell. I ended up at the very first conference on the West Coast where the Women’s Caucus for Art was started. And Judy Chicago came out with everything, Woman House, and I was completely struck by it. Completely.
My husband was furious at me because I didn’t spend the time with him. I went to everything else around this. And then I went back to Cornell and I organized a Women in the Arts. It was a 3-week festival. And I ws — I’ll just put it this way. I can do almost anything, but I don’t put my name on it.
So I did this festival, which was the first one in the United States. And it had all the arts. It had, you know, the first time film critics or musicians or composers got together. And we had a show of, it was before the Johnson Museum was made, and there was the first women’s artist show. And then we had a 3-day weekend of women about feminism.
JW: What year was that?
BD: That was in ’70s. Oh my gosh, ’73 or ’74. I’d have to look on my resume. And it was enormously successful. It was the same year as Mary Beth Edelson did the thing in Washington one week later. And I went down to New York and met the women artists in New York. And, you know, many— Judy came and she led a gathering and told people they needed to organize a feminist art studio for me to teach. So I did the feminist art studio at Cornell.
JW: I mean, tell me about it. What was a feminist art studio?
BD: Well, you know, the premise is that most of the students are female in art school and all their professors are male. And there is a really actually huge— I mean, I was told things like take the ovaries out of my work. I was often the best student, but certain professors, and they’d lower my score, my grade, because my work wasn’t like theirs.
When I was in graduate school at Columbia, Motherwell sat in my studio and he was this big, portly man. And he’s like, oh, “Betsy, you know, you’re very, very good. But, you know, if you want an art career or something like, don’t get married. And if you get married,” and he was being kind, you know, “don’t have children.” So, I mean, it’s— and that became, you know, that sort of divide became a big deal. A big deal.
JW: Tell me about that. What do you mean?
BD: Well, some women who are very famous, which I won’t mention, would tell young women, don’t have children. No, you can’t succeed. You know, the recipe for fame was— and I, in fact, take issue with it. One thing I love about the West Coast artists, how they’ve come out, they stayed very female and championed it. Not Judy, who I also really, I like everybody mostly, but that the essence of our—
JW: You mean Judy Chicago.
BD: Yes. You know, but she wouldn’t ever say those things. What’s lost is that the female is the primary creative force on the planet. Whatever species you want to choose, it is. There are some species that can self-propagate, but female is the creative force. Now, why did feminism lose that? Or you think it’s degrading to— it gets complicated with biology as destiny, but it’s not degrading to stand up for our biology as a creative force.
And if you go back and read people like the British sculptor who was in a relationship with, I think, Henry Moore. She had 4 children and she talks about it. And so I went back and I read everything I could. Like, how do you do this? How do you do it in the face of, you know, a culture that doesn’t support you as a female?
JW: Do you recall any books that really impressed you?
BD: Well, Linda Nochlin, I knew her. Why are there no great female artists? The French woman, you know who I’m talking about. The Second Sex. I really liked, who is it, she’s a very radical woman, I think Dutch or German. The end of her book is, “Try to remember when we’re powerful, and if you can’t remember, make it up.” Monica Wittig.
JW: Betty Friedan. Did you read hers?
BD: Yes. Betty Friedan. Amazing. I knew Kate Millett. I read her. I read everybody.
JW: She convinced you, you could do it. Is that it?
BD: Not necessarily. I convinced myself. I’m one of those people who’s very persistent. And I mean, you have to believe that we can do it to strike out. You know, I’ve also formed an organization in the ’80s called No Limits for Women Artists. Because I got tired of women sitting around complaining at tea time about how awful it all is.
JW: What did this group do?
BD: It invited women to organize ourselves in small groups of support. But I stepped out into the streets of New York in ’76 as a 7,000-year-old woman.
JW: Oh, tell us more about that.
BD: I decided that in the early ’70s, I said I was all taught by men. I know nothing about who I really am as a female. Well, I had already had 2 children, but something deep in it. And I decided I had to notice my dreams, and I spent 2 years not going to a movie or reading a book by a guy to retrain myself.
JW: Oh, interesting.
BD: Because we’re trained, right? You know, and I didn’t dislike my teachers or anything. Some of them were— well, some of the men were really disgusting. But, um, and also I did have in high school, an art teacher who was very, very supportive of me. Oh, but I was, I was considered very much a rebellious, negative person in a, in a girls’ school. It was the National Cathedral School for Girls.
JW: But somebody was supportive of you.
BD: Oh yeah, my English teacher, my art teacher. There’s a rigorous training to raise a daughter to marry a smart man. And I didn’t want that life. I didn’t know that back then. But right, right. You know, I didn’t know that. But yeah, it’s very rigorous, you know, and including— I mean, my mom was interesting because she didn’t necessarily like her role at all, but she didn’t know anything else. And so when I would step out of it, she would get really scared. My mom was the chairman of the board of the National Cathedral.
JW: What would you say like a major accomplishment of yours was?
BD: I’m just going to back up one minute and say I also joined a consciousness-raising group when I was in Ithaca.
JW: First talk about the Consciousness Raising group. Did you get stuff out of it? What do you think?
BD: Well, yes and no. The only thing I remember, this is kind of ridiculous. I mean, we were all wives of Cornell professors and mostly, you know, the more radical people. I’m too embarrassed to say. Like all of them were having trouble just having sex with a guy, and I was the only person who was like, well, I didn’t have that problem.
And, you know, they all— I didn’t remember my childhood accurately. I remembered the myth that it was perfect. I had to uncover all that stuff and go through all that and everything. And once I decided to start to remember my dreams and other things, I uncovered a very horrific childhood. And I mean, our brains are able to do that.
JW: Okay, so we were on your accomplishments.
BD: Well, I did the first inner city park in the world in China. That’s a water cleaning system, and I did it in ’95. Oh, and, um, before then, um, I mean, I can do almost anything. I just don’t tell people and I don’t ask people to write about it and I don’t try to show it.
So I also had cast 250 feet of a dry riverbed in handmade paper called A Memory of Clean Water. So I have a lot of things. And I was the performance artist with the 7,000-year-old woman and then went on to become for the next 12 years doing performances, many, many, many performances, and almost ended up with becoming an alternative theater person.
JW: Oh, this is all in New York?
BD: Yep, yep. And then I, yeah, everything. And then I took my children to China. I’d always wanted to go to China since I was a little girl in Turkey and could swing in the fig trees and look across the Bosphorus. And if I knew if I could swim it, I could walk to China. And my great-grandmother’s house had many, many, many things from China. Her father and grandfather was a sea captain. She had all these incredibly gorgeous things. Plimoth Plantation was her estate.
JW: Oh, I’ve heard of that. So you continued to support women, I assume, throughout your career.
BD: Oh, yes. Yes.
JW: Tell me a little about it.
BD: After the Feminist Art Studio at Cornell, it moved downtown and was sort of an open studio for women, and we did a lot of exhibits. They did a lot of exhibits. And then when I came to New York, I formed the WCA chapter. Always supporting women.
JW: WCA? What is that?
BD: Women’s Caucus for Art, which was formed in 1972 with the opening of Woman House.
JW: I see.
BD: By all different, all kinds of academic women and professional women who could gather. It was a really heady, wonderful meeting. I remember it to this day really well.
JW: And any memory from it that you want to share?
BD: Just the complete enthusiasm in that room. I mean, the room was packed. There was standing room only. You know, Anne Southern Harris, Linda Nochlin, Judy Chicago, Miriam, everybody, everybody was there who could be there, get themselves to LA at the time.
JW: And then you formed a New York chapter.
BD: Yes, we formed a New York chapter. I was living in Ithaca so when I came to New York in ’76, after that, I got active in the New York chapter and then I was president of it. We had like 500 members in the mid-’80s. And put on huge conferences and I spread it to other— like everything was being held in downtown Manhattan, which is exclusive. So we spread it to meetings up in Harlem and other places.
For 7 years, I was a very active lesbian. And I was always, always, always trying to aim for as much inclusion as possible. And the No Limits for Women artists, my friends who were African American, formed their own group. They asked me if they could. I said, yes, of course.
And they formed their own group. Worked together, exhibited together. And I just think you can’t do anything by yourself. The limits are there. And the idea that, you know, you have to be by yourself to be famous is something that is really wrong in the art world. And, well, you can’t get a MacArthur if you’re a couple. So the Harrisons could not get a MacArthur.
JW: Oh, I didn’t know that.
BD: We championed the Who’s Who. And then even when I did the park in China, everybody was obsessed. Who really designed it? Who really did this? Who really did that? And I’ve insisted for, well, I really did initiate the idea. I really did have a very big hand in the design. But the Chinese—it would never happen if the Chinese had not completely adopted the idea as theirs and done it. It would never have happened.
JW: What particular idea do you mean?
BD: Oh, it was to have a park that demonstrated how nature cleans water.
JW: Oh, I see.
BD: And I did that in ’95. But I started by organizing artists in Minnesota to address environmental issues. I am the pioneer. I can proudly say that. People have been urging me to. So I, I did a something in Duluth, um, but the Americans always want you to jury them. Who has the best idea? So who gets all the money? And there’s never much money.
So, but the Chinese didn’t have that at all. You know, they piled into the project. I do public brainstorming, like you don’t go off by yourself and come back with a proposal. Every meeting, everybody had to talk out loud about what they wanted to do and what their idea is. And eventually the Chinese took over because I didn’t at that time speak Chinese.
JW: I was going to ask you that, if you spoke Chinese.
BD: No, my son speaks Chinese and he was with me. You know, I can learn a discrete vocabulary and I was trying to teach myself Chinese. But anyhow, so they— yeah, I got the Princeton tapes and practiced. So they teach you the pronunciation stuff first. So my pronunciation is really good, but my vocabulary is limited, extremely limited.
JW: And what are you doing now?
BD: I am launching a project called Water Alive. I got a Guggenheim for this project. I have a theory that, which is now not becoming a theory, it’s becoming more common knowledge. All, everything on this planet comes from water. Absolutely everything, even a rock. Now they’ve figured out how to compress water back into a rock, scientists, but given our terribly siloed, mono-exploitative culture, most people are still not literate on the reality of the complexity that we live in, what’s really happening, and why they should not do certain things. I, I wrote a book called Water Talks.
And I would probably write a somewhat different book now, not different in philosophy, but more— at that time, I couldn’t have gotten it published if it had things like water is consciousness. I mean, I suggested there, and I went to huge international water conferences where I met the scientists who were right there. Mae Wan Ho, The Rainbow and the Worm. She unfortunately died of cancer.
We were going to work together, but what water is, is the reason we have interspecies communication. Water is the reason that we exist. And that has completely been eradicated in the U.S. from what you learn, and water is way more than 3 pieces of a hydraulic cycle.
They now know it’s at least 12 stages. I— the ancient people believed it was, um, 64 at least. And the absolute importance of water and health has been completely buried because they want you to buy all the expensive other stuff, and they can’t figure out how to reasonably deliver really good water.
Water will deteriorate in a pipe after 1 mile. Does not like to be in a pipe. And water bottling is, without a doubt, it’s genocide to the area where the water bottling plants are. Really? And plastic bottles are disaster. So what else do you want to know that we don’t think about?
We do not think about it. And America spread this. America had some of the best deliverable water in the world to a city. And thanks to Nestlé, which is a Swiss company that lied and put a propaganda out that water fountains were dirty. And they got people to buy bottled water. And so now cities in Europe have restored water fountains everywhere, but not America.
JW: I want to know about your art and water. I want to know how you’ve combined art with these theories.
BD: Well, I have a lot of visual work that I have to show soon. Somewhere. But I don’t consider somebody painting a sailboat on a lake a water piece. I also don’t consider people painting the surface of water a water piece. They all do, because that’s it. But it still objectifies water.
What if you think of water as a verb? What can you do in this society? It is a verb, actually, in indigenous cultures. So I struggled with all that stuff. Like, I did cast 250 feet of a dry riverbed, which I call A Memory of Clean Water. It’s a beautiful piece. It’s in storage. I did show it quite a bit.
JW: And what is it exactly?
BD: It’s handmade paper. Paper is liquid, so it’s paper poured on a dry riverbed where it captured everything. And I actually, the last step of always, you know, okay, getting it in a museum, I didn’t do that. And I regret it. But personally, I just couldn’t ever go that widely. I couldn’t sell myself. Or what do you call it? Just put it out there widely, like, you know, how great it is or something like that. But really good piece.
I also did— I was in the Aspen Biennial where I got the community to clean a river, and I made 7 sculptures that could play in the water. And I always forget what I’ve done. And that right now, and I have a huge series of drawings of water creating heart.
JW: Oh, I see.
BD: And I looked in a microscope at a water drop, a healthy water drop, and you could see the patterns that the microbial elements formed. And I have, I can say honestly, a stunning drawing. So that’s what I draw. That’s what I do. And I also have 8 elements, basic elements of water that I’ve done in sumi ink. I studied Sumi painting when I was in Japan for a year at a college there. I found a teacher. I asked Taisetsu Suzuki because I knew his secretary, and he sent me to a remarkable teacher.
JW: Male or female? I’m just curious.
BD: Female.
JW: Oh, okay. Wow. Progress.
BD: It’s complicated for all of us because we have different relationships within our family about who supported you and who didn’t. And I don’t want to put this in my whatever, it’s my experience. Like, certain people, like Judy Chicago, really supported me. And there’s certain people, women, who can’t really support you.
There’s so much pettiness among, uh, you know, the real support from competitive [people]. And when there’s the oppressed group that has scarce resources, people are nasty around that. And, and they got nasty once we got attention. And so in many ways I find it easier to work with guys.
JW: That’s interesting.
BD: And in other ways, not, because they can get like, how are you? Or they would say to me, you know, so there’s benefit in downsizing to both. Like, I can stand up to men much better than to women because my mom was absolutely the oppressor in my life. Bar none. And my grandmother, I don’t think they— that’s something else.
But, you know, so on some level, my dad was very supportive. Like, he found Schwank’s book on whatever it was called, something flow, the book that he published in a garage and bought it for me. And he loved to collect wood that had been, you know, just revealed through the waters. And he somehow was on to my wave.
JW: That’s great. Well, tell me, do you have any final comments, any conclusions?
BD: I think that it’s really important for women to believe in their own highest thinking. I do. I mean, it— we’re so— the oppression makes us limited even today. Even today, like, you know, or scared and having to stay, well, I’m making money here, I better not challenge that, or, you know, other things.
And the few women who have stepped out like Judy Chicago or Louise Bourgeois. Nancy Spiro, against all odds, did amazingly. And I haven’t kept track that much because my career went this other direction of being in China. And then recently I just had to— several broken bones, and my bones are fine. But, um, so, but still, what— it’s what I try to do with everybody I know is, you know, what’s your vision here? Go for it, do it, take it step by step. You will end up being supported.
JW: That’s— wow, that’s great.
BD: So that’s really my thing, and that’s No Limits for Women Artists, which lasted for 20 years and had over 500 women in it, and they— high percentage of them got careers. Because the question was, what’s your greatest, biggest thought right now?
JW: Do it.
BD: Exactly.
JW: Oh, that’s amazing.
BD: There are these questions: how are you going to start, what will get in your way, and what are you going to do about that? And it’s infallible.
JW: It’s— it really works for just about any choice, really.
BD: Exactly. I’ve even had nurses take it up on it. So any choice, and everybody has equal time. Nobody can grandstand, nobody can steal the time you’re together. It’s equal time, and, um, that’s your support group. Once a month.
JW: That’s great.
BD: Some people did twice a month, and during COVID we reassembled in, in certain ways, which was really interesting and fun and anyway, it works.
JW: That sounds great. Well, I thank you so much.