THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT
Fern Shaffer
“I think that women have this inbound ability to cooperate and work with each other.”
Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, December, 2022
JW: Could you start by telling us your full name and when and where you were born?
FS: I go by Fern Shaffer. My full name is Fern Joan – Goldsand was my maiden name – and Shaffer, my married name. I was born March 29, 1944. I was born in Chicago, and I have lived here for 79 years and for many more years to come.
JW: Tell us a little bit about your childhood. What maybe you think led you to be the person you are. Did you have siblings, a little ethnic background, whatever you like?
FS: I’m Jewish, and I have a brother and a sister. Both of my parents were deaf mutes, so that was very interesting, to grow up in a house where there was no music and no radio. We had television very early because my father loved watching boxing, and I grew up in a relatively normal home. We had dinner at 6:00. The differences were that after school I had to come home because my mother was waiting to check on all of us kids. And then if I say, “I’m going to go to my girlfriend’s house,” she would say, “You have to be home at 5:30,” because there was no phone communication in between.
Mother was artistic. My father was a house painter, I became very familiar with painting materials because I wanted to be with my father. I would help him fold up his drop cloths and look at his brushes and paint. I was introduced to my love of painting very early. My mother; I view her as a shaman, and I was really taught shamanistic early as a ways to look at the world. She wouldn’t identify with that, but I did much later. She would show me how to look at people and watch for signs. “That’s not a good person. That’s a good person,” because she had to prepare me to live in the world, and those were the only skills that she had.
I learned how to read people very early, and she would test me. She said, “Look at that person. What do you think?” And so, those skills came into my life very easily. When my mother got pregnant, her siblings, and all of the relatives around my parents, were very worried. How could they raise children? How can they take care of children? Maybe they should take the children and put them in a shelter of some sort. They were wrong, my brother was a CPA by 20. My sister has a master’s degree in deaf education. I have a master’s degree in multi-interdisciplinary art. My mother was pulled out of school in 7th grade to go work in a factory. My father was more educated as he got to go to high school and then worked in his father’s painting business.
JW: So how did she communicate to you?
FS: Sign language.
JW: You learned sign language?
FS: Sign language is my first language, and so, I think that affects the way that I write. I write very little, and I write very directly. I’m very direct with my speaking, and taking complex ideas and breaking them down into simpler forms to sign with.
JW: I see. And so, when did you learn to speak?
FS: Well, there were people around me all the time, so maybe I didn’t speak at nine months, but I learned to speak, I speak a lot. Both of my parents were deaf mutes from hearing families. My cousins, neighbors, aunts, and relatives, all spoke. You can pick up a language very easily as a child. But my signing has really fallen off, since my parents passed and I do not use it very much.
JW: I’ll bet. So how did you get involved in women’s issues? When did that happen?
FS: Oh, women’s issues, that came later. I got married very early at 20, and had children very early. By the time I was 25, I had three kids. I had to drop out of school my last semester because I couldn’t handle all this, and I went back to school later. I was very happy in that role, of being married and having children. And then I realized that was really not all that I wanted in my life.
As soon as the kids were all in school; it was good to have them close together because eventually they all got to school at the same time, I went back to making art. I was always an art major. When I was eight years old, I knew that I would be an artist. I just didn’t know how that would manifest itself. I didn’t know how I would do that. But I knew that anything I did had to have an artistic component to it. When the kids were little, I sewed clothes for them, or I made needlepoint canvases. I was always producing something.
The women’s movement really didn’t even hit me until I would say, the ’70s, when I tried to get a credit card. I could not get a credit card in my name. “What do you mean? I can’t have a credit card?” It’s true, I didn’t have a job. My husband was working and he didn’t believe that women should work at that time. That was the second clue about the women’s movement that became very interesting to me. I went to a local art center and aligned myself with all my friends that are new, and they were really active in everything. I went to my first woman’s conference, in the late ’70s, and I was shocked that there were lesbians there. “Oh, my God.” the speaker, I won’t use her name, but she’s very famous, she walked around barefoot.
JW: Why won’t you use her name? We all know her.
FS: Lucy Lippard. You probably do know her. Lucy Lippard was the speaker, and I went specifically to hear her speak, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her dirty feet. I was brought up in another way. So, this was shocking to me. I can’t remember what she said, but I do remember that. That was my values that I had from home, but I worked through a lot of that.
I was painting at the Evanston Art Center with all my friends, we were in the same class. They were getting into art galleries and I was not. So, I joined Artemisia. Artemisia was a women’s run, cooperative gallery. And with that, I understood what the limits of being a woman was in the art world. So there, my job was really cut out for me. I became President and led Artemisia for twelve years. It was a women’s run gallery, but we exhibited men. We just didn’t let men in our business.
JW: Can you tell me what years that was?
FS: ’81 to ’92, or something like ’80 to ’92. And that’s when the whole environment lent itself to being different. We really needed to express ourselves in a different way. My take of it was, “So what if I’m a woman? I can paint 20-foot paintings. I’m just as good as a guy.” And that’s what I did. I was really ambitious. I still am in another way, but I made huge paintings, 15 x 20ft. It was just so exciting because I didn’t have to hear say, “No, you can’t do that.” I didn’t want to hear the word no.
One of my favorite colors is black. I went to show my work to a dealer and she said, “I can’t sell these. Nobody wants black paintings.” “Okay, this is wrong.. I’m not going by these rules.” So, we had our own rules and we could do this. In retrospect, now, sitting here and looking back, the mistake that I felt that I made is that I didn’t know how to run a business. The gallery was run by writing grants. Sales were not the top of our list. We had women speakers come, because we wanted to promote women. That doesn’t mean we eliminated men. I had sons and I had a husband. Not for long, but I did have a husband.
Women’s issues became much more important to me, I would say, between the ’70s and the ’80s. I was born in ’44, got married at 20, raised children, but while I was raising children, art was still so important. I started a program in the school that my children attended. It was called the Picture Lady program. We bought prints of famous artists, women and men. I gathered eight women whose children went to the same school as my children. I figured out, how to make it simple, 8 new prints a year and 8 women, each woman had to learn about the artist and explain it to the children, the print was hung in the classroom for a month and then moved on to another class.
Say you had a Picasso print, you would then study up on Picasso and you go in the classroom, and you would talk for 15 minutes about the painting, and the painting stayed in the room. Next month, you came and picked up the painting and brought it to the next room and repeated it. So, you had to do a little work, but it wasn’t taxing. By the time the kids got to fifth grade, they were associated with 30 or 40 artists, and I thought that was important.
I was a PTA president, because the I could delegate funds to purchase prints. So, I said, “Okay, I’ll be president. It’s not a problem.”
JW: Whatever it takes.
FS: Whatever it takes, I lived in the North Shore, and the women were all dressed in skirts and their pretty Peter Pan collars, and there I was in blue jeans and T shirts.
JW: It was the ’70s after all. Well, tell me more about your, did you call it a cooperative or your gallery?
FS: It’s a cooperative. Artemisia Galleries started, in 1976. I came in 1981. I was not one of the beginning people. It was a gallery started because there was no place for women to exhibit their art work. Nobody picked women. 40 artists, called got together, and agreed that we would vote for the for the top 20 artists and start a gallery. “Okay, everyone, put up your slides, and we would vote. The top 20 will start a gallery.”
The top 20 were selected through voting from this larger group of women. They started a gallery, rented a space, painted it, we did everything. We painted, we framed, we installed, we curated. We learned so much. People would come to the gallery and select artist to join their gallery. But I wasn’t in that category, my paintings were to large. I wanted to keep doing my own crazy ideas.
I eventually went to work. I got divorced, so I needed to have money. I couldn’t find a job because I really didn’t have a degree in anything but art. I ended up taking a job at a place called the Selfhelp Home, it was a home for Holocaust survivors. There is a part of me that’s philanthropic. I took the job to teach art to the elderly, but that wasn’t really what the job was. The job was everything, and I was there for 30 years.
When I walked into the home, and I’d never dealt with the elderly before, I said, “If it smells, I will not walk in the door.” But it didn’t smell, and I fell in love with the job. I fell in love with the people. And as a result, I did everything. I got a book club going, reading is really hard as you get older, I turned them all on to Kindles. I proposed to the board that they give me $3,000. “I’m going to buy 18 Kindles, and I’ll pick the books and I’m going to teach them how to read on a Kindle,” because you can make the font as big as you want. I did. And they’re still doing it. They all read on kindles.
This was a German Jewish home, and most of the people were from Germany, obviously, because that’s where the Holocaust started, and they loved opera. I didn’t know anything about opera, but I learned about opera. I learned how to contact people from the opera, because everybody wants to help and would come and perform for us. So, I would have major opera performers coming and singing for us. Every Sunday there was a classical concert and other things that I could think of. I was very creative with my programming. And that’s how I survived being divorced and having income. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a lot of pay, but fulfilling.
JW: Are there still Holocaust survivors?
FS: There’s maybe five. When we started, it was a full house. It’s a Jewish home, and they do what is needed to make the residents feel safe and cared for.. I liked exposing them to new ideas. I brought in whatever I thought would be interesting to the residents and they were really thrilled with it. It was just a wonderful experience.
JW: Let me ask you, did they learn to read English?
FS: Oh, yes, they all spoke English. They came over in the ’40s and the ’50s. Enough of them got out early. A lot of them came later. The ones that got out early, left when Hitler said to them, “We’ll take your home, business and your factories.” You leave. And they left. The war ended in ’44, so let’s say this was in ’38, ’39. They came to Chicago, near the University of Chicago, South Side, and there were enough people that brought their mothers and their aunts with them.
Everyone needed to work. They had no money, so they bought a house on the South Side, and it was filled with volunteers. They did group living. Then they moved to the north side, and I lived on the north side. They realized that people are living in the home, they need something to do. What are they going to do all day? How is their mother going to be amused or what’s going on? We worked around that and it’s still running, and it’s very great. I’m still friends with some of the residents that were there, because the truth is, the elderly are exactly like you and I. Just because they’re 20 or 30 years older, it just means they’re a little slower.
JW: I’m getting slower. So, I acknowledge that.
FS: I do too. I really do too. So, they can’t run as fast. But we went out. We went to the opera, we went to symphonies, plays and shopping. I view them as my friends, not like some elderly, feeble person.
JW: Were there more women than men or not really?
FS: Of course. Because women outlived the men and the men that were young enough were killed in the war. Yes, mostly women.
JW: Can you tell us of maybe one particular experience you remember?
FS: I can only tell you that Phyllis is 80. She’s just a year older than I am. She came into the home because her husband was killed very early and she just couldn’t cope. She had four children in a big house and she just totally fell apart. When she came in, we naturally became friends because I felt she was the closest person to my age. And we became friends, and we still are. I have encouraged her to make collages.
This woman was brilliant. She has two PhDs, one in philosophy, one in Jewish studies. I mean, how do you dismiss this? You don’t. So, I’ve encouraged her to make art out of all of her intelligence and her experiences and her writing. She’s working on collages, and in fact, I’ll go there tomorrow and check out what she’s doing, even though I’m not working. It’s the friendship that counts. She’ll call me and we’ll talk. And I have other residents that call. They want to check in with me, and I don’t mind. Do you want to call me in the middle of night? I’ll talk to you.
JW: That’s amazing. And so, you said you stopped that after about 30 years, but you continued your own art.
FS: Oh, my own art I made, yes. I started my own art when I joined Artemisia. I have a very extensive resume.. My resume is seven pages, single [spaced]. I marked everything down because I had no place else to do it. My first exhibition was in ’81. I wish I could show you the slideshow. It was great. I made wall hangings out of canvas. That’s when I became very interested in shamanism.
It was three colors. These canvases, they were beautiful. Red, yellow and black. Red was for the blood that’s part of our lives, and life. The yellow is the dying, because all the food and forests and trees, turn yellow as they die. And black is the unknown. And someone said to me, “God, they would make gorgeous costumes,” and it sat in my head for a few years. My interest is the environment began at this point . I really believe that you have to have something to say. I’m not painting just to make decorations. I want a story out of what I’m doing. I did make costumes out of these wall hangings. Which became the clothing I wore making rituals.
I worked with a photographer and we would go wherever the earth felt like it needing healing. I would form a rituals and make a healing ceremony, with the photographer, Othello Anderson. The pictures became very important in the world. You probably will have to go to my website to see them all. I have a whole series of rituals and I also make paintings. My favorite paintings are the very large ones that are a deep red. Images of Mars came to me, that seemed to be the inspiration.
In the first painting of that series was a group of five, in a very unusual shaped form of plants, people, whatever you want to call it. Then there was a confrontation, then there was three. Then a 20-foot painting was one figure in this huge, vast land of nothing. And the last painting was nothing. And the story is repeated time and time again. There’s a tribe, there’s a confrontation, there’s a war, then there’s nothing. And that’s the story of that painting.
JW: Wow, that’s wonderful.
FS: Then I did the greenhouse paintings, and each painting was 8 x 15ft. In Chicago when we get these bad storms, I saw the environment kind of greenish in color. I mean, that’s just the way I see it. The painting expressed the environment keeps changing and changing, the atmosphere is a light green, a medium green, a darker green, then an almost black green. That’s the sequence of the paintings.
Maybe it was five years ago that my cousin, who was a physicist went to India. When he came back from India, he meditates, his guru told him about the story of 1000 moons. And the Gru was concerned whether he should celebrate his 80th birthday, or 1000 full moons that would be 80 years and ten months, and my cousin told me about that. I was just fascinated by the thought of seeing 1000 moons in your lifetime. So, I made him a gift. I painted 1000 moons, small watercolors, 50 on a sheet and presented him with this box of 1000 moons, which we eventually made into a book.
I said, “Okay, good, I did this.” And my body says, no, you’re not done. This is not satisfying; you need to do more. “Oh, okay,” I’m going to be 80 in another year. “Okay, I’m going to do that for myself.” The pandemic set in, and I gave up my studio because it was just too hard to leave the house and drive and get there. I just closed it down and I brought it all home. I live in a three-bedroom apartment. One of those old-fashioned railroad apartments where the living room is up front, and then there’s all these bedrooms. So, in one bedroom, which I’m sitting in, is my studio; you can see brushes behind me, and I paint here, and I made all of the paintings basically 10 x 20 inches and 12 x 24 inches.
JW: Oh, and there’s a full moon. I see it.
FS: Yes.
JW: Are there full moons, are they behind you also?
FS: Behind me on the wall is a picture; there’s 26 colors of full moons. So, I use that as a template for painting. There’s a pink moon, there’s a blue moon, they’re multicolored. I painted one thousand one-hundred and fifty, and I’m through with that. One bedroom is where I paint. One bedroom is where I splatter paint; way outside on the back porch, I splatter the stars. And in another bedroom, I wrap the paintings in Glycine paper. I have to wrap all these paintings to protect them as I box them up into plastic bins for they are going into storage.
I had to buy 1000 canvases. The whole thing was so exciting for me to do. Look at the problems I have to solve. I had to figure out what size I was going to make them, how I could get canvases that were already painted black; saved me a lot of time and energy. I ordered a thousand canvases at one time, so the color would be the same. Then I had to rent a storage unit. Every time I went to Costco, I’d buy ten more totes and bring them home, and then I wrapped the paintings and put them in the totes. Label them and put it in the storage unit. So now I have proposals out. I have ten proposals out, and so far, no one’s responded, so I’m a little nervous because I would love to experience being in a room to view what 80 years looks like.
JW: Well, it sounds wonderful. I have something we can explore. The shaman. You said you got interested in that.
FS: Yes.
JW: And what do you do with it?
FS: Shamanism, is more about, that things have life energies. I really believe that. Michael Warner, was a shaman, he came through Chicago to give a workshop at The Jungian institute. I went to hear him and take the workshop. James Hillman was another influence in Jungian ideas. It just made sense to me that there’s a spirit world out here, and that you go through what you’re doing using the spirit world to help you, and one way is through meditation and another way through making art.
I’m not an outdoor person, I have to tell you. I don’t like flies and bugs. I don’t like anything eating me. I like my food to be dead. I mean, it’s all of these simple things. It’s interesting, when I did the rituals outside in the forest, or I really pushed my own fears to the very edge, I’d be standing on the top of a mountain and wearing this 75-pound costume and dancing up there, and I always had an agreement with my photographer. We worked together for 29 years. If anything happened, that he keep shooting, because he wouldn’t be able to save me. If I fell over or something, just keep shooting. That it’s really the artwork that’s the important thing. So that added some edge to the photographs.
In the beginning, when I went out, I put on false eyelashes and did my hair. Fashion shots, like for Vanity Fair. And they came back and I said, “No, who is that person?” Like a tap on the shoulder. “No, Fern, that’s the wrong direction.” So, I had to hide myself. Once I covered my face, I was able to withdraw into myself and use my internal energies to transfer into the earth. Women are very important in what they do, and they carry a lot of responsibilities, and I wanted that to be apparent in all the work that I do.
JW: Just as you’re saying that, I think, to a large sense, to me anyway, the women’s movement taught me that it wasn’t just, I love false eyelashes and how I look to please men, but about inside, just like you’re saying, who am I? What can I contribute? I think that affected a lot of women, to realize they didn’t just have to be what was prescribed.
FS: Extremely. Even when I was working in the nursing home, I was a leader for the women. Just because you have some problems doesn’t mean you can stop doing what you want to do or believe in. I think that’s the strength that I get from the other women, and when I see other women doing it, I love it. Even when I was involved with the PTA, I was a strong woman leader. I wasn’t there just to make tea and make nice. They were closing schools; I would call meetings together. I understood the system so simply. Every room had two room mothers. All you have to do is make one phone call. The vice president calls the room mothers, the room mothers call all the parents. When I had meetings, when I called the parents, there were hundreds of people that showed up because we had a system already in place.
And that’s what I wanted Artemisia to be for other women, to be a system that was in place. We had mentoring programs. We brought in young artists to come and work with us and learn how to write the grants and how to stretch paintings and how to do things. We taught, and I think that’s really important. I think that women have this inbound ability to cooperate and work with each other. There are some that don’t. I mean, there’s always a few that are difficult, but on the whole, I mean, I look at you and I say, “Judy, I know I could call you if I have a problem.”
JW: Oh, I’d love it. I’d love to stay in touch.
FS: Exactly. I mean, that’s how I feel about people and things, that we can do this.
JW: We can do it. That’s fabulous. Wonderful. Well, do you have anything else to add?
FS: No, I’m just enjoying talking to you.
JW: This is super. It’s just so great. I’m pretty new to Veteran Feminists of America, and I didn’t realize that you were one of the folks that got that award, so, makes it even more special.
FS: Oh, yes. I got medals and a certificate hanging on the wall.
JW: Right. I say it’s not military, it’s veterans from a different fight.