Irene Peslikis (October 7, 1943 – November 28, 2002) was an Americanfeminist artist, activist, and educator. She was one of the early founders and organizers in the women's art movement, especially on the east coast.[1]
Irene Peslikis spent her life inNew York City. She was born into a Greek working-class family inQueens.[2]: 46 She began her studies in art at the Pratt Institute after completing high school in 1962, before breaking away in 1963 to help foundThe New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture.[1] She graduated fromQueens College in New York in 1973 and earned an MFA from the City College of New York in 1983.[3]
Peslikis organized the first show of Second Wave women artists.[1] She was a founder of theNew York Feminist Art Institute, which ran a full-time radical feminist art education program for women for years.[4] With another feminist artist,Patricia Mainardi,Marjorie Kramer and Lucia Vernarelli, Peslikis founded the journalWomen & Art, which helped to make the artistAlice Neel famous.[1][3]
She was a founder of theNoHo Gallery inManhattan, one of the first cooperative feminist art galleries. Her political cartoons, widely circulated in the earlyWomen's Liberation Movement years & published in feminist journals and in collections of the feminist movement likeDear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women’s Liberation Movement. Peslikis was one of the earliest members ofRedstockings, the leading Feminist women’s theoretical and consciousness- raising group in New York City as well as a member of the earlier groupNew York Radical Women and was a key organizer and participant of the Redstocking abortion speak-out at Washington Square Methodist Church in 1969.[5] She was also active in the Greek community.
Peslikis taught courses on painting, drawing, visual arts orientation, women and art studio workshop, and contemporary perspectives on art at a number of post-secondary institutions including theCity College of New York, theCollege of Staten Island, theCollege of New Rochelle and Ramapo College.[3]
Peslikis wrote "Resistances to Consciousness" (printed in Notes from the Second Year), an important paper for understandingconsciousness raising and women's resistance to it.[6][2]: 200 She also contributed to theArchives of American Art "Art World in Turmoil"oral history project withPatricia Mainardi.[7] She published pieces on art and art history and criticism in Rozinanta, Demokratia and Eleftheri-Patrida.[1]
