Ursula: Issue 11

This issue of Ursula is devoted to its namesake, Ursula Hauser, one of the great art patrons and collectors of her generation, who turned eighty-five this year. Of her many decades in the art world, she once said, with considerable self deprecation: “I’m not a professional … but I think I don’t have a bad eye for artists.” Her eye, in fact, has been prophetic, not least because she began to befriend, and collect the work of, visionary women artists at a time when the art world was just beginning to undergo a transformation (still very much a work in progress) from its centuries-long default of male domination. 

When we launched this magazine in 2018, I remember a long list of potential names for it sitting on my desk. Despite all the thinking that went into compiling the possibilities, they were depressingly generic (Manifest had somehow risen near the top of the list, as if we were launching a commercial sea-freight journal.) Then the idea of naming it for the matriarch of the gallery went off like a light bulb, for several reasons: It personalized the magazine, in meaningful and esoteric ways; it denoted strength—the name is derived from the Latin for “she-bear”; and it possessed not only an elegant sound but also a striking graphic presence on the cover, with the parallel uprights of the U’s and the L playing off the curves of the R, S and A.

This issue is also a testament to the more open and adventurous art world that Ursula Hauser has helped create. Inside are pieces by and about the work of Amy Sherald, Phyllida Barlow, Roni Horn, Aki Sasamoto, Rei Kawakubo, Uman and Zoe Leonard. In 2018, as part of her retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Leonard created a work called Homage on the walls of the museum’s staff offices, embellishing them with excerpts from art historian Linda Nochlin’s landmark 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (The answer, Nochlin wrote, “lies not in the nature of individual genius or the lack of it, but in the nature of given social institutions and what they forbid or encourage in various classes or groups of individuals.”)

More than half a century after Nochlin’s essay, the art world is changing but not nearly as quickly or fundamentally as some believe. “There is still a huge gender gap,” as Leonard has stressed in interviews. “Perhaps even more exhausting than all that is the way that our authority—in regard to our own work—is constantly called into question. Women who speak up, who have clear and definitive ideas about how one’s work should be displayed, described, produced, etc. are often pegged as difficult … Of course there are the exceptions, but what’s that they say about exceptions proving the rule?” 

—Randy Kennedy