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I watch artist Harriet Bart gaze at a piece of textile art she created more than 40 years ago, hanging in a new exhibition in a new-ish gallery in the historic Warehouse District building that also houses Bart’s studio. But Bart—and that particular artwork—aren’t new to the building at all.
“Oh, it’s a good story,” she says, gesturing to the black-and-white square, full of small tufts of silky fabric meticulously arranged, printed with words I can’t quite make out. “Should I tell it?”
I cough out a laugh. As we bask in the warm sun streaming through the Kickernick Building’s giant historic windows, surrounded by the work of some of Minnesota’s most seminal women artists, there’s nothing I want more than to hear every detail of every piece, and try not to sound too eager as I tell her so.
“I moved into a studio here, on the fourth floor facing Fifth, around 1976,” Bart says. “And the person who left that studio before me had been manufacturing down jackets. When I walked into the studio, there were washable-fabric labels all over the floor. I collected them all, and in 1985, I made them into this. That very formal-looking piece has the labels upside-down and backwards.” She says it reminds her of Fort Snelling, or Arlington National Cemetery, with its somber grid lines and dark swath of paint underneath.
Later, after Bart and I say goodbye, after she floors me with a tour of her current mini-museum of a studio, two levels below the one where she first made her career as an artist; after she recounts stories of her days as a founding member of WARM (originally Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota); after she shows me more bits of the exhibition at Kickernick she recently helped pull together that celebrates 50 years of what was once the largest women’s art collective in the country; I step closer to Concrete Poem and squint. There they are, smudged and faded but legible after being swept off the floor five decades ago: rows and columns of words instructing the wearer how to handle a garment with care, for a garment that never actually materialized, lined up like headstones. Poetic, indeed.
But Bart wasn’t sitting with me in the middle of the gallery to send me into an existential spiral. She, along with Kickernick Gallery curator Christy Frank, was there to teach me all about WARM’s impressive history and the exhibition celebrating the artists’ work, which hangs in the gallery until mid-June.
For the uninitiated, WARM was a women’s arts organization founded in 1976, when artists Lynn Lockie Warkov and Susan Fiene started meeting up to share resources and create a 35mm slide registry of other women artists as they attempted to get their work into galleries, shows, and exhibitions—relatively brutal work for women in the mid-’70s. At that time, there was only one or two solo shows each year by women artists in museums like Mia and the Walker; about a quarter of artists or fewer represented in group shows were women.
With a promise and hope of mentorship, visibility, and activism and calls for equity in the arts, 37 women officially founded WARM with a few stipulations: All members would serve as a governing body; membership was limited to 40 women at a time; and members would pay dues, attend monthly meetings, and spend 300 hours a year on the organization and its gallery, which opened in the Wyman Building that same year. “The Wyman was really the arts mecca here, along with the New French, through the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s,” Frank says. “There were over 20 galleries in that building then,” Bart adds.
Archivist Heather Carroll, who’s working on an oral history (and, eventually, a book) about WARM, agrees that the Twin Cities was a vibrant, open, ever-changing place for art and social change. “We had just come off the initiation of the American Indian Movement, the Pride movement was in full swing, the feminist movement and how that was related to art was bolstering,” she says. “WARM was a big part of that.” (PS: If you want to hear more about it, check out Carroll’s lecture about WARM on May 28.)
And while the gallery closed in 1991, citing reasons like rising rent in the Wyman and the fact that WARM members were able to show their work in different places by then, the collective kept on until 2021. Notable artists and participants included Elizabeth Erickson and Patricia Olson (major proponents of WARM), Hazel Belvo, Judith Roode, Vesna Kittelson, and Jantje Visscher. And, of course, textile and conceptual artist Harriet Bart.
“It had never occurred to me, as a young woman, that I could be an artist,” Bart says. “I didn’t have any role models.”
In the mid-’70s, Bart was at home with three kids, creating art in stolen moments at her dining room table. Originally from San Francisco, she had gone back to school at the U of M to study contemporary sculptural tapestry, pursuing a lifelong love of art, but had no way to show or sell her pieces on a large scale, beyond a piece here and there in group shows. But then, a flier for WARM’s just-opened gallery caught her eye. “Elizabeth Erickson was there, and she was a very wonderful, intense person,” Bart says. “She looked right at me and said, ‘You do know this is a feminist gallery, right?’”
Bart was immediately taken with her, and fell in love with the space. Luckily, WARM was still looking for its founding crop of members.
“For me, it was graduate school,” she says. “I wasn’t a beginner, but I was young and didn’t have much of a resume. It gave me a network. It was the most significant group I have ever worked with.”
Beyond direct skills for her craft (through WARM, she expanded from textiles into painting, sculpture, and, her biggest art love, installation), she learned how to be a professional in the art world: how to market herself, how an exhibition should look, how to understand what she calls the “cultural responsibility” of being an artist.
Her first solo exhibition was through WARM, before she went on to show her work in countless solo and group shows around the Cities, the country, and, eventually, the world. In the last 50 years, she’s received fellowships and residencies from the Bush Foundation, McKnight Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and more; she was a founding member of the Traffic Zone in Minneapolis; she’s won three Minnesota Book Awards for her fine-press and mixed-media books. And she credits a lot of that success to her time with WARM, which she stayed with until 1987.
But she never lost touch with many of the women she collaborated with, mentored, and learned from in her decade with WARM—part of the reason this current exhibition came to be in the first place. “We are the steering committee that drives Christy nuts,” Bart says proudly, smiling at gallery curator Christy Frank.
After realizing 2026 marked WARM’s 50th anniversary, Bart floated the idea for an exhibition by some of her still-local WARM friends. “Since I’m back in the building, it was on my mind,” she says. “It took on a life from there; I can hardly say.” The exhibition’s opening party, on April 12, hosted some 1,200 people—not far off from the WARM Gallery’s 1,500-person opening reception, just down the street, almost exactly 50 years earlier.
Every one of the 90 artists who were part of WARM during its gallery years was invited to submit work for the exhibition, and 73 agreed or had family members agree to submit on their behalf. For the next month, visitors can see one of Susan Bacik’s found-object contemporary pieces, a massive acrylic by Hazel Belvo, a striking painting by Elizabeth Erickson, Vicki Lee Johnston’s steel-and-sheep-hair sculpture, Judith Roode’s charcoal, the aforementioned textile by Harriet Bart, and many more, as expansive and diverse and incredible as WARM’s member base. (Additionally, the exhibition’s catalogue, pulled together primarily by WARM artist and professor Patricia Olson, is both a work of art and historical document in itself; buy one at Kickernick for $20 and you’ll learn the impact of each and every artist represented.)
“It was the most wonderful community,” Bart says, looking around at her friends’ and colleagues’ work. “It wasn’t easy, because it asked a lot. Everyone was focused, professional, and that was the expectation everyone had. And it was extraordinary. I don’t know how we would have moved forward without it.”
Visit Legacy: The Women of WARM Gallery at the Kickernick Gallery now–June 13, and listen to archivist Heather Carroll’s talk, Standing Ground: The Dynamic Creation of a Women’s Art Collective, May 28 at 7 p.m., 430 1st Ave. N., Mpls., kickernickgallery.com
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