Introduction:

Borrowing from Virginia Woolf's1926 essay,"A Room of Ones Own", give a woman a yearly income and a room of her own and you will have a poet. Ellen Wilt set up a means to make the everyday woman an exhibitor of a world of their own in a standard issued cardboard box ( 14 inches square and 7 inches deep). The only criteria to participate in the show A ROOM OF YOUR OWN was to be a woman. The guidelines were passed around by copied flyers and word of mouth. The response was great and ended with 220 Rooms. The participants are from all parts of Michigan and out of state. The variety of interpretations is astonishing and makes for a lively exhibit. To many, working on their rooms was a revelation - in some cases therapy, with subjects ranging from philosophical to biographical... humorous to profound.

Ann Arbor News review article, Sunday, September 22, 2002:

Entertainment News -- Solo space is place in the heart
Tableaus by 198 female artists back Virginia Woolf's affirmation of 'a woman's need for independence and her own creative space'

BY JOHN CARLOS CANTU
News Special Writer

The women participating in the Michigan Guild Gallery's "A Room of Your Own" agree on one fundamental principle: A room is indeed not only a good thing to own - it's also an equally good thing to share.

Ann Arbor's Ellen Wilt and 197 of her friends - from points north, south, east, and west; both in and out of state, as well as in and out of town - have contributed 7" by 14" by 14" mixed-media tableaus arranged and hung in six salon-style groups ringing the gallery.
As Wilt says in her gallery statement, the inspiration for the group installation comes from author Virginia Woolf's 1926 "A Room of One's Own," in which Woolf champions "a woman's need for independence and her own creative space."
Wilt's roll call is far too extensive to be listed, and any short list of local talents - 114 from Ann Arbor alone -would undercut the project's camaraderie. So let's note that seemingly every practicing female artist in Tree Town has joined up - and if this observation is inflated, it's probably only slightly so.
The exhibit - and an accompanying recording that expresses in sound what the contributors illustrate - is a stunning success. The Michigan Guild Gallery is as packed as it is ever likely to be. Its fruitful imagination is nothing less than intoxicating.
Every genre and style of art is on display. As Wilt aptly notes in her statement, the 198 rooms are revelations "with subjects ranging from philosophical to biographical from humorous to profound." Abstraction is set beside expression. Surreal fantasies are contrasted against visual diaries. The sole measure of the display is a fascinating glimpse of the eternal feminine in all its manifestations.
My favorite artwork in the exhibit is Merta Trumble's "... in a plain white room, with a really good book." Ann Aborite Trumble's fully realized tableau of a faultless bedroom with a window overlooking a field at night manages in its miniature form to comment on desire through calm meditation.
In this instance, first appearances are deceiving because Trumble's "white room" - like Woolf's "really good book" - is anything but plain.
This marvelous little mixed-media is, rather, an artfully poignant reminder of how utterly crucial it is to have a private space to call one's own.

Go to actural review page

October "Observer" review: A Room of One's Own - Personal space

By Laura Bartlett

"____ Inspired by A Room of Ones Own, Virginia Woolf's1926 tract about obstacles faced by women artists, the exhibit shows 198 vivid abstract and representational boxed scenes crammed with visual puns, self-portraits, and otherworldly weirdscapes.
As a visitor pulls knobs on local musician Annie Gallup's black-velvet-coated box to part curtains and animate a female figure within, or peeks into Sally Silvennoinen's lace-curtained box provocatively titled Peep Show, a twenty-minute statements by the artists plays in the background. 'The hands of women are covered.' says Sheri Lynn. 'They have things to do - social decorum, conventions - but in my box, you throw all that away and you play.' Her box shows two white gloved hands in the upper left and lower right corners. In between is a playful whirl of wire decorated with multicolored jacks.
Ellen Moucoulis describes being kicked out of an exhibition because her paintings were controversial. Her ideal room would be 'a place where I can work and keep people out,' she says,'where I can keep my paintings safe from the world and the world safe from my paintings.' Her boxes shows a ragged, wiry chicken, resembling an angry dragon, leaping over a wire fence against a background of storm sky.
Marge Pacer's voice comes on, describing her box as a portrait of the art-deprived hiatus that followed her childhood love of drawing. 'I never had the courage to draw' as an adult, she says, until age forty-seven. Her joyful abstract box shows three pillars, each supporting a paper cut rose. Script like twirls and spirals, drawn when the paint in the pale painted in the background was still wet, floating above a floor of red paper tiles. They're daubed with what look like lipstick kisses in lime green, burgundy, and robin's-egg blue.
Pam Campau speaks painfully of infertility, which gave her time for creativity but which also created loneliness. Her box shows a cozy nest set against an empty blue sky. Instead of eggs, a handful of used pastel crayons lines the nest.
I parted the curtains of Peep Show to see cheerful spray-painted marshmallow chicks, or 'peeps,' perched insouciantly here and there in a cozy blue room with a fireplace. radiating from all of the boxes, on display though October 4".