35: Finding Youtopia: ArtCurious' Jennifer Dasal on "The Club"

Dear Readers,

This month we chat with Jennifer Dasal, who you may know from the excellent ArtCurious podcast, about her new book:

The Club: Where American Women Artists Found Refuge in Belle Époque Paris about a one-of-a-kind artist space that has been overlooked in history.

We’re going to get into the details and dive into her research process and discuss how The Club applies to ALL of us artists, art historians, and art lookers in 2025.

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‘The Club’ takes us back in time to 19th century Paris . . . ‘back’ because we were just there in our recent Mary Cassatt episode .

When we left off in 1893, Mary had just painted that MASSIVE, potentially Degas-inspired spite mural “Modern Woman” in which she reimagined an Eve-led Eden.

Detail, middle panel from mural “Modern Woman”: “Young Women Plucking the Fruits of Knowledge or Science”, 1893.

In the mural, Eves are wearing loose, un-corseted clothing and are free to pursue and pass down knowledge, art, and science from generation to generation: a utopic alternative to the world Mary had lived in as a young American expat in Paris 20 something years prior to this mural.

But Mary was onto something: it’s almost the 20th century, women were fighting for equality, the Victorian era will soon end to a close.

Her painted vision of a potential future was already coming true as the next generation of women artists slowly gaining freedoms she had to fight for (like women finally being allowed to attend the Ecole des Beaux Arts in 1897).

And soon, a real life version of Mary’s utopic mural would come to fruition:

A place where hundreds of American women artists - or Eves - far from home and full of artistic ambition, would find themselves at The American Girls Club of Paris or ‘The Club’ to be met with housing, tea time, gardens, libraries, and most importantly, a studio and exhibition space.

“The American Girls Club” in 1913, Paris.

A small utopia where women artists were given space and opportunity to create impressive work away from the US where - at the time - it was incredibly difficult to make a career of art as a woman.

If you are wondering, Dear Readers, why heck are we roping in all this talk about utopias . . . well ‘The Club’ REALLY struck a chord with us in how it was so relatable to what us artists, art lookers, and historians face today.

But some of the best art and opportunities came as a result of struggle or restrictions.

And as Surrealist Dorothea Tanning said:

“Art has always been the raft onto which we climb to save our sanity.”

This is very much in line with Kristen Ghodsee’s book ‘Everyday Utopia’ where she chronicled the history and continued existence of these mini-utopias created over the centuries . . . along the lines of Pythagoras’ commune or those living spaces for women in China that keep popping up in the news.

This REALLY changed our perspective on Utopianism which sometimes can seem, at worst as ripe for cult-like abuse or at best a bandaid to broader societal issues.

But to survive the current landscape of 2025 (and beyond), we’re going to need to be imaginative and strive for supportive structures where we all can carve out our own lil slice of utopia.

But back to the ‘The Club’ - we may never know all of the artists who took up residence there but Jennifer Dasal gives us a collection of those artists whose experiences in that little Parisian Utopia took the mantle from Mary Cassatt’s generation and continued to push society forward towards equality:

There was Florence Lundberg - a San Franciscan on a budget

who had the brilliant idea to paint a mural in a local cafe in exchange for food. This would go on to propel her career in illustration, graphic design, and mural work filled with fluid, whimsical marks, and rich art nouveau inspired color:

Anne Goldthwaite - a Confederate captain’s daughter who pushed back against her papa’s heinous beliefs

threw herself into painting, printmaking and civil rights activism, eventually teaching a young Stanley Kubrick at the Arts Student League in NYC on the merits of her mark making which seem to perpetually dance on the surface.

Queer rebel Suffragette sculptor Alice Morgan Wright -

who at a young age being barred from life drawing classes (because women were forbidden to be in the presence of gweenies) instead went to boxing matches to study the human form and ended up making flowing Futurist / Cubist sculptures, giving old Boccioni a run for his money.

But The Club had it’s dark side . . .

The insanely talented Meta Veaux Warrick Fuller

faced a similar struggle as fellow African-American sculptor Augusta Savage when she was denied a space at the American Girls’ Club once the head of the house realized she was black.

This didn’t slow her down as she went on to become one of the most well known sculptors in Paris, even studying under THE Rodin, earning her the title of “Delicate Sculptor of Horrors” for her macabre subjects.

This is all to say the stories in “The Club” hit hard today.

Art can be escapist, it can be a vision of a brighter future and like Mary Cassatt’s “Modern Woman” mural - art can also be prescriptive.

We don’t have the same struggles these artists faced today but we also don’t have the same opportunities.

But just because we don’t have an atlas and a step-by-step 100% guaranteed success plan doesn’t mean we can’t think on our feet and carve out opportunities.

The solution to the kind of ails we’re all feeling today in 2025 require the same thing that lead us to make art - or to appreciate art - in the first place:

Creative thinking!

Art can be this immensely personal experience that can isolate artists . . .because it requires a lot of hours alone with yourself.

So we have to ask ourselves, how can we: a) build a raft for ourselves but also b) offer rafts to each other?

Be it in a physical space like an artist collective…

or an off-shore island of artists rafts we’ve all kind of tied together . . kind of like ancient Mexican chinampas.

You can pick up “The Club” from your local bookseller, or if you don’t have the funds, you can ask your local library to add it to their collection.

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If you watched/listened, let us know your thoughts!

We will be back VERY SOON with episodes - yes plural - on Rosa Rolanda and Miguel Covarrubias: THE Mexican artist power couple that predate Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.

THANK YOU for reading and for all of your support - we couldn’t do it w/o you all!!

Love from the bottom of our little hearts♡♡,

Russell and Stephanie

P.S. If you missed last month’s episode on the new graphic art historial novel The Woman with Fifty Faces: Maria Lani & the Greatest Art Heist That Never Was Check it out as well!