Feminist Love Letters
Joseph Montgomery
Valentine's Day serves as a celebration of love for close ones and significant others. Everyone has their own distinct styles and methods of expressing their love for friends, relatives or lifelong partners, whether it involves passing out chocolates or going out on an immaculate date.
For this year’s Valentine’s Day, Chaffey’s Rancho Cucamonga campus held a special workshop titled “Feminist Love Letters” at the Center for the Arts. As the event’s title implies, guests were given the opportunity to write love letters to their favorite feminists.
According to the event’s webpage on the official Chaffey website, “Collaborators are invited to profess their love, send words of support and encouragement, or unleash their feminist fury in a letter to a contemporary or historic feminist.”
The workshop was hosted by Los Angeles-based artist Cindy Rehm; Rebecca Trawick, director and chief curator of the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art; and Chaffey’s very own Evolve Club, a club established back in November 2022 intended “to rekindle the feminist movement at Chaffey College.”
“Throughout Evolve's short existence on campus its members have worked tirelessly towards creating a space where women can comfortably reclaim power in their existence, and where every person who joins our cause feels like they matter,” the club explains its mission statement on the official Evolve website. “We commit to our goal of providing the Chaffey student body with great things to look forward to every semester and hope you will continue supporting us for many years to come.”
From 3 P.M. to 5 P.M., visitors were invited to celebrate Valentine’s Day by crafting love letters to their favorite feminists, from historical figures and pop culture icons to close friends and loved ones. The event provided a variety of materials and tools like greeting cards, postcards, glue, scissors, stickers and googly eyes for attendees to utilize while making their love letters. Not only that, but attendees were each allowed to craft more than one love letter to dedicate to any feminist role model they desired.
Snacks and refreshments were also provided for visitors as they made their love letters.
Once guests completed their love letters, they were allowed to share their works with Rehm, who took photos of their love letters to upload onto a Tumblr archive for everyone to experience. All the attendees had to do was fill in their names, their emails, and the recipients of the love letters on a sign-up sheet.
“Feminist Love Letters” is a project initiated by Rehm, alongside writer and artist Sara Ellen Fowler, on Valentine’s Day in 2016. According to an article from the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the project took influence from a 1971 letter written by visual artist Nancy Spero that was sent to writer and art critic Lucy Lippard. That letter, in particular, read the following: “The enemies of women’s liberation in the arts will be crushed. Love, Nancy.”
This brought forth a collaborative project in which individuals can express their love and gratitude to those who have left an impact in the field of feminism. The “Feminist Love Letters” webpage on Rehm's official website instructs those who wish to write their own love letters for their favorite feminists to “send a 300dpi jpeg to 1971loveletter@gmail.com. All future contributions will be posted on our blog.”
The webpage also features a link to the “Feminist Love Letters” Tumblr archive, which features various submissions for the project. Submissions can also be viewed on the "Feminist Love Letters" account featured on Instagram.