CWC Docs: Acting Like Women

Cheri Gaulke is a pioneer in the feminist art movement in Los Angeles and an award-winning filmmaker, whose films have screened in national and international film festivals. Gaulke’s work has been presented at the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Museum of Contemporary Art (LA), in a Smithsonian-touring exhibition, and in settings all over the world including buses, churches, and prehistoric temples. Known for her solo performance art, she also co-founded the collaborative performance groups Feminist Art Workers and Sisters Of Survival, which were featured in a Getty-sponsored exhibition in 2011. Gaulke has received artist fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, City of Los Angeles, California Community Foundation, and California Humanities.

Her recent short films include Gloria’s Call, about women and surrealism (40 film festivals; Best Documentary, Ann Arbor Film Festival; 2022 Venice Biennale); Miss Alma Thomas: A Life in Color, about an under-recognized African-American artist (for a museum retrospective); Inside the Beauty Bubble, about a gay hair salon owner (50 festivals; Audience Awards at San Luis Obispo Film Festival and Dances with Films); and Old Girl in a Tutu: Susan Rennie Disrupts Art History, about a queer butch elder artist (40+ festivals). In addition to her distinguished art and film career, Gaulke is also an award-winning educator, now retired after having taught at Harvard-Westlake school for thirty-one years. During her tenure, she co-founded a California youth film festival; created The Righteous Conversations Project, in which teens and Holocaust survivors make films that have screened at the Cannes Film Festival; and traveled with students to countries recovering from conflict to make professional documentaries.

photo credit: Annie Sprinkle

Anne Gauldin is a feminist artist, graphic designer, and business entrepreneur. She earned an M.A. through the Feminist Studio Workshop at the Los Angeles Woman’s Building, where she studied prehistoric archaeological sites in Western Europe alongside contemporary feminist art and education. Gauldin served as the Slide Librarian at the Woman’s Building, overseeing the Center for Feminist Art Historical Studies collection created by Arlene Raven and Ruth Iskin. She was also a founding member of The Waitresses and Sisters Of Survival performance art collectives. The archives of these collectives can be found at the Getty Research Institute, which has been restoring a costume Gauldin created in 1977 for The Waitresses’ “Ready to Order?” performance. Inspired by the ancient sculptures of Diana of Ephesus, Gauldin cast latex replicas of the breasts of members of The Waitresses and sewed them onto the costume. Getty Research Institute conservators affectionately refer to it as the “breast dress.” Gauldin ran her own graphic design company for many years and more recently collaborated with Cheri Gaulke as a producer and writer of the 2018 documentary Gloria’s Call. Her work has been exhibited and performed nationally and internationally.

photo credit: Jennifer Stuart

Jenni Sorkin writes on the intersections between gender, material culture, and contemporary art. She is the author of Art in California (2021), written for Thames & Hudson’s acclaimed World of Art series. Her first book, Live Form: Women, Ceramics and Community (University of Chicago Press, 2016), examined the confluence of gender, artistic labor, and the history of post-war ceramics. She has published widely as an art critic, and her writing has appeared in Artforum, Art Journal, Art Monthly, East of Borneo, NU: The Nordic Art Review, Frieze, The Journal of Modern Craft, Modern Painters and Third Text. She is the recipient of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Center for Craft, the Smithsonian and the Getty Research Institute, and won the Arts Writers Grant from the Warhol Foundation in 2025 for a forthcoming book on textiles, gender, and modernism.