RIDGEFIELD, CONN.- The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is bringing together six of Mary Beth Edelson’s ground-breaking story gathering boxes in a participatory exhibition that invites visitor contributions. The project, which was initiated in 1972, is still ongoing and has encapsulated an evolving feminist art legacy and evidenced the very first vestiges of what is familiarly known today as “social practice.”

Mary Beth Edelson: Six Story Gathering Boxes (1971–2014) will remain on view until April 5, 2015. These works, taken as a whole, engage audience interconnectivity to establish an exhibition hinged upon “interaction” in order to explore the diverse ways in which we relate to collaborative art and its impact on the world beyond the museum.

Edelson’s newest box to date, Family Immigration Stories, was made especially for The Aldrich. Curator Amy Smith-Stewart explains, “This box asks us to contemplate one of the most contested topics of our post-9/11 times. As with all of the prior story boxes, Edelson utilizes an inclusive ritual of inquiry as her chosen method. Through the lens of four prompts, we are asked to acknowledge this highly politicized issue vis-à-vis our own family genealogy. Edelson hopes to mobilize us to recognize who we are, where we have been, and ultimately how our thinking engages in shaping others.”

Artist and activist Mary Beth Edelson is a pioneer of the Feminist art movement, instrumental in the organization of the first conference for Women in the Visual Arts in 1972, and an active contributor to WAC, the Women’s Action Coalition, from 1991–95. She initiates two types of boxes: in one, wooden tablets created with diverse media encompass texts and imagery on specific themes; in the other, questions that prompt a response are posed on sets of paper tablets. Visitors are invited to participate by writing their stories, adding to time capsules reflecting more than four decades of changing social history. The story box Great Mother (1973), which focuses on goddess figures and was included forty years ago in The Aldrich presentation Contemporary Reflections (1973–74), returned to the Museum for the exhibition.

Mary Beth Edelson was born in 1933 in East Chicago, Indiana, and has lived and worked in New York City for the past forty years. She received her BA from DePauw University, IN, her MA from New York University, and her Doctor of Fine Arts from DePauw. Her artwork is widely exhibited and published in the US and abroad, in the literature of fields as diverse as psychology, women’s studies, feminist theory, photography, theology, and art, and has been collected by major museums. including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; The Walker Art Center, MN; and The Malmo Konstmuseum, Sweden. Recent exhibitions include WACK!: Art of the Feminist Revolution, MoCA, Los Angeles, MoMA PS1, New York, and the Vancouver Museum, Canada; L’Heure Des Sorcières, Le Quartier Centre d’Art Contemporain de Quimper, France; Me. Myself. Naked., Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, Bremen, Germany; Collaborative: 1971–1993, Accola Griefen Gallery, New York; 22 Others : 1973, Suzanne Geiss Co., New York; NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash, and No Star, New Museum, New York; Female Power: Matriarchy, Spirituality, & Utopia, Museum Arnhem, Netherlands; and Woman: The Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s, BOZAR, Brussels, Belgium. A survey of Edelson’s work toured seven exhibition sites in the US from 2000 to 2002. She is a lecturer, and has written and designed four books, the most recent being The Art of Mary Beth Edelson, which surveys thirty years of her art interlaced with activism, essays, and conversations with other artists.

In addition to international recognition for her artwork, she has been involved with numerous enterprises as a feminist pioneer, including the first Conference for Women in the Visual Arts (CWVA) held at The Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC, in 1972 and The Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC, 1973. She was a founding member of Heresies Magazine, a feminist publication based out of NYC, in 1977. One of the early members of AIR Gallery in New York, 1975–82, she was actively engaged in WAC (Women’s Action Coalition) from 1991–95. She created the community-based project Combat Zone: Campaign Headquarters Against Domestic Violence, which was sponsored by Creative Time in 1994. Edelson has received grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The Thanks Be to Grandmother Winifred Foundation, and The Richard Florsheim Art Fund.