Nine women showed one painting apiece in a show called IX Painters at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus in February. The setup was somewhat inept, not because of a cramped and inaccessible space as much as the promotional attitude. An accompanying catalogue, in tabloid form, announces “IX PAINTERS — 9 Styles” (styles come cheap?) and quips coyly, “Coincidentally, all the painters are women.” The two most professional efforts were Alice Baber’s Wind-Divided Mist the Darker (1972) — something like a color-field work seen though a kaleidoscope and Loretta Dunkelman’s Sky Series: Summer of ’71, a big surface of smooth gray horizontal stripes, with a raised but perfectly even lip between each pair of adjacent bands. The show was, naturally, tiny in comparison with the one at the Cultural Center, but perhaps because I still had Joyce Kozloff and Pat Adams, among others, in mind from“Women Choose Women” nothing here seemed really to measure up.

––Joseph Masheck