In 1939, as part of the WPA's Federal Art Program, artist, psychologist, and color theorist Hilaire Hiler created sweeping murals in San Francisco's Aquatic Park Building (now the site of the Maritime Museum). In the circular room that held the "ladies' lounge," he painted a colorwheel of his own, 120-hued design and other schema related to his color philosophy. Hiler's aim was no less than a place to look upon light and color with the awe one might reserve for space—not a planetarium, but a "prismatarium," which he believed would be uniquely soothing to women. Today, at Et Al gallery Becca Albee's installation "Prismataria" extends Hiler's project as a way to revisit and reflect upon a collection of materials that shaped her early feminist conscience. A critical ladies' lounge.

Albee completes Hiler's unrealized goal of installing a rotating, circular light fixture with multicolor panels in the center of the ceiling and pays homage to his belief that gray primes the eyes for color by painting the gallery's walls chromatic gray stripes. Some of her pieces, hung above and below the middle stripe, are her own assemblages of photographic gels and reprints from undergraduate readings from an undergraduate course called "Women’s Health and Healing" that she took at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington in 1993. She includes the "Acknowledgements" and "Dedication" sections of The Black Women's Health Book and A New View of A Woman's Body, respectively. Other pieces relate to cultural ephemera from the late 80s and early 90s: framed fabric swatches resembling a colorwheel are from "Color Me Beautiful" (apparently bought on eBay), a color-system intended to help women pick the seasonal shades that best suit their skin tone. A photograph of glass perfume bottles filled with two, complementary shades of oil struck me as a formally beautiful composition of a luxurious personal accessory. Even better, they're Aura Soma oils, a 1980s New Age "holistic soul therapy" that, per its stuck-in-time website, integrates "visual and non-visual vibrations of colour, crystals and natural aromas" that, when combined with light, "harmonise body, mind and soul of humanity."

On one side of the gallery, a framed photograph with the words "Radical Feminist Therapy" in dark blue loopy cursive against a light green background seems heavy-handed in a show of otherwise abstract work. The image is a blown-up cover image from a psychiatric textbook used in the "Women's Health" course. First published in 1992, the design looks as though it was meant to appeal to women, its cool colors perhaps softening its content on violence against women. Hiler had posited that humans are better able to perceive more gradations between blue and green than any other color spectrum. What at first seemed like an odd fit unites the elements in the show. As the light whirred in the background, taking the blue-green cover from deep aquamarine to startling magenta, I thought about the title again. It seemed overstated, a vestige of 90s identity politics. Then again, maybe this is what I need right now.

In the time since Albee first showed "Prismataria" at 356 Mission Rd. gallery in Los Angeles in 2015, her constellation of feminist and feminine artifacts has accrued a new sense of urgency. Weeks before the election, Zoe Leonard's 1992 poem "I want a president," was resurrected as a 20' by 30' public artwork in downtown Manhattan. "I want a dyke for president," it begins. "I want a person with aids for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn't have a choice about getting leukemia." Leonard is an artist often associated with the third wave feminism that Albee references in her show, and came up in—while at Evergreen, she also played in the riot grrrl band Excuse 17. Flash forward to our current political nightmare and both Albee's retrospective of texts and Leonard's poem are relevant as ever. Mothers and children are currently being separated at border crossings, citizens are being detained, and the EPA's funding is about to be slashed. Many will likely die as a result of not having access to life-saving medical care.

The Federal Art Program that commissioned Hiler's murals in the 30s was a relief measure to employ artists, and it seems somehow fitting that Albee's modern tribute to his community space takes place underground, in a gallery located in the basement of a Chinatown drycleaner. Eileen Myles, writing on Nicole Eisenman, another artist who gained prominence in the early 90s, said: "... no one really wants to talk about what's done to women, in our families, at our jobs, in a state of war, in the art world, in the bedroom and everywhere else. By now the words just feel redundant in the face of all that we know, but then the knowing starts to feel redundant too."¹

It's difficult, even embarrassing to confront our own vulnerability and know what to do about it. But in this moment of stress and news fatigue, seeing how the gravity of others' circumstances intersects our own anxieties in the very least helps us understand that we're living through this seemingly endless, oncoming-wreckage together—a through-line from one person's experience to your own. Myles continues, "Maybe it's perfectly reasonable to corral a space within that same vast American silence and in it make a vivid proposal of what anyone would do, in response if they could." In corralling her own space, Albee's installation serves as a reminder to return to the things that have given us hope, a way forward.

^{1. Myles, Eileen. "It's A Wonderful Wave: Nicole Eisenman" (2003) in The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays In Art. Semiotext(e), 2009. ↩}