A mindbending trip that summons the forgotten women of surrealism

While writing her dissertation on surrealism as a graduate student at New York University in 1971, Gloria Feman Orenstein discovered that women had been left out of the surrealist canon. Through a series of serendipitous – and perhaps even supernatural – adventures that took her everywhere from New York to Paris to Mexico City, Orenstein became the academic voice of feminist surrealism. In her searches, she also became a close friend to many influential female surrealists, including Leonora Carrington and Meret Elisabeth Oppenheim. In Gloria’s Call, the Los Angeles-based artist and filmmaker Cheri Gaulke manifests Orenstein’s journey into the surreal with collage-like animations. Through her appropriately trippy visual style and glimpses of the mindbending work of these female surrealists, Gaulke illustrates the undeniable brilliance of a generation of artists who might have been overlooked were it not for a like-minded feminist critic.