Cynthia Navaretta, who with a newsletter, a publishing house and an unflagging enthusiasm promoted female artists for decades, beginning at a time when male domination of the art world was particularly pronounced, died on May 18 at her home in Manhattan. She was 97.
The artist Susan Schwalb, a longtime friend, confirmed the death.
Ms. Navaretta was not an artist herself, nor a gallery owner, but she was a quiet force on the art scene in New York and beyond. In the early 1970s she was immersed in various efforts by women to secure a bigger voice in the art world, and in 1975, with Judy Seigel as founding editor, she began publishing Women Artists Newsletter, covering issues and events of interest to women in that world that often went unmentioned in mainstream publications.
It was later renamed Women Artists News, and by the end of the 1970s Ms. Navaretta had also established Midmarch Arts Press, which has published dozens of books in the ensuing years, many of them by or about women in the visual arts.
“She was a facilitator and a supporter and an advocate,” said Ms. Schwalb, who was art director on the early newsletters.
In addition to being very male when Ms. Navaretta began her advocacy, the art world was very white, which she also sought to rectify.
“Cynthia was very brave and supported women and women of color when no one else was willing to,” the artist Howardena Pindell said by email. “Without her my books would not have been published or my opinion heard.”
But as women became more vocal in the era of second-wave feminism, Ms. Navaretta was rarely the one in the spotlight; instead, she nudged others to take the lead.
“Certain people step forward,” Ms. Schwalb said, “but there is always somebody behind them.”
Cynthia Greenberg was born on Jan. 31, 1923, in the Bronx. Her father, Morris, owned some of Manhattan’s first parking garages, and her mother, Sophia, was a homemaker. She studied at the University of Wisconsin and New York University before earning a bachelor’s degree at Columbia University in 1946 and a master’s degree in mechanical engineering there in 1948.
She worked for, among others, Alvord & Swift, a heating and cooling contractor, designing systems for major projects, including for some of the structures at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York. But if engineering was her career — rare for a woman at the time — art was her passion.
Around 1953 she had married Emanuel Navaretta, a painter who was part of the Abstract Expressionist circle that emerged in the late 1940s and included household names like Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. It was largely a man’s world, as she recalled in 1977 when she introduced an Artists Talk on Art panel discussion called “Women Artists of the ’50s.”
“It was very male-dominated,” she said. “Women were there to be danced with and to listen and be full of admiration and adulation.”
The same prejudices were still much in evidence two decades later.
“In the 1970s it was a very difficult time for women artists,” Ms. Schwalb said. “Dealers, if they would talk to you at all, often said that they didn’t show women, or that collectors weren’t interested in buying women’s work, or that there were no women artists.”
Women had begun to push back against that mind-set, through groups like Women in the Arts and exhibitions like “Women Choose Women,” which was seen at the New York Cultural Center in 1973. Ms. Navaretta had a hand in many of these efforts and was a fixture at gallery openings, panel discussions and feminist marches.
“She was everywhere,” Ms. Schwalb said.
And wherever she went, she made an impression.
“She was a thoroughly modern woman who retained the kind of style of a grande dame,” a niece, Lynda Hulkower, said by email. “When she marched in Washington for the E.R.A. she wore a silk Pucci carré, Irish handkerchief linen blouse with matching capris — she never wore jeans.”
The newsletter featured listings of gallery shows, write-ups of conferences, reviews, and bracing discussions of subjects including pornography and the state of art criticism. One goal was connecting artists to one another, something Ms. Navaretta also sought to further with her Guide to Women’s Art Organizations (1979), an early publication of her Midmarch Arts Press.
“Slowly but inexorably, an interdisciplinary network is building among women artists, whatever their special pursuits or geographical location,” she wrote in the introduction. “Still, many organizations remain isolated. One of the purposes of this guide is to reach individual women still working in isolation, to help them find a point of entry into a broad and expanding movement.”
Other notable Midmarch books included “Women Artists of the World” (1984), “Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975-1990” (1992) and “Gumbo Ya Ya: Anthology of Contemporary African-American Women Artists” (1995). Other titles, though, were more lighthearted — for instance, “Artists and Their Cats in Their Own Words” (1990).
Ms. Navaretta is survived by a son, Miles, and a granddaughter.
Artists and others Ms. Navaretta helped have posted remembrances on social media and are planning a Zoom memorial for September. Ms. Schwalb is among the organizers.
“I didn’t want Cynthia to slip into oblivion,” she said, “because she did so much to lift us out of oblivion.”
Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
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