Sharing Circles: Carol Newhouse and the WomanShare Collective

Sharing Circles surveys the world-changing impact of 1970s feminism through Newhouse’s work, which documents the creation of WomanShare—a queer feminist, land-based community in rural Oregon. Cofounded in 1974 by Newhouse, her then lover Billie Miracle, and her best friend Dian Wagner, WomanShare joined a cluster of lesbian collectives located along Interstate 5, a major corridor of the LGBTQIA+ movement on the West Coast.

WomanShare was more than just a home to its residents. As an experiment in communal ownership, group decision-making, and liberated sexuality, it offered refuge and release from patriarchal society while requiring mutual vulnerability and trust from its members. Gathering Newhouse’s creative work alongside that of her peers, Sharing Circles explores the complexities of communal life and the practices that sustained the collective over the decades—in particular, the sharing circle, a method of group mediation that encourages empathy, active listening, and nonhierarchical participation. Dispelling the myth of separatist isolation, this presentation affords an intimate view of the networks that continue to shape and interlink the Women’s Lands, not only in Oregon, but across rural America.

Cocurated by artist and Ohio State professor Carmen Winant and Wexner Center Associate Curator Daniel Marcus along with Curatorial Research Assistant Raechel Root and Graduate Curatorial Intern Arielle Irizarry, Sharing Circles presents over 150 photographs alongside Newhouse’s contact sheets, slides, and ephemera. The exhibition also features artworks by other members of the WomanShare community, including Billie Miracle and current residents Bianca Fox Del Mar Ballara and Lycan El Lobo Coss, who are working with Newhouse and Miracle to transfer the land into the stewardship of queer BIPOC women and Two-Spirit people, renaming it NativeWomanshare.

Please note: This exhibition contains nudity and work dealing with sexuality.