Are feminist exhibitions, the same as or different from women artist’s exhibitions? Is there a history of feminist art exhibitions? Is there a politics in feminist curating? Can a feminist exhibition be defined by the curator’s interpretation of feminism, when the artists in it (male or female) might have different politics or definitions?
Exhibition politics in the Museum
How is the question of women artists’ representation present within museums? The exhibition of their permanent collections determines how the general public see the position of women artists. In recent years there have been many different kinds of initiative to change the visibility of women artists in public museums.
Let’s make a distinction between permanent collections from which and in relation to which women artists’ exhibitions are organised and those which are temporary exhibitions, held over a few months, in public art galleries (kunsthalles) and museums of modern and contemporary art.
There are several key questions here:
- what strategies lie behind the development of specialist collections or museums of women artists?
- what are museums of contemporary and modern art doing to promote women artists in their collections?
- what are museums doing to change the representation of women artists in their collections?
The first two resources look at two founders of art museums for women artist, both from the 1980s, one in USA, one in Germany and their motivations in creating individual and unique spaces.
This is Abbeville’s promotional video of the book, A Museum of Their Own, by Wilhelmina Cole Holladay and explores her role in founding The National Museum for Women in the Arts (NMWA) in 1987 whose principle collection is her personal collection of women artists.
Watch this video (German soundtrack) of Marianne Pitzen, founder of the Frauen Museum in Bonn, in 1981. (Please note: This is a regional TV Review programme and the section on the Frauen Museum is from the last 5 minutes of this 15 minute video). Her arguments outline the museum’s role in promoting women artists and providing a space in which women’s art can be seen. The video offers a good view of the space of the museum and its contemporary displays.
In the last 10 years a number of major museums have organised initiatives to promote the works of women artists in their collections:
Elles@CentrePompidou
The most extensive of these was Elles@Centre Pompidou (2009-2011) where the exhibition space of the contemporary art museum, Centre Pompidou, in Paris displayed the works of only women artists. The percentage of works by women artists in the collection was increased by acquisitions to 20% of the total. The curator behind Elles, Camille Morineau, has continued this work in the online project AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions which offers research on 20th C women artists, and was started in 2014.
VN XX CAS
A new joint initiative of philanthropist Valeria Napoleone and the Contemporary Art Society in 2015, in partnership with Camden Arts Centre, aims to promote gender equality in the arts by commissioning and purchasing new works for museums. The Valeria Napoleone XX Contemporary Art Society (VN XX CAS) is discussed in relation to her other work in New York in Valeria Napoleone XX to Bring Work by Female Artists to SculptureCenter (New York) and UK Museums ArtNews (6 November 2015)
Modern Women Artists’ Initiative at MOMA
MOMA, New York set up a Modern Women Artists Initiative, 2010-2014.
This resulted in a major publication: Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art
The blog is the only remaining evidence on their site of this 5-year project reassessing their founders – 3 women – and the place of women artists in their collection, whilst organising temporary “corrective” displays.
The Second Museum of Our Wishes, Moderna Museet
For three years (2008-2010) Moderna Museet in Stockholm pursued a research project called In the Shadow of. Women Modernists from a Gender-Oriented Art History Perspective in Connection with Moderna Museet’s Project The Second Museum of Our Wishes, a purchase programme dedicated to works of women artists, with support from the Swedish Arts Council’s R&D funding for national museums.
Tate Modern: Rehang in 2016
When Tate Modern expanded its museum space and opened a new extension in 2016, the new Director, Frances Morris, also rehung the exhibitions. She increased the percentage of contemporary women artists on show within the permanent displays to 30%, presenting many solo rooms of individual women artists (something which had not been done before to any great extent!) and showing the relationship between male and female artists in relation to new themes. Read n.paradoxa’s critique of the launch of this new programme.
Can we change how museums represent women artists and their works?
As an example of curator’s responses to the question of women artists in art history and role played by museums and art history in their recovery, reputation and their place in museum collections, take a look at the responses in this article and the lack of consensus:
Still invisible? Issue 2, British Art Studies, Spring 2016.
You might also like to think about these responses in the light of ideas about “feminine stereotypes”; how masculinity/femininity are constructed in these arguments; ideas about a female/feminine aesthetic from Lesson 7 on the avantgarde.
Does Krakow need a Woman’s Museum?
This is the question Elzbieta Sala embroidered as an artwork. This led to an interesting article on the MOCAK, Poland website discussing this position.
Laura Crossley and Kristen Hussey talk in this article about what it is like to be a young curator starting out in museums.
A review by Carla Garnet of discussions on Curation in museums at the Feminist Dialectics Symposium, Canada (3 Dec 2008).
Natasha Chaykowski asks:
Are Sex Differences Getting in the Way?: The Limits of Gender-Based Curating
in a review of the exhibition Queensize in MOMUS (4 August 2015). This article voices many of the often repeated objections to women only exhibitions and voices the critic’s ambivalence and wariness at the stereotyping of women’s art but ends up reinforcing it, not exploding it.
