Is a history of feminist curating the same as a history of women artists’ exhibitions?
This idea is based on the same idea that feminism and the history of the women are one and the same. As pointed out in lesson 1, What is feminism?, there may be good reasons to question this notion.
In 2007-2010, there was a season of blockbuster exhibitions which drew attention to the legacy of feminist art practices and to contemporary feminist art practices internationally.
Here are just some of them:-
2010 Zen d’Art (Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Russia)
Curator(s): Natalya Kamenetskaya and Oksana Sarkisyan
2010 The Will as a Weapon – Review 1970-1980 (Icelandic Art Museum, ReykjavÃk, Iceland) (ReykjavÃk: Kjarvalsstadir) Curator(s): Hrafnhildur Schram (read this Iceland Review)
2009 Feminism Never Happened (Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, Australia) Curator(s): Robert Leonard (read this review in ArtLink)
2009 Elles@Centre Pompidou (Paris, France: Centre Pompidou)
Curator(s):Â Camille Morineau
2009 Gender Check (Vienna, Austria: MUMOK and Erste Foundation)
Curator(s): Bojana Pejic
2009 Rebelle: Kunst en feminisme 1969-2009 (Arnhem, The Netherlands: Arnhem Gemeentemuseum) Curator(s): Mirjam Westen (read Mirjam Westen’s interview in n.paradoxa, vol. 24 2009)
2008 Cooling Out: On the Paradox of Feminism (Zurich, Switzerland: JRP Ringier) Curator(s): Rene Zechlin et al (review in Circa, 2006 when the show travelled to Cork)
2008 We are Unsuitable for Framing online catalogue/collection (20 Dec 2008 – 26 Jul 2009) (Te Papa Tongarewa, Museum of New Zealand )
2007 Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: 45 Years of Art and Feminism (Bilbao, Spain: Musee de Belles Artes de Bilbao) Curator(s): Xavier Arakistan
2007 WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (Los Angeles: MOCA, exhibition catalogue Massachussetts, USA: MIT and LA MOCA) Curator(s): Cornelia Butler
2007 Global Feminisms (exhibition venue, Brooklyn Museum, New York. catalogue, London and New York: Merrell and Brooklyn Museum) Curator(s): Linda  Nochlin and Maura Reilly (Maura Reilly’s intro to catalogue as PDF)
2006 Konstfeminism (Helsingborg, Sweden: Dunkers Kulturhaus and Lilevalch Konsthall)  Curator(s): L. Anderson, A. Livion Ingvarsson, M. Jensner, A. Nystrom, B.Werkmeister, N. Ostlind (Review of the catalogue by Power Ekroth)
2007 Gender Battle/A Battala dos Xeneros (Spain: Santiago de Compostela) Curator(s): Juan Vicente Aliaga (Read this review in UnDO net, 12/09/2007)
2007 Its Time for Action (There’s No Option) About Feminism (Zurich: Migros Museum, Switzerland and JRP Ringier) Curator(s): Heike Munder
In this period, the Feminist Art Project (at Rutgers University) (USA) (started in 2006) also attempted to map contemporary feminist/women artists’ exhibitions taking place. The list of events and exhibitions was extensive and sought to celebrate the American Women’s Art Movement from the 1970s. The site continues as an archive, while the group behind the project also organises an annual day of events within the College Art Associations’ annual conferences, reviewing the American Women’s Art movement.
Open this PDF of international feminist art exhibitions arranged by date, compiled by Katy Deepwell.
The online list at of Feminist Exhibition catalogues on ktpress.co.uk lists many more exhibitions around the world than the list above.
If you look through n.paradoxa’s resources you can see quite quickly that there have been very few years since 1975 when there were not major feminist exhibitions in art galleries and museums featuring and revising the presentation of women artists and considering how their contribution to contemporary art should be reassessed.
- Would a history of feminist curating, be the same as a history of these exhibitions?
- What marks the difference between these recent exhibitions and their predecessors?
- Is it the venue? The scale? The size of the catalogue?
- Or the current publicity machine?
- The visibility of the named curators nationally or internationally?
- Or is it the attempt to “historicise” feminism and create a history of feminist art in the museum?
These questions are explored by Bojana Pejic in ‘Why is feminism suddenly so sexy?‘ in an article for Springerin (Vienna) issue 1 (2008).
Reviewing these recent exhibitions, Amelia Jones asks if they show the differences between ‘Feminist Subjects versus Feminist Effects: The Curating of Feminist Art (or is it the Feminist Curating of Art?)’
On Curating, Issue 29 / May 2016. This article is part of a special issue on CURATING in feminist thought.
If one takes a longer historical overview of the development of feminist exhibitions since the 1970s to the present, several features are striking.
The majority of feminist exhibitions until the mid-1980s were organised by groups of women artists working together to organise the exhibition. There were many women art critics, writers, curators and art historians who worked alongside artists as curators: Lucy Lippard, Silvia Eiblmayr, Marcia Tucker, Martha Wilson but the majority of exhibitions were led by women artists’ working together as a group.
After the mid-1980s, the number of exhibitions which are organised by curators – either guest curators at a venue, or curators within the museum or art gallery where the exhibition is held – increases dramatically.
This shift mirrors a general art-world trend: the rise of the curator as the figure who not only co-ordinates and selects the exhibition but is the key public spokesperson for the content and ideas on display.
The period since the late 1980s has not only seen the rise of curators as key figures in the creation of exhibitions but it has also been the period in which there has been a significant rise in the number of international art biennales around the world. The work, as well as the selection, of curators are a key part of how these biennales are promoted. There are many curators of international art biennales who have been women and prominent advocates of feminism and women artists. Nevertheless the idea of the “wunderkind” curator is often projected as if it were exclusively masculine.
This phenomenal growth and the range of art exhibitions on a global scale can be grasped quickly if you visit:
Biennale Foundation website which has an international Directory of Biennales which lists approximately 70 biennales of contemporary art.
and
The Global Contemporary Art: Art Worlds after 1989 This exhibition project in 2011 at ZKM, which has an extensive website, was part of a larger research project examining changes in the art market and museums. Feminism is strikingly absent as a term of reference in this website: but a considerable number of women artists were included in the exhibition.
It is important to recognise that the attempt to “historicise” feminism takes place in a wider context in which the art world has embraced a new global dynamic of exchange and in which debates between “local/global” tendencies in contemporary art are extensively debated in relation to legacies from previous decades and art historical precedents from the 1960s.
Some of the exhibitions (above) about the history of feminism have been “local” in sense that they have explored a national history or “scene” in one or two cities. The majority of those listed above have been “international” (i.e. the selection of artists has been from many countries rather than just one or two) rather than “global” (i.e. considering how globalisation has been the subject of women artists’ works or how women artists are also implicated in this new global dynamic).
The next part of this lesson will look at local/global dynamics in feminist art exhibitions and in feminist responses to theories of globalisation/global art worlds.
Vol. 18 of n.paradoxa (July 2006) was a special issue on Feminist Curatorial Strategies. This edition was guest-edited by Renee Baert.
Watch Lucy Steed talking with Lucy R. Lippard about her Numbers exhibitions of women artists in this half-hour video about this series of exhibitions, (1969-1974) in an Afterall event to celebrate the production of a special book on these exhibitions.From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Numbers Shows 1969–74
Collaboration and Collectivity: The Past or Future of Feminist Exhibition Making
Collaboration and Collectivity: The Past or Future of Feminist Exhibition Making (TFAP@CAA 2015: Panel 1) from CWAH on Vimeo.
This panel focuses on the role of collaboration and collective identity in past and contemporary feminist curatorial practice, in line with the current interest in the history and politics of feminist curating and collaboration. Bringing together agents of recent feminist collaborative curatorial projects and collectives, this panel hopes to illuminate the diverse ways in which collaboration and collectivity underpin radical feminist exhibition making, while questioning their challenges and promises for future feminist political action in the arts, including effective feminist curating.
Chair: Kalliopi Minoudaki (Independent Art Historian)
Panelists: Doris Caçoilo (_gaia), Lauren Denitzio (Artist; For the Birds), Kate Wadkins (Writer/Curator; For the Birds); Dr. Maura Reilly (University of Sidney), Ridykeulous (Curatorial collective)
This panel was part of the 2015 TFAP@CAA Day of Panels: Collective Creativity: Collaboration and Collectives in Feminist Art Practice.
Defining Experiences
In 2000, n.paradoxa asked a number of women artists, critics to write about a defining exhibition that had changed how they saw women/feminist art exhibitions. The results were published in n.paradoxa online issue 13, September 2000.
