A.8 Updating the Account: Women Artists in Museums and Beyond, Part 1
Thu Oct 15 / 9:00 – 10:30
voice_chat expiredchair / Amy Wallace, Carleton University
Recent headlines suggest an increase in institutional initiatives to support the work of women and underrepresented artists. The Baltimore Museum of Art, for instance, announced that in 2020 it would only acquire work made by women artists. In Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario deaccessioned 20 works by A. Y. Jackson in 2019 to diversify its collection of Indigenous and Canadian art. Despite such recent initiatives, a 2019 study by artnet News and In Other Words found that work by women artists accounted for only 11 percent of acquisitions and 14 percent of exhibitions in a survey of the top American museums over the last decade. This session seeks quantitative or qualitative analyses of the current status of women-identified artists in Canada and abroad. Papers that address representation and diversity within any of the interrelated spheres of museums, governmental funding, art prizes, and the art market are welcome. Intersectional approaches that examine joint factors such as gender identity, race, and socioeconomic status are particularly encouraged.
Amy C. Wallace is an art historian and curator specializing in European and American art of the 19th and early 20th centuries. She earned her PhD from the University of Toronto in 2019. Her dissertation, entitled Studio of Nature: The Transformation of Artists' Studios, 1845–1910, examined the impact of artists' changing relationship to nature on studios in Britain, France, and the United States from the advent of Realism to the Arts and Crafts movement. She recently curated The Artist's Dream: Works of French Symbolism for The Art Gallery of Hamilton, an exhibition exploring the significance of dreaming in Symbolist art. Her co-authored article with Joyce Zemans, Where are the Women? Updating the Account!, was published by RACAR in 2013.
A.8.1 Is Collecting Enough? Twenty Years of Collecting Canadian Women Artists at the AGO
Georgiana Uhlyarik, Art Gallery of Ontario
In 2000, curators in the Canadian Art Department at the AGO identified three areas of priorities to address underrepresented artists in its collection: women, Inuit and Indigenous artists. They made an express commitment to focus on collecting these artists to its Chief Curator, Director, and Canadian Acquisition Committee. I will use the AGO’s collecting of Canadian women artists as a case study to evaluate the impact of this articulated focus – not just in numbers but also qualitative, palpable difference that is structural.
Griselda Pollock writes that it is imperative to never forget that “at the heart of most museum collections lies a profound paradox.” And that the frustrating and absurd challenges that continue to plague our attempts to redress “the missing future” as she calls it, are still very real and imbedded. A woman artist is still an artist with a qualifier. There are iconic ones, financially successful ones, even famous ones, but they are all women, exceptional, extraordinary, women artists. Ironically, some have become so desirable that Museums can no longer afford them. Twenty years later, what has been the impact of the AGO’s explicit declaration of intention to collect the work of Canadian women artists? Recovering the past so that the future does not go missing takes a lot of will and time and work and people. The central questions to consider and discuss are:
- How can we best articulate and establish the contribution of these artists in the collection?
- How do we ensure that this presence has significance, visibility and impact?
- What are strategies to implement? What are impediments?
- What shifts are required to create real structural change?
- Who do we mean when we say ‘women’? Who is privileged? Who is overlooked?
This paper seeks to examine how (and if) collecting works by women artists is an effective strategy in advancing the study, research, exhibition and dissemination of their work.
Georgiana Uhlyarik is Fredrik S. Eaton Curator, Canadian Art, and co-lead of the Indigenous + Canadian Art Department at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada. Her recent collaborations include exhibitions and publications: Tunirrusiangit: Kenojuak Ashevak and Tim Pitsiulak, the J.S. McLean Centre for Indigenous + Canadian Art, Georgia O’Keeffe (Tate Modern), Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry (Jewish Museum, NY); Picturing the Americas: Landscape Painting from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic (Terra Foundation for American Art and Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo); Introducing Suzy Lake and The Passion of Kathleen Munn. Uhlyarik is currently an adjunct faculty member in Art History departments at York University and University of Toronto, and research associate, Modern Literature & Culture, Ryerson University. Originally from Romania, she lives in Toronto with her twin sons.
The Nova Scotia Women Artist Journal Archives from the Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery. Photo: Lisa Bouraly.
A.8.2 Feminist Curatorial Practices in the Atlantic: Enquiry into the Exhibitions and Collection History of the Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery
Lisa Bouraly, Université du Québec à Montréal
This paper explores the exhibitions, acquisitions, and programming history of the Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia. First opened in 1971, this modest museum has devoted a significant part of its activities to the representation of women as cultural workers and producers, including BIPOC and queer people. Based on archival research and quantitative methodology, this paper analyzes the gallery’s curatorial practices over a 50-year period. This research highlights the gallery’s strong commitment to women solo and group shows, as well as programed activities which addressed a wide variety of topics (e.g., wage inequality, lack of representation in art institutions, mothering). In terms of acquisitions, more than 50% of the artists in the collection are identified as women, several of whom are Indigenous. In 1975, then gallery director, Mary Sparling, began the Slide Registry initiative to promote women artists from Atlantic Canada, which led to the creation of a TV broadcast, entitled Nova Scotia Women Artists Journal. Former director Ingrid Jenkner invited famous international women artists such as Carolee Schneemann, Eva Hesse, and Adrian Piper for solo shows. Both Sparling and Jenkner worked with Indigenous artists from Mi’kmaq Women of Eskasoni Reserve, Walking With Our Sisters Collective, and Métis artist, Rosalie Favell. This contribution to “Updating the Account” thus examines the degree to which the gallery’s rhetoric of inclusion has aligned with its actual practices of collecting and exhibiting. How does the gallery’s exhibition history live up to the institution’s stated objective of representation and support for contemporary Canadian art and women artists? What lessons can be learned from a small regional gallery with a 50-year history? This presentation moves beyond mere numbers and quotas to shed light on the curatorial methods and practices used to diversify the stories exhibited, the artists presented, the types of work performed, and the knowledge produced in Canadian art galleries.
Lisa Bouraly is a researcher in Museum studies and a curator of contemporary art. From 2013 to 2017, she served as curator and administrator at the Guido Molinari Foundation in Montreal, QC, where she co-created exhibitions and residencies. She has served as a collection assistant at the Anna Leonowens Gallery at NSCAD University (2018) and at MSVU Art Gallery (2019). She is currently pursuing a joint PhD in Museum studies in Montreal (UQAM) and Paris (Université Paris 8). Her research explores how contemporary museums are reshaping the permanent exhibition through an emerging repertoire of curatorial strategies and practices. She has published articles in academic journals and popular magazines.
A.8.3 Mapping the (Loop)holes: Living Women Artists and the National Gallery of Art
Emily Ann Francisco, National Gallery of Art, Washington
Since its opening in 1941, the National Gallery of Art, Washington (NGA) has acquired over 156,000 art objects, of which roughly 12,000 (under 8%) were created by women. The museum also historically collected few works by living artists, even adopting the policy (later changed) that an artist could not be included in the permanent collection until twenty years after their death. Overall, this might seem an especially difficult environment for celebrating living women artists’ achievements, despite their prominence in modern art movements. Yet, as early as 1943 the NGA gained thousands of works by women, many still alive at the time, through significant prints and drawings acquisitions. This paper examines the conditions that led to acquisitions of work by living women artists at the NGA, from 1941 to the present day.
Leveraging collection data to visualize the NGA’s acquisition history, I argue that the museum’s history of acquiring works by living women artists mirrors broader art world hierarchies of media, taste, and gender during the twentieth century. Evaluating this data from an intersectional perspective, numerous questions arise, such as: Which artists were not collected? What trends are visible over time? And what can this information tell us about the intersection of art, gender, race, and politics in the United States capital? Although issues of collection diversity are not unique to the NGA, their prominence within the institutional fabric of the national art museum provides a useful case study for both understanding and confronting these challenges embedded in our field.
Emily Ann Francisco is the Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, where she works primarily on permanent collection projects and installations. In addition to her daily responsibilities, Emily is part of a curatorial team that is developing an upcoming exhibition about women artists in the Gallery’s collection as part of a broader institutional initiative. She also co-organized and moderated the panel Women in the Nation’s Collections at last year’s College Art Association Annual Conference in Chicago, Illinois. Prior to her current role, she was the Collection Management Assistant in the Gallery’s Department of Photographs, where she cataloged over 1000 photographs from the Corcoran Collection. She received dual M.A. degrees in Art History and Museum Studies from Syracuse University, where she worked as a teaching assistant. Emily specializes in American sculpture and American modernism.
