C.2 New Ways of Knowing in Feminist Art Histories

Fri Oct 20 / 13:30 – 15:00 / KC 204

chairs /
Béatrice Cloutier-Trépanier, Queen’s University
Laura Ryan, Queen’s University
This session examines feminist ways of knowing, such as anecdotes (Gallop), autotheory (Fournier), creative writing (Grant and Rubin), omitted footnotes (Dimitrakaki), gossip (Butt, Chave, Rogoff), imagination (Latimer), intuition (de Mille) and queer formalism (Simmons) as answers to incomplete or inexistent archives and sparse or biased literature. What are the implications of working with/on non-traditional forms of writing, and/or anachronistic methodologies? How have Indigenous, Black, queer, and trans critiques of and collaborations with feminisms developed new forms of intersectional art historical narratives? How does this destabilize institutional(ized) feminist art history? We welcome contributions that address such questions and discuss how these experimental processes probe the unknowability/instability of art historical research as a subject, alongside the pedagogical need for such ways of knowing and ways of working. 10-minute presentations will be followed by a roundtable during which we hope to exchange and reflect on our experiences and experiments of/in feminist art histories.
keywords: feminism, methodologies, ways of knowing, intersectionality
session type: panel + roundtable
Béatrice Cloutier-Trépanier is a PhD candidate in art history at Queen’s University (Kingston, Canada). Her dissertation, In the Margin: The writings of Lucy R. Lippard and Lee Lozano, examines the experimental writings of Lippard and Lozano. The layered connectedness of their writing practices of the 1960s and 1970s, at once autobiography, theory, fiction, criticism, conceptual art, and life/work, supports an analysis of the feminist labor that constitutes, drives, and sometimes complicates these marginal forms and early examples of autotheory. This research refocuses anecdotes, citations, and footnotes, both as historical evidence and theoretical framework, and represents a personal investment in counterintuitive modes of knowing. Beatrice has recently been granted a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship (2023-2025) to expand her research on Lozano in feminist conversations with Yoko Ono and Yvonne Rainer. She is the curator of a private collection and the co-director of Joe Project in Montreal, Canada.
PhD Candidate at Queen’s University, Laura Ryan’s research focuses on French modernism, women artists, self-primitivism, and maternity. She earned her MA in Art History from American University in 2019 with a thesis on Sonia Delaunay’s Yellow Nude (1908), which she presented at the Association for Art History Conference in 2023. At AU, she was awarded the Broude and Garrad Prize in feminist art history for her paper on early renaissance birth trays. Ryan has also presented her research on James Ensor at the Southeastern College Art Conference (2016) and on Baya Mahieddine at the Humanities Graduate conference of York University (2020). She has work experience at the Baltimore Museum of Art (curatorial), the Walter’s Art Museum (registration), and the James E. Lewis Museum of Art. Her in-progress dissertation is entitled, Reproducing Woman as “Primitive” Sign: Alice Bailly, Mela Muter, and the Gendering of Modernist Primitivism in the Parisian Avant-Gardes, 1904–1914.

A very interrupted life – Mary Pratt’s Supper Table

Anne Koval, Mount Allison University

The feminist writer Mary Jacobus positions the diary writing of women as “located in the gaps, the absences, the unsayable or unrepresentable of discourse and representation.” Such is the case for Mary Pratt. As an emerging female artist in the late 1960s, she was often marginalized and struggled to find time to paint while raising her family. In a small week-to-view diary Pratt records her first attempt using the photorealist technique she became known for. This fragmentary account, interspersed with her ongoing domestic obligations, has been left out of the narratives on her well-known painting Supper Table (1969). This overlooked diary begins to tell another version of Mary Pratt’s very interrupted life.

keywords: Mary Pratt, feminism, biography, Photo-Realism, Canadian artist

Anne Koval is an independent curator, art historian, writer on art, poet, and lives a very interrupted life. She has written on historical and contemporary art and her biography Mary Pratt: A Love Affair with Vision is published by Goose Lane Editions (October 2023).

The Erotics of Lesbian Looking: Revisiting Millie Wilson and Catherine Lord's Something Borrowed

Genevieve Flavelle, Queen’s University

In 1993 artist Millie Wilson (Born 1948, Hot Springs, AR) and writer/curator Catherine Lord (Born 1949, Dominica), were commissioned by SITE Santa Fe to create a collaborative site-specific work for its inaugural biennial titled Longing and Belonging: From the Faraway Nearby (1995). The exhibition was ambitious and featured the work of thirty-one artists from thirteen countries. Rather than their nationality, however, Wilson and Lord felt that their commission hinged on their identity as lesbians. In response, they developed an installation titled Something Borrowed, rich in the complexities and contradictions of lesbian identity and history. Over a period of eighteen months, Wilson and Lord conducted extensive archival research and outreach to women "living outside the boundaries of heterosexuality." In response to the archival absences they encountered, the artists practiced creative queer methodologies such as an "erotics of lesbian looking" and other pleasure-centred research methods. These methods anticipated many strategies of queer and trans archive art to come throughout the 2000-2010s, yet Something Borrowed has largely been forgotten in queer and feminist art histories. In 2022, during a research trip to the ONE Archives, I found Lord's archive of Something Borrowed and began writing a history of the project. In this presentation, I explore how my methodology reflects the challenges of queer archival research Wilson and Lord themselves faced in making Something Borrowed. Like the artists, I attempt to fill in archival gaps creatively, using embodied narrative, gossip, and anecdotes to piece together the project's history to share with new generations of scholars and artists dedicated to recovering and imagining untold LGBTQ+ histories.

keywords: feminism, queer, gossip, lesbian, erotics

Genevieve Flavelle is an independent curator and PhD candidate in the Art History program at Queen’s University. Her doctoral research investigates the work of queer and trans contemporary artists who are challenging traditional forms of historical research to give voice to underrepresented, forgotten, or imagined histories.

(Re)Writing the Archive: feminist speculative fiction

Paula Burleigh, Allegheny College

This presentation explores how visual art strategies associated with feminist speculative fiction can facilitate a re- imagining of feminist art history and its methods. Encompassing science fiction, fantasy, and Afrofuturism, speculative fiction (SF) is a literary genre of conjecture, in which authors imagine alternative realities in order to question current norms. While SF discourse primarily focuses on literature, SF is likewise evident and widespread in contemporary visual art. Among the most prominent strategies deployed by artists working in SF is time travel, or the speculative recuperation of lost or erased histories through story telling. Recognizing that altering the future requires historical foundations on which to build, artists invent the histories of women figures for whom there is limited or no archival documentation, a strategy that builds on the writings of Saidiya Hartman and others. As a case study, I examine artist Kathy High’s project The History of Shit (2017), an installation comprising photographs, fabricated objects, and writings by a fictional nineteenth century queer woman pioneer in the field of proctology. The creation of this archive forges a transhistorical lineage of influence and affinity. Rendering distinctions between fact and fiction moot, this archive and others like it can disrupt heteronormative definitions of progress and time. Rather than privileging the biological nuclear family (and its imperative to reproduce), artists working in speculative historical fiction picture novel kinship structures between humans across time and space, which invite contemporary individuals to see their own intersectional identities reflected in history through the figure of invented foremother. High’s work leads to a discussion of how speculative methods of writing history—from the plausible to the fantastical—might open up new possibilities for artists and writers as we think through alternative, dynamic methods of representing feminist art historical narratives.

keywords: feminism, queer theory, speculative fiction, gender

Paula Burleigh is an art historian specializing in postwar to contemporary art. She is an Assistant Professor of Art and affiliated faculty in Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at Allegheny College where she also serves as director of the Allegheny Art Galleries. Burleigh earned her PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (New York, NY). She was previously a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and a frequent lecturer at the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY). Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Art Journal, The Brooklyn Rail, Stedelijk Studies, and in various edited volumes. Burleigh’s current research focuses on the intersections of feminist speculative fiction and contemporary visual art.