AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research & Exhibitions is founded in Paris, under the French Association Law (1901), on the initiative of seven women from diverse fields, including Margot Mérimée Dufourcq, Nathalie Rigal, Camille Morineau, Julie Wolkenstein, Elisabeth Pallas and Alexandra Vernier-Bogaert. Its mission is the writing, collation, and dissemination of information about women artists of the 20th century.
From the beginning, content has been bilingual between French and English.
As part of its partnership with Éditions des femmes-Antoinette Fouque, AWARE is republishing the entries from the Dictionnaire universel des créatrices on its website. This work has been translated into English and includes illustrations aimed at increasing its accessibility and international reach.
The association’s first conference takes place at the Gulbenkian Foundation (Lisbon), organized with the Institute of Art History and NOVA University Lisbon. The event is entitled “Penetrable, Traversable, Habitable: Exploring Spatial Environments by Women Artists in the 1960s and 1970s.”
As part of the same program, a second international conference, organized with the Musée Sainte-Croix in Poitiers, explores the subject “Parent-elles: Partner, Daughter, Sister of…: Women Artists and the Ties of Kinship.“
On the occasion of the Journées du Matrimoine (European Heritage Days), seven guided visits are organized, in partnership with the HF Île-de-France Association, at the Jeu de Paume, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Musée Carnavalet, Centre Pompidou, Musée d’Orsay, Petit Palais, and MAC VAL.
AWARE awards the first prize dedicated to women artists in France (originally called the Prix Marie Claire), which has become an annual project for the association. Esther Ferrer is named as the first recipient. Her works are exhibited at the Fondation EDF one month before the award ceremony with the other nominees: Léa Barbazanges, Rebecca Digne, Émilie Pitoiset and the duo Louise Hervé and Clovis Maillet.
In addition to new offices, AWARE creates a research center with a collection devoted exclusively to women artists, aiming to welcome a community of researchers. It draws heavily on the personal collection of Camille Morineau, gathered since the late 1980s. From the start, the library is further enriched by donations. Ana-Lia Amand has been volunteering for ten years to help index these resources and make them accessible.
The association expands its activities: AWARE becomes a resource center, virtually accessible to all, offering illustrated biographical notices of artists born between 1860 and 1972; longer articles by researchers; exhibition reviews; as well as an agenda, updated daily, listing current exhibitions that feature women artists.
Commissioners are chosen to each preselect two artists—one for an Emerging Artist Award, the other for the Outstanding Merit Award—and defend these in front of a jury composed of eight international figures from the art world. The winners are announced at the Ministry of Culture. They receive a cash prize of 10,000 euros. The winners of the first edition are Judit Reigl and Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann.
A new website, designed by Lisa Sturacci and developed by Maxime Bichon, is put online and continues to evolve after this date. Among other notable changes, a thesaurus of keywords is first established, allowing for a more precise indexing of biographies.
After just two years of existence, AWARE surpasses the threshold of publishing one hundred artist biographies online, in both French and English.
The program’s new edition takes place at the Musée d’Orsay, Centre Pompidou, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the house-workshop of Marta Pan and André Wogenscky, and the Ministry of Culture and Communication.
The symposium papers from “Parent-elles” are published. Since then, proceedings from other important colloquia have likewise been brought to print.
On the occasion of the exhibition “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985,” biographies written for the show are also published online through AWARE’s website. This marks the first collaboration with an international museum, and serves to announce a new program called AMIS (AWARE Museum Initiative and Support).
A scientific committee is gathered: its role is to define a given year’s thematic orientations and its associated programming, as well as designating priority artists to publish on the website. Chaired by Bruno Racine, the committee is initially composed of members Roei Amit, Marie-Laure Bernadac, Emmanuel Coquery, Cécile Debray, Catherine Gonnard, Camille Morineau, and Éric Poitevin. Other personalities would also take part in subsequent years, including Marie Minissiuex, Rémi Labrusse, and Floriane de Saint-Pierre.
In order to specifically structure the publication of articles on the website, an editorial committee is also created, overseen by Jean-Pierre Criqui. Over time, it would bring together Caroline Hancock, Valérie Da Costa, Clément Dirié, Marc Donnadieu, Annalisa Rimmaudo, Nathalie Ernoult, and Elvan Zabunyan.
In 2022, the editorial and scientific committees would be merged.
The second edition of the AWARE Prizes jointly recognizes Vera Molnár and Nil Yalter for the Outstanding Merit Award and Violaine Lochu for the Emerging Artist Award.
Taking place at the Hôtel de Soubise – Musée des Archives Nationales, it brings together works by Nicola L., Vera Molnár, Tania Mouraud, Nil Yalter, Julie Béna, Violaine Lochu, Mélanie Matranga, and Marianne Mispelaëre.
In the framework of the program “Paris c’est elles“, flash conferences across a variety of sites in Paris are organized, including artist performances.
For two years, on the 8th of every month, a guided tour is organized to either an exhibition or the collection of a French museum.
Organized by the Réunion des musées métropolitains Rouen-Normandie (RMM) and the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA), the Argument de Rouen is an annual series of debates that invite the public to question museums over their ability to rise to the social challenges of our time. This third edition is conceived in partnership with AWARE around the theme of “Gender Equality. Where Do Museums Stand?“
AWARE institutes a regular call for contributions around different geographic nodes, as well as a call for summaries of master’s theses. The association hence allows authors from around the world to contribute to the site, further opening its activities to an international context.
The third edition of the AWARE Prizes names Jacqueline de Jong for the Outstanding Merit Award and Hélène Bertin for the Emerging Artist Award.
AWARE participates at a contemporary art fair for the first time, at the invitation of Art Paris, in conceiving an installation of French women artists.
In the framework of the second and final edition of the program “Paris c’est elles“, guided visits and performances are organized, retracing the presence of women in public space.
By the time of its anniversary, AWARE has five hundred portraits online and a documentation center comprising more than two thousand works related to women and nonbinary artists and feminist art.
A symposium entitled “Faire œuvre. Making a Body of Work. Training and Professionalisation of Female Artists in the 19th and 20th Centuries” is organized at the Centre Pompidou and Musée d’Orsay. The event culminates in the publication of its proceedings.
An interview with Nil Yalter, winner of the 2018 Outstanding Merit Award, is published with Manuella Éditions, the first in a series of eleven volumes.
For Saison Africa 2020, organized by the Institut francais, the event’s curator N’Goné Fall invites AWARE to participate in “Focus Femmes.” A scientific committee, working alongside AWARE, comprises Eva Barois de Caevel, Nadira Laggoune, Peju Layiwola, Nkule Mabaso, Nontobeko Ntombela, Karen Milbourne, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Senam Okudzeto, Fatou Sarr Sow, and Rachida Triki.
At the invitation of the Armory Show, AWARE imagines a selection to highlight the work of twenty-five women artists in the Galleries Section of this historic New York fair. The AWARE Prize at the Armory Show, specific to the event, is awarded to a single woman artist. It is given to June Edmonds in the amount of $10,000.
The fourth edition of the AWARE Prizes sees Marie Orensanz receive the Outstanding Merit Award and Tiphaine Calmettes the Emerging Artist Award.
Working in close collaboration with the American curator Maura Reilly, AWARE institutes the TEAM network: Teaching, E-learning, Agency, Mentoring. Comprising eighty university professors and graduate students from across the world, the network seeks to enrich AWARE’s website through coverage of under-represented geographies and also to train a new generation in the challenges of equality in art history. During its first year, TEAM produces some sixty biographical notices of artists from over twenty-five different countries, as well as thirteen research articles and five recorded webinars, all freely available on AWARE’s website. The program has continued to the present.
AWARE launches its first podcast, Women House, in reaction to the lockdowns caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Using narratives of confinement, whether imposed or chosen, as a common thread, each episode in the series invites a narrator to embody extracts from a text by an author of her choice.
During the Covid-19 lockdowns, AWARE gives a platform for artists to question this truly unusual period. How should we consider the closed-off space to which one is limited? Hélène Bertin, Violaine Lochu, Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann, and Tiphaine Calmettes, former AWARE Prize recipients, respond to the invitation.
In the unusual context of the Covid-19 pandemic and its lockdowns, AWARE and the Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP) together launch an open call entitled “La Vie bonne“, inviting women artists to react to the crisis by proposing original performances. Among 420 applicants, ten winners are chosen: Thérèse Ampe-Jonas, Eva Barto, Fabiana Ex-Souza, Fallon Mayanja, Myriam Mihindou, Jeanne Moynot, Anouchka Oler-Nussbaum, and Famille Rester as well as, from abroad, Eszter Salamon and Louise Siffert.
The first episode of this animated video series, both humorous and educational, intended for children seven years and older, is posted online. As of 2026, the series comprises twenty-six videos.
A solo exhibition devoted to Hélène Bertin at Creux de l’enfer (Thiers) is co-produced with AWARE as part of the 2019 AWARE Prizes.
AWARE extends its chronological boundaries by publishing biographies of women artists born in the 19th century thanks to an initial partnership with the Musée d’Orsay, followed by diverse partnerships with additional museums.
The podcast “Great Women in Art” gives voice to women artists of the 20th century. They speak about their work, their life, their world, and their triumphs. Each episode shares these artists’ voices through audiovisual archives from the INA. Fourteen episodes are produced between 2021 and 2022.
The fifth edition of the AWARE Prizes names Barbara Chase-Riboud for the Outstanding Merit Award and Gaëlle Choisne for the Emerging Artist Award.
Born through a partnership with the Gallery of the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM), this program seeks to reinforce the presence of Canadian artists on AWARE’s website through the publication of biographies and articles, and to underscore their importance in the history of art. A scientific committee of specialists is brought together specifically for this program.
In addition to holding a symposium, thirty artist biographies published in the exhibition catalog for “Women in Abstraction: Another History of Abstraction in the 20th Century” are also published online through AWARE’s website. This collaboration is part of the AMIS program, which brings together museums from around the world to share research on women artists produced through exhibitions, purchases, and collections-based activities.
In the context of the Generation Equality Forum, AWARE conceives a documentary exhibition “Be AWARE: A History of Women Artists“, on the recognition of women artists in the 20th century and actions taken to valorize their works in the global history of art. For this traveling show, matali crasset created an original design concept for modules that could be disassembled and transported. “Be AWARE” is installed at the Bibliothèque nationale de France; Tempelhof, Hangar 2 + 3, in Berlin; at l’IESA Paris, following a reactivation of the system by international master’s students; and at FRAC Lorraine in Metz.
The research and documentation center as well as the association’s offices move to the Villa Vassilieff through the end of 2025. Carrying the name of the artist Marie Vassilieff, who herself moved into the building in 1912, the new site is thought as a place welcoming to any person interested in the history and work of women and nonbinary artists. It is designed and conceived by matali crasset.
A formal policy of acquisitions and exchanges is instituted, with the documentation center reaching four thousand titles by the end of 2025.
The Villa Vassilieff hosts diverse audiences during visits and events involving interventions by artists or professional guides, notably during the European Heritage Days, class trips, and groups of students in visual art, art history, or arts mediation, as well as groups of teachers from the national education system.
The goal of this partnership with the Clark Art Institute (Williamstown) is to restitute 19th and 20th century artists, whether Black, Indigenous, or women of color, to their rightful black in the history of art in the Americas. Unfolding over four consecutive years, it leads to the publication of eighty-eight biographies, ten research articles, and three videos in the “Little Stories of Great Women Artists” series, as well as two research residencies (Christelle Lozère and Kássia Borges), an international symposium, and several events at the Villa Vassilieff.
This four-year program (2022–2025) showcases Japanese women artists through the production and dissemination of scientific content on the AWARE website. The project draws on prior research to continue to reveal the presence of Japanese women in artistic movements from the 19th century to the present day, thanks to the reflections of a scientific committee composed of five experts based in Japan.
One of the two prizes, hitherto devoted to emerging artists, evolves to recognize mid-career artists, who are far less supported by grants, fellowships, salons, residencies, and prizes, and the current arts ecosystem at large. The sixth edition recognizes Myriam Mihindou for the Nouveau Regard Prize and Laura Lamiel for the Outstanding Merit Prize.
The winner of the Nouveau Regard Prize benefits from a residency at Villa Albertine in New York, personalized support from the A.I.R. Gallery, based in the same city, and the acquisition of works by CNAP. This residency is replicated for four editions, the last of which is scheduled in 2026.
Bétonsalon, in Paris, presents “Soupe primordiale” a solo exhibition of Tiphaine Calmettes curated by Émilie Renard, co-produced by AWARE in partnership with DCA, a French association for the development of contemporary art centers. Tiphaine Calmettes is a winner of the 2020 AWARE Prize.
AWARE launches a research residency program on women and non-binary photographers and video artists. Through 2026, this program welcomes a resident for three months each year in a dedicated studio within the Villa Vassilieff: Alexandra Symons-Sutcliff, Kássia Borges, Sonia D’Alto, Amelia Groom, and Oluwatobiloba Ajayi.
Twenty-six artists born between 1900 and 1951 are highlighted to compose an alternative history of art through the “Spotlight” selection.
Built with the Njabala Foundation in Kampala (Uganda), this program seeks to highlight the work of women artists in Africa during the 1960s, a decade marked by a profound transformation and achievement of independence for a significant number of countries across the continent. Accompanied by a scientific committee, the program produces biographies, research articles, and a symposium in Uganda.
The association questions the notion of lineage and artistic genealogy through a series of meetings organized by invited curators. These meetings activate the documentary resources held by AWARE and are accompanied by a video program. Between 2022 and 2025, multiple events take place: “Manglares” (with Persona Curada, Noelia Portela, and Cris Cyril), “Sur un fil” (with Zamân Books), « Ukraine xx » (with Oksana Karpovets)…
One thousand illustrated biographical notices of women and non-binary artists from around the world, born between 1790 and 1972, are published on AWARE’s website.
AWARE-USA is created to collect donations on the American continent in order to pursue the Parisian association’s mission: the creation, indexation, and distribution of information on women artists from the 16th through 21st centuries.
Carried out in collaboration with Asia Art Archive, this program seeks to encourage research, share knowledge, and produce digital archives on southeast Asian women artists in all their diversity. Over three years, this program produces many biographies and research articles published on AWARE’s website as well as a study day, all with the participation of a scientific committee and annually invited researchers and artists (based in Hong Kong, Yogyakarta, Bangkok).
The seventh edition recognizes Rose Lowder for the Outstanding Merit Prize and Louisa Babari for the Nouveau Regard Prize.
This fellowship and residency program has the objective of encouraging research and artistic practice for artists in a transcultural context. At its heart are concepts of the Black Atlantic, following Paul Gilroy, and the Global South. Through the end of 2025, it has three awardees: Jerry Philogene, Sihle Motsa, and Clare Patrick.
In the context of this three-year research program, in collaboration with Asia Art Archive (AAA), an initial study day takes place at the partner organization’s Hong Kong headquarters. A second study day is organized the following year in Indonesia, in collaboration with the Indonesian Visual Art Archive (IVAA), based in Yogyakarta, and a third in 2025 at the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok.
AWARE opens the doors of the Villa Vassilieff to the public. For this occasion, an artist collective, Union Quoi? International·e, intervenes in the space to offer different activities and ateliers around matrilineal transmission. Afterward, AWARE invites the collective for a residency in its research center. During the 2023–2024 academic year, the artists thus offer four reading workshops open to the public.
In the context of the program “The Origin of Others,” in collaboration with the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) and Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA), AWARE organizes “On the Edge of Visibility: An International Symposium“, an event around women and non-binary artists of African and Indigenous ancestry, with a special emphasis on practices in three major geographic zones: Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States.
The website now hosts biographies of artists from the 18th century, in partnership with the Baltimore Museum of Art, Art Gallery of Ontario, Rijksmuseum, and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts through the program “Reilluminating the Age of Enlightenment: Women Artists of the 18th Century.” This program is inscribed within the AMIS network, which brings together museums from across the world.
Beginning in this year, AWARE offers new biographical notices on international artists born in 1973. Each year, a new year will be added to slowly advance the site’s temporal purview.
The association gifts its didactic system “Be AWARE” to FRAC Grand Large (Dunkerque), after several years of travelling installations.
These workshops on artist role models are an occasion for welcoming upward of twenty groups of high schoolers to the Villa Vassilieff through December 2025. Two artists are invited to offer original workshops, conceived in dialogue with AWARE’s work: Morgane Baffier and Cheryl Ann Bolden.
The eighth edition recognizes Laura Huertas Millán for the Nouveau Regard Prize and Katherina Thomadaki (for her joint work with Maria Klonaris) for the Outstanding Merit Prize.
Organized in collaboration with the Njabala Foundation and held at Makerere University in Kampala (Uganda), this symposium concentrates on the often neglected contributions of women artists during this watershed decade in history across the African continent.
The exhibition is co-produced by AWARE in partnership with DCA, the French association for development of contemporary art centers. Gaëlle Choisne was winner of the 2021 AWARE Prize.
In the context of the Season of Lithuania in France, AWARE, in collaboration with the Institut Français, Artnews, and Echo Gone Wrong, organizes a residency to make visible the active role of Lithuanian artists in artistic production in the 20th and 21st centuries. The winner of an open call is Inesa Brašiškė. Additionally, five biographical notices of Lithuanian artists are added to the website.
The Njabala Fondation, Independent Curators International (ICI), and AWARE launch a mentorship program for supporting six emerging curators based in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda.
On the occasion of the association’s ten-year anniversary, the website’s taxonomy is overhauled to better showcase the diversity of content and events that it has developed.
This new section seeks to make the website’s content more accessible to a Japanese audience. It is born of work carried out in Japan since 2020 in collaboration with local experts and institutions. These collaborations are reinforced and extended over the years.
From June to December, a season of events is organized at Villa Vassilieff around lesbian and queer presences in the history of art in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Working from a common interest in feminist and trans-local approaches, AWARE invites the Initiative for Practices and Visions of Radical Care to a residency over several months. During this period, the Initiative offers events around the theme of “care as methodology”.
This project is presented during a conference on women artists of the American west at Jackson Hole (Wyoming).
AWARE opens its doors to the public and invites five artists engaged in performance practices (Fallon Mayanja, Boryana Petkova, Iskra Blagoeva, Morgane Baffier, and Cheryl Ann Bolden) to dialogue with the association’s missions and its research center at the Villa Vassilieff.
This group, composed of six professors and two members of the oversight board for visual arts at the Académie de Créteil, works together on pedagogical tools destined for teachers in visual arts programs at middle and high schools, based on the curriculum of the Ministry of National Education. The French-language educational booklet “Women Artists: Pathways and Proposals for Diversifying the Teaching of Visual Arts” is published in November 2025. The group likewise involves AWARE in associated teacher trainings.
The exhibition “Praesentia” offers a generous overview of the work by Myriam Mihindou, winner of the 2022 Nouveau Regard Prize, drawn from the past twenty years and including new work. It is conceived by the Palais de Tokyo and CRAC Occitanie in Sète, where it is subsequently presented in February 2025, and co-produced by AWARE, in the context of the 2022 AWARE Prizes, in partnership with DCA.
NEST: Network for Empowerment, Solidarity, and Transregionality is an alliance of NGOs and independent structures sharing common values, initiated by AWARE. These organizations collaborate from different parts of the world with the common goal of showcasing women and non-binary artists and their worlds in art history and contemporary art. AWARE hosts member organizations during a two-day event in Paris, with a closed-door meeting at the Villa Vassilieff as well as the public event “u>A Story Named Joy“, with the participation of Trinh T. Minh Ha, at the Palais de Tokyo.
AWARE invites the Nest Collective, composed of artists Park Chae Biole, Park Chae Dalle, and Constance de Raucourt, to a residency based at the documentation center at Villa Vassilieff. Over the course of 2025, the collective organizes three events around the notions of parenthood, home, and exile.
The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain and AWARE come together for a signal event around textile arts, inviting researchers and artists to question the practice of weaving through a feminist and decolonial perspective. This event is organized on the occasion of the major retrospective exhibition at the Fondation Cartier devoted to Olga de Amaral, a singular figure of the Colombian art scene and Fiber Art.
The Louvre and AWARE join forces to deepen and share knowledge of women artists found in the museum’s collections and to extend the association’s chronological boundaries to include artists of the 16th century. Thanks to this scientific and cultural partnership, staff from the Louvre’s departments of Painting, Graphic Art, Sculpture, and Objets d’art have contributed to the writing of biographical notices and research articles now published on AWARE’s website. The program is conduced in the framework of the AMIS network.
On the occasion of the exhibition “Video Game, AI and Contemporary Art” at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, this symposium presents the contributions of women and non-binary artists in new media since the 1960s. It forms part of an eponymous program which yields biographical notices and research articles for the website.
The Japanese-language section of the website is presented to the press and its launch is celebrated with collaborators during a cocktail at the Institut Français in Tokyo.
“Common Ground” is a multiform research program around feminist and decolonial ecologies. It is born of the fact that when one speaks of ecology, be it in art history or in other fields, women are less represented even when they are the most active. This program gives rise to the commissioning of several artist biographies and articles.
This program is devoted to fostering the study and visibility of Japanese photographers. Conceived in dialogue with a consulting committee, it explores such photographers’ practices in an expanded historical context as well as within contemporary discourses.
As part of celebrations for the association’s ten-year anniversary, AWARE and FRAC Champagne-Ardenne join up for a retrospective exhibition dedicated to winners of the AWARE Outstanding Merit Prize. Evoking the trajectories of lives and careers, whether individual or collective, this exhibition pays homage to the singular paths of these artists.
Published with Éditions La Martinière, this anthology brings together the voices of forty artists active in a vibrant and cosmopolitan Paris between the Belle Époque and the eve of the Second World War, including women who were famous around the world and others who remain unknown.
AWARE, having already stretched its chronological parameters, expands in turn its engagement beyond the field of visual arts. Through two dedicated programs, architects and designers progressively join the artist index and are the object of research articles.
AWARE opens the doors of the Villa Vassilieff to a young people ayoung people and those accompanying them – family, friends, teachers and educators. Workshops and artistic activities, in dialogue with AWARE’s missions and its documentation center, are offered by six artists: Morgane Baffier, Cheryl Ann Bolden, Keywa Henri, and the Nest Collective, composed of Park Chae Biole, Park Chae Dalle, and Constance de Raucourt.
This program, conduced with the National Center for Art Research (NCAR) in Japan, seeks to reinforce the study of women and non-binary artists active in the field of visual art and having a connection with Japan. It supports two projects each year.
AWARE leaves its premises at the Villa Vassilieff and donates its research center collection to two Parisian libraries: Bibliothèque de l’École Normale Supérieure (ENS) and Bibliothèque Kandinsky at the Centre Pompidou, thereby enriching public collections.
AWARE is integrated as a unit within the Musée National d’Art Moderne, in order to continue and develop its foundational missions of research and valorization, and to reinforce the museum’s activities in this area.
