The Women Artists Shows.Salons.Societies project was launched in 2017 as a collaboration between Artl@s and AWARE. Combining AWARE’s ambitions to restore the presence of 20th-century women artists in the history of art, and Artl@s’s desire to provide scholars with the data and tools necessary to question the canonical art historical narratives through quantitative and cartographic analyses, we decided to work on group exhibitions of women artists.
Our first ambition is to build a community of scholars and work together to develop a common terminology and even possibly a common and consistent methodology to study these events, because the ones used in the field of exhibition history are inadequate. None of these exhibitions “made art history” or can be thought as “exemplary,”and the discursive silence that surrounds them require art historians to come-up with new questions, new research strategies, and new discourses.
Through the programs we organized and will organize, and through the tools and resources we are making available to the public, including this issue of the Artl@s Bulletin, we also want to contribute to a global history of all-women exhibitions from the 1870s to the 1970s.
DOWNLOAD AND READ THE FULL-LENGTH INTRODUCTION ON THE ARTL@S BULLETIN WEBSITE.
Founded in Athens in 1954, the Association of Greek Women Artists organized a significant number of group exhibitions in Greece and abroad, where its members showed their work. This paper examines the context of the association’s all-women shows in the 1950s and 1960s and their meaning in relation to feminist cultural politics inside, but also beyond, national borders. More specifically, it analyzes the purposes of the collectivity, the critical reception of its exhibitions in Greece and their interpretation as female initiatives. It also explores the possible connections between the association and other Greek or foreign women’s groups.
Glafki Gotsi holds a PhD in the history of art from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She has taught at several university departments. She is currently employed at the Hellenic Open University. Her publications and research interests focus mainly on issues of modern and contemporary art from the perspective of the history of women and gender.