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.
In France, during the 1970s, women artists gathered together to fight against their invisibility on the artistic scene. Several collectives carried their demands, accompanied by some theorists, who worked to make their work known. The decade thus saw the emergence of multiple exhibitions of women artists, linked to these collectives with varied ideologies. This article focuses on this profusion of exhibitions, based on a pioneering research published in the book Witches as others. Artists and Feminists in the 1970s France.
Fabienne Dumont est historienne de l’art, critique d’art et professeure à l’ENSAD-Nancy. Sa thèse est devenue un livre, Des sorcières comme les autres. Artistes et féministes dans la France des années 1970 (PUR, 2014). Elle a édité l’anthologie La rébellion du Deuxième Sexe. L’histoire de l’art au crible des théories féministes anglo-américaines (1970-2000) (Les presses du réel, 2011) et codirigé deux projets collectifs, L’histoire n’est pas donnée. Art contemporain et postcolonialité en France (PUR, 2016) et À l’Ouest toute ! Travailleuses de Bretagne et d’ailleurs (Les presses du réel, 2017). Elle prépare un essai monographique au sujet de Nil Yalter.