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 1927 the great Female Exhibition was held in Chile within the framework of the fiftieth anniversary of the Amunátegui Decree (1877), a precept that allowed women to go to university. The Exhibition was the result of a series of initiatives held by the high bourgeoisie that began in 1914 with the creation of women’s organizations such as the Women’s Art Society.
Twelve years later, in 1939, the MEMCH—the Pro-Emancipation Movement of Women in Chile—held the Actividades femeninas (Feminine Activities) exhibition, conceived as a response to previous experiences led by the elite, and focused on the political and social aspirations of women.
Art historian and curator with a broad knowledge of Chilean and Latin American Art from the end of the 19th to the beginning of the 20th century. Curator of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago de Chile. Focused on topics of republican imagery, peripheries and gender studies in art. Author of Modernas. Historias de mujeres en el arte chileno (1900-1950),(2018 ed. Origo, Santiago, 2013).