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.
This essay elaborates on women-only shows organized in post-war Europe by the associations of (women) artists that – as initial research has shown – were major initiators of this type of exhibitions during the period. It proposes a comparative analysis of operations of this type of association in three countries whose situations during and after the war differed considerably: Austria, France and Poland. The geopolitical positions of these countries and the gender politics they implemented influenced the operation of (women) artists’ associations and the organization of their annual exhibitions, but also the place they occupy in the art historical narratives.
Agata Jakubowska is Associated Professor and Deputy Director at the Department of Art History, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. She is the author of On Margins of the Mirror. Female Body in the Polish Women Artists’ Works (in Polish, Poznań 2004), Multiple Portrait of the Alina Szapocznikow Oeuvre (in Polish, Poznań 2008), Awkward objects. Alina Szapocznikow (ed., Museum of Modern Art, distributed by the Chicago University Press, Warsaw 2011), All-Women Art Spaces in Europe in the Long 1970s (ed. together with Katy Deepwell, Liverpool University Press, 2018). She is currently working on a project devoted to the history of women-only exhibitions in Poland and a book on the Polish sculptor Maria Pinińska-Bereś (1931-1999).