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 describes the two Esposizioni Internazionali Femminili di Belle Arti, which were the first international events for women artists ever held in Italy. The exibitions organised in Turin (in 1910-11 and 1913 respectively) were promoted by the magazine La Donna. They took place at a very important time for the development of a new status for women artists, giving more visibility and legitimacy to their artistic production. By using archival sources and contemporary documents, the essay describes the way in which this experience took place and highlights the complexity of institutional, social, patronage and matronage network contributing to its success.
Francesca Lombardi, storica dell’arte specializzata presso l’Università degli Studi di Siena, ha collaborato come ricercatrice con l’Università Roma Tre e il C.N.R. Attualmente lavora per la Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali. Nell’ambito delle sue ricerche sulla cultura figurativa tra XIX e XX secolo, ha approfondito in particolare il tema della produzione artistica femminile.