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.
The paper examines the history and the critical reception of the “Salón femenino de arte actual”, an annual all-female exhibition organized by a group of women artists in Barcelona between 1962 and 1971. Unique at the time, the “Salón” challenged the traditional role attributed to women under Franco’s dictatorship, managing at the same time to obtain support from local authorities. The paper argues that it was the ability of the organisers to take advantage of political ambivalence, to find a delicate balance between complicity and resistance, which allowed the exhibition to survive for almost a decade.
M. Lluïsa Faxedas (1974) est docteure en histoire de l’art. Elle enseigne histoire de l’art moderne et contemporain à l’Universitat de Girona (Espagne). Elle est membre de la chaire d’art et culture contemporains et participe à différents projets de recherche sur des aspects de l’art et de la culture, ainsi que sur les femmes artistes et l’art féministe.
Isabel Fontbona (1987) est doctorante dans le département d’histoire de l’art à l’Universitat de Girona (Espagne). Elle a obtenu une double licence en philosophie et en histoire de l’art, ainsi qu’une maîtrise de recherche sur les humanités. Sa thèse de doctorat porte sur le féminisme, le corps et la performance, entre autres sujets.
Patricia Mayayo (1967) est maîtresse de conférences en histoire de l’art contemporain à la Universidad autónoma de Madrid. Ses recherches s’attachent à l’histoire des femmes artistes, aux questions féministes et à l’art contemporain en Espagne.