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 1960 the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art inaugurated the exhibition Contribuição da mulher às artes plásticas no país. This was the first female collective exhibition of a large scale to happen in Brazil. However, although it happened in a prestigious institution and it gathered renowned artists, this exhibition did not get extensive press coverage and it did not inspire similar initiatives during the decade. This article proposes a reflection on this silence and on the resistance of Brazilian artistic circles to treating women artists as a collective, which could explain the late impact of feminism in this field.
Marina Mazze Cerchiaro, PhD student in Aesthetics and Art History at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo with a FAPESP scholarship. Her thesis focuses on the process of building the reputation of the Brazilian female sculptors from the 1940s to the 1960s who won the firsts Biennials of São Paulo (1951-1965).
Ana Paula Cavalcanti Simioni, Professor at the Institute of Brazilian Studies of the University of São Paulo. She is the author of several researches and publications in the area of sociology of art, in particular on the relations between art and gender in Brazil.
Talita Trizoli, PhD in Education at the University of São Paulo with a FAPESP scholarship. Her research addressed the presence of feminist issues in the works of Brazilian female artists during the 1960-1970s, and the problems of critical reception.