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.
TÉLÉCHARGER ET LIRE L’INTRODUCTION EN INTÉGRALITÉ SUR LE SITE DE L’ARTL@S BULLETIN.
Cet article reconstitue l’histoire du Women Artists’ Salon of Chicago, fondé en 1937 en tant que société d’expositions dans cette ville, et soutient que le conseil d’administration a pris pour modèle des organisations développées au XIXe siècle : le Palette Club et le Woman’s Building lors de l’Exposition universelle (World’s Columbian Exposition) de Chicago en 1893. Cet essai retrace également comment des membres du Women Artists’ Salon ont délibérément exposé des œuvres associées traditionnellement au féminin et à la sphère domestique, et ont organisé des événements destinés à en stimuler les ventes et susciter une nouvelle génération de collectionneuses d’art.
An associate professor at DePaul University, Joanna Gardner-Huggett’s research focuses on the intersection between feminism and arts activism. Her most recent scholarship explores the history of the Guerrilla Girls, the Feminist Art Workers, and the origins of the women artists’ cooperatives Artemisia Gallery in Chicago (1973-2003) and ARC (1973-present).