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.
La Société des femmes artistes modernes (FAM) a ouvert un espace permettant aux femmes artistes actives à Paris dans les années 1930 de développer leur pratique à travers des expositions annuelles intergénérationnelles et des collaborations internationales. La thèse soutenue ici est que FAM incarnait un paradoxe : d’une part, cette société soutenait les artistes souhaitant mettre en question les stéréotypes de genre, de race, de classe et de nation ; de l’autre, sa structure institutionnelle et sa direction n’ont pas contesté les présupposés patriarcaux concernant le rôle subordonné des femmes dans la société. L’article explore cette tension en comparant le travail et la réception critique de plusieurs artistes du groupe qui illustraient le thème de la maternité.
Paula J. Birnbaum is a professor at the University of San Francisco and author of Women Artists in Interwar France: Framing Femininities (Ashgate/Routledge, 2011). Her scholarship focuses on modern and contemporary art in relationship to gender and sexuality, as well as institutional and social politics. She is presently completing a biography of the sculptor, Chana Orloff, forthcoming with Brandeis University Press.