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.
Au XIXe siècle, la scène artistique à Riga était assez peu développée : il était impossible d’y suivre une éducation artistique de qualité, le marché de l’art était quasiment inexistant et seul un nombre relativement faible d’artistes ayant étudié en dehors des pays baltes y travaillaient. Elle est devenue sensiblement plus active après 1870 avec l’établissement de la Société d’art de Riga. En 1898, la société ouvre son Salon d’art, qui présente plusieurs expositions individuelles et au moins deux expositions collectives d’artistes femmes. L’une d’elles montrera des œuvres d’anciennes étudiantes de l’école de dessin d’Elise von Jung-Stilling, organisée après sa mort en 1904.
Baiba Vanaga (b. 1981) studied art history and theory at the Art Academy of Latvia, where she received the Doctor of Arts (Dr. art.) degree. She has worked at the Latvian National Museum of Art and at the National Archives of Latvia, and now is working at the Rundāle Palace Museum. Her research interests are women artists, Baltic German artists and artistic life in Latvia in the 19th and early 20th century.