50 US Museums Are Teaming Up to Organize Exhibitions of Female Artists in the Run-Up to the 2020 Election

In the aftermath of the election of President Donald Trump and
the 2017 Women’s March, one curator was inspired to take action on
behalf of women artists, creating an initiative to help promote
feminist art exhibitions, performances, and programs around the
country ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

This week, the fruits of her labor will become public. Apsara
diQuinzio, the senior curator of Modern and contemporary art at the
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film
Archive, will officially launch the Feminist Art Coalition
(FAC), a nationwide effort to organize shows of art by women. The
Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum of American Art in
New York, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis are among the 50
museums that have already signed on to participate, and diQuinzio
expects more to follow suit.

The project has been spearheaded by a small group of dedicated
curators. “We started meeting informally,” diQuinzio told Artnet
News. “The inspiration for the project was really the Getty’s
Pacific Standard Time. Thinking about how we could organize on a
national scale without the budget of the Getty, we decided that it
really had to be a grassroots initiative.” (The Art Newspaper
was the first to report on the program.)

“Many of us were caught off guard by the results of the 2016
presidential election,” diQuinzio added. “This urgent need to do
something was how this came about. We thought it would be good to
create a cultural groundwork where important conversations relating
to gender and politics could take place within art institutions in
a thoughtful, strategic way in the lead up to the 2020
election.”

The project’s website, Feministartcoalition.com, is going live
on November 5, just in time for this year’s election day. The
exhibitions, most of which will launch in fall 2020, are also timed
to the centennial of the 19th amendment, which was ratified in 1920
and granted women the right to vote. (“An incredible coincidence,”
said diQuinzio.)

In 2017, the Warhol Foundation awarded diQuinzio a $50,000
curatorial grant, which helped fund a three-day colloquium at
BAMPFA in April 2018, culminating with a public program at UC
Berkeley. Titled “Feminist Curatorial Practices: A Roundtable
Convening,” the panel discussion featured female curators and
museum directors from around the country and served as a starting
point for the broader project.

Next fall’s FAC exhibitions will include “Lorraine O’Grady:
Both/And” at the Brooklyn Museum, a Dorothy Iannone show at MIT
List, Dorothy Napangardi at the Seattle Art Museum, and Virginia
Jaramillo at the Menil Collection in Houston, not to mention the
highly anticipated Judy Chicago retrospective at the de Young
Museum in San Francisco.

At the ICA LA, new director Anne Ellegood will be teaming up
with the Hammer, where she worked for the last decade, on a joint
group show of mid-career artists called “Witch Hunt,” while
diQuinzio is curating “New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st
Century” at BAMPFA. The show will feature more than 100 works by
about 75 international artists from the turn of the millennium
through today.

In addition to showcasing woman-centric programming at
institutions across the country, the FAC website will also offer a
feminist art reading list, recommending existing books and videos
as well as “Notes on Feminisms,” a series of newly commissioned
essays.

Despite a growing amount of awareness that women have not been
given as much museum exposure as their male peers, the numbers
remain wildly unequal. Just 11 percent of acquisitions and 14 percent of
exhibitions at 26 high-profile American museums were of work by
women over the past decade, according to a recent investigation by
Artnet News and In Other Words.

“In the last couple years,” said diQuinzio, “there’s been a lot
of progress toward diversifying museum programming. It’s been kind
of the zeitgeist, and it’s very encouraging to see, but we still
have a lot more work to do obviously, particularly in the
representation in institutional collections.”

DiQuinzio and her collaborators have been spreading the word
about FAC among their colleagues and at different conferences, but
this week’s official project launch should take the initiative to
the next level. “We’re hoping,” she added, “that it will sort of
grow organically, sort of like the Women’s March did.”

The post 50 US Museums Are Teaming Up to Organize
Exhibitions of Female Artists in the Run-Up to the 2020
Election appeared first on artnet News.