Week X
Naming The Women
Could we name 5 women artists? From those, how many of them are contemporary? Do we actually know women artists prior to the 1900s?
With this project, what I want to do is to highlight the fact that women artists should not be treated as a separate curiosity like governments’ curriculums are trying to paint it, but rather as any human artistic creation should be understood, studied, and transmitted, and for that reason, students deserve to know and study it. They deserve to have a curriculum updated and loyal to historical rigour. Only through education can we create a more egalitarian society, and at the moment, despite the efforts that are being made to advance towards a more equitable art history, there are still many steps to be taken while the educational contents remain so unbalanced. The first step, then, would be to name the artists, for if something is not named, it doesn’t exist.
So in this third term, the main idea is to get the names of artists like Artemisia Gentileschi, Luisa Roldán, Camille Claudel or Lavinia Fontana (amongst many, many others) out in the street, for people to see and know. With the help of galleries that can offer a space for this campaign, we can try to get the conversation going, and put some pressure on institutions asking in Dublin for the first time: where have been all the great women artists in History?
After speaking with Fiona on Monday, we both agreed that I should reach out to more professionals in the field. They can help me to better understand how to approach this idea of doing a city-wide campaign, with a space where interested people can interact with the artists and learn about their life and work. In fact, next week I will be conducting an interview with Dr Aoife Brady, a curator at the National Gallery of Ireland who is also in charge of an exhibition about artist Lavinia Fontana that will be very relevant internationally.
I also need to start gathering some pictures and ideas to jump into design in the upcoming weeks. At the same time, I have to develop a brand, for which I will need to create the name and everything that goes with it. This week we did an interesting exercise with Vivienne to start warming up and get to know better our target audience and their possible engagement with our project: mapping a customer journey. In my case, I took my customer, Florence, out into the streets, for her to interact with the “campaign”.
About #5WomenArtists | National Museum of Women in the Arts (2023). Available at: https://nmwa.org/support/advocacy/5womenartists/.
De Diego Otero, E. (2020) “A propósito de la calidad,” in Las mujeres y el universo de las artes / coord. por Concha Lomba Serrano, M. Carmen Morte García, Mónica Vázquez Astorga, pp. 15–28. Available at: https://ifc.dpz.es/recursos/publicaciones/38/38/02dediego.pdf.
Fajardo Galarreta, A. (2016) La inclusión de mujeres artistas y la perspectiva de género en el currículo de Historia del Arte de Bachillerato. Thesis.
Lomba Serrano, C., Morte García, C. and Vázquez Astorga, M. (2020) Las mujeres y el universo de las artes [Ebook]. INST.FERNANDO EL CATOLICO. Available at: https://ifc.dpz.es/recursos/publicaciones/38/38/_ebook.pdf.
Nochlin, L. (2020) “ARTnews.com,” ARTnews.com, 20 October. Available at: https://www.artnews.com/art-news/retrospective/why-have-there-been-no-great-women-artists-4201/.
Feel free to read my other blog posts! You can find them here.
Between The Brackets: Outcome
“There isn’t anything inherently different about work created by artists of any particular gender - it’s more that society and its gatekeepers have always prioritised one group in history” (K. Hessel, 2022)