Underrepresented

Week 41 : Notes

Many international art institutions post short videos on YouTube or Vimeo with the focus on modern and contemporary art. One of the most active seems to be British Tate that podcasts interviews with artists, performances or walks through exhibitions on a weekly basis.

The programme about underrepresented women in art opens with a painting by Emily Mary Osborn (1828–1925), a British artist and campaigner for women’s rights in the Victorian area, followed by a performance commemorating Russian painter, fashion and costume designer Natalia Goncharova (1881 –1962). Not only did she greatly influence the avant-garde art scene in Russia but also émigré artists in Paris, after moving there in 1921 with her artist husband Mikhail Larionov (1881 –1964). ‘There were always women who were artists, but it was men, who wrote the history books.’ says English–US-American artist and actress Jemima Kirke. This is followed by the Guerrilla Girls, an anonymous group of masked, feminist artists founded in New York in 1985 that is devoted to fighting inequalities, sexism and racism in the art world. Joanna Moorhead, British journalist and author, discovers that she is related to surrealist painter and novelist Leonora Carrington (1917 –2011) and meets her in Mexico. Sheba Chhachhi, an Delhi-based photographer, multimedia installation artist and women’s rights activist and Helen Cammock, British artist, working with moving images, photography, poetry and installation, talk about how the (im)balance and power structures in society can be made visible through art. Philippine visual artist, filmmaker and human rights activist Kiri Dalena, co-founder of Southern Tagalog Exposure, a multimedia collective that focuses on audio-visual works with socio-political concerns, tells us about her artwork which is based on political traumatic occurrences and Joan Jonas, US-American visual artist and pioneer of video and performance art, gives advice to young artists.

It is perhaps surprising but not unexpected that, in 2021, after over a century of activist pressure, art by women is still underrepresented in museums and art collections. Blanche Anderson talks with archivists and museum curators about the reasons.