SESSION: Feminism in the Art Institution

Katy Deepwell (2006) argued that ‘who controls our institutions has feminist implications’. This panel will explore the impact of feminism on art institutions, including how work by women artists has been acquired and curated.

While feminist politics have often been positioned as critical of institutional neglect, in recent years the artworld seems to have become more welcoming to feminist artists, feminist practitioners and feminist ideas. These changes correspond with the growing interest in nascent feminist institution-building around histories of women’s liberation and women-centred practice. Despite this, as Griselda Pollock (2022) has acknowledged, the uptake of feminist thinking sometimes requires negotiation, often depending on who is in control.

We invite papers that explore the possibilities and pitfalls of feminism in the art institution. These may tackle transformations in forms of working, or in practices of collection and display. Alternatively, these may enquire into what constitutes a feminist collection and who it may include. We ask, how do feminist practices challenge gendered types or art historical canons, and what are the limits of this work, including where it has met resistance?

We encourage papers that focus on specific case studies. While these may be drawn from any context, this session emerges from research undertaken on The Women’s Art Collection (WAC) at Murray Edwards College (University of Cambridge), which holds the work of over 400 artists in the context of an educational institution.

Session Convenors:

Ella Nixon, The Women’s Art Collection (Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge

Session Speakers:

Alice Correia, Independent researcher

Feminist Curating at Rochdale Art Gallery in the 1980s

During the 1980s, a team of women curators, led by Jill Morgan, oversaw a remarkable programme of feminist, and feminist inflected exhibitions at Rochdale Art Gallery. This paper will ask: what were the feminist politics of Morgan and her team, which included Bev Bytheway, Sarah-Jane Edge, Lubaina Himid, and Maud Sulter, and how were those politics expressed in their curatorial practices? Is it possible to identify Rochdale Art Gallery in the 1980s as a feminist institution?

Drawing on Morgan’s essay, “Women Artists and Modernism”, published in Feminist Art News in 1990, alongside documents held in the Rochdale archive, this paper will consider the exhibition Speaking in Tongues: Women Artists and Modernism 1900-1935, which was the culmination of several years’ research. I will consider the hurdles Morgan faced in staging this exhibition and discuss its impact – or not – on the work of women artists and subsequent feminist curatorial practice. I will argue that parts of Tate Britain’s 2024 Now You See Us were unwitting and uncredited re-stagings of Morgan’s thesis. In light of this proposition, I will conclude with some reflections on why such a remarkable decade of exhibition making at Rochdale Art Gallery – which also included what must be one of the earliest examples of a decolonial collection display, selected by Himid and Sulter – has remained largely undocumented and under-recognised. What can we do to ensure that women curators are not constantly re-inventing the wheel?

Sofia Cotrona, CDP candidate at Imperial War Museums, University for the Creative Arts

Co-curating a Feminist Institution

Amid renewed institutional interest in feminist and community-based practices, art historian Beatrice von Bismark (2020) describes the curatorial situation as one of hospitality, mediated by tensions of care and control. Building on this, my paper examines the ‘co-curation turn’ in museums: the growing institutional adoption of collaborative practices between institutions and communities. It asks how co-curation can challenge or reinforce institutional power structures through feminist curatorial practices.

Through a materialist feminist lens, I explore how co-curation expands institutional norms of hospitality, agency, and participation, foregrounding reciprocity and feminist politics of care. Combining qualitative interviews, policy analysis, and exhibition study, I draw on two case studies: Glasgow Women’s Library, where co-curation is embedded, and the Imperial War Museums, which are transitioning towards it.

I situate co-curation within a feminist legacy of curatorial practices, rooted in community archives and art collectives from the late 1960s; grounded in kinship and non-hierarchical decision-making. I argue that co-curation enables counter-hegemonic narratives to emerge in collections and displays, expanding cultural authority through participatory practices (Lea). Yet echoing Silvia Federici (1974); practices rooted in care risk reproducing extractive participation under the guise of a ‘labour of love’.

Responding to Pollock’s provocation on feminist agency, I contend that co-curation’s transformative potential depends on reconfiguring governance and agency. To achieve a feminist institution, co-curation ideals need to extend beyond the medium of exhibition to transcend a subjugated visibility of minoritised narrative to move towards genuine institutional reformation.

Clare Sully-Stendahl, University of King’s College

A Poiesis of the Past: Pollock, Parafiction, and the Actualization of Feminist Imaginaries

In Griselda Pollock’s Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum (2007), she argues that feminist art history must always be in a state of becoming, a “poiesis of the future” rather than a prescriptive methodology. She imagines the model of a “Virtual Feminist Museum,” with “virtual” indicating that such a museum “could never be actual” given the inherent incompatibility of feminist analysis and institutional power structures. While Pollock compellingly analyzes this incompatibility, her “Virtual Feminist Museum”—like many theoretical critiques of feminist art historical approaches—remains at a critical remove from the hands-on practicalities of institutional work itself. I argue that what has been crucially overlooked in analyses of the limits of institutional “actualization” is those artists and approaches who were never themselves actual in the first place—and who, paradoxically, can offer us new methods for tangibly enacting feminism in the art institution.

My research considers the generative and joyful potential of the emerging genre of “parafiction” (Carrie Lambert-Beatty, 2009) in relation to contemporary feminist art and theory, focusing here on the case study of Carol Sawyer’s The Natalie Brettschneider Archive. Since the 1990s, Sawyer has been “researching and documenting” the life and work of “forgotten” avant-garde artist Natalie Brettschneider and bringing her to life through iterative exhibitions. Brettschneider is, in fact, Sawyer’s fictional creation. By weaving a fictional history with a factual past, Sawyer activates the past itself as the ground for feminist poiesis in the present. She researches and integrates archival materials and artworks that allow real women artists local to each institutional iteration to be encountered and interpreted in relation to Brettschneider, and thus outside of the power structures identified by Pollock as totalizing. I argue that this form of parafictional relational research offers a new model for institutional feminist art history, while demonstrating that imagining new approaches to art history may require imagining—and then enacting—new forms of the past.

Anja Segmüller, University of Oxford

Kunsthaus Erfurt: From Collective Experimentation to Feminist Institution

This paper examines the founding of the Kunsthaus Erfurt in 1991 as a feminist act of institutional transformation rooted in the legacy of the Künstlerinnengruppe Erfurt (1984–1994). Prior to 1989, the women artists associated with the group were excluded both from the GDR’s official art institutions and from the male-dominated underground art scene. In response to this double marginalization, the collective created its own forms of publicity through private performances and exhibitions in alternative spaces. These marginal practices gradually evolved into a vision for a self-determined feminist art space, which took institutional form in the turbulent aftermath of German reunification.

Structured as an association, the Kunsthaus Erfurt opened in Erfurt’s historic town as a multi-purpose venue encompassing a café for readings and live music, an exhibition floor for performance, installation, and visual art, and an atelier for avant-garde fashion and textile design. This multi-dimensional programme reflected the group’s holistic feminist ethos – refusing hierarchies between art forms and between public and private space. Initially conceived as an all-women art making and exhibition venue, it hosted international feminist performance festivals, providing visibility and empowerment at a moment of profound social upheaval.

Today, the Kunsthaus continues as a contemporary art gallery under the direction of former group member and co-founder Monique Förster. The paper traces how this loose, anarchic collective translated its feminist ideals into a sustainable institution, asking what is gained and lost when feminist self-organisation becomes institutionalised. Through extensive archival research and recently conducted oral history interviews, this paper seeks to situate the Kunsthaus Erfurt within broader debates on feminist space-making and considers how feminist infrastructures can endure without losing their radical potential.