Feminism meets the big exhibition: museum survey shows since 2005

In the years 2005-2011 something remarkable happened. Feminist art and/ or art by women was made the focus of many exhibitions in major museums: over twenty institutions in different parts of the world put significant time and financial resources into surveys of feminist art and/or art by women. This phenomenon occurred mostly in European countries, but also in the USA, Iceland, Russia, Japan and elsewhere.
These exhibitions have occurred 35-40 years after the women’s liberation movement, the art world, and art history first intersected in a way that was highly productive. That so many major museums felt that it was timely to reassess this movement and its intersection with the art world provokes the questions: What feminist politics informed these exhibitions, and what feminist politics did they produce? As a result of the choices made by the curators, how would viewers of these exhibitions understand the intersection of feminism with the art world? What was the curators’ reading of the history of this work? What histories of feminism have these exhibitions produced? This essay will examine four of the survey exhibitions in an attempt to answer some of these questions: 'WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution' (LA: 2007); Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: 45 Years of Art and Feminism (Bilbao: 2007); REBELLE. Art and Feminism 1969-2009 (Arnhem: 2009); elles@centrepompidou (Paris: 2009).

Permission granted on 24/04/17, by On Curating (http://www.on-curating.org/) to include the published article in the Middlesex University Research Repository.

Revised version of essay first published in Anglo Saxonica