Following the election of Donald Trump as president, and the 2017 Women’s March, Aspara diQuinzio, a senior curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, has teamed up with 50 US museums to help promote feminist art exhibitions, performances, and programmes ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
Today, diQuinzio will launch the Feminist Art Coalition (FAC), a country-wide effort to organise art exhibition by women. Among the 50 museums taking part is the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
Inspired by Getty’s Pacific Standard Time, an art initiative across southern Califronia that focuses on the cultural community through various themes connected to the region, the project is headed by a small group of curators across America. “Many of us were caught off guard by the results of the 2016 presidential election,” diQuinzio told ArtNet News. “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.”
Most of the exhibitions are due to launch in autumn 2020, to coincide with the centennial of the 19th amendment (which granted women the right to vote). Among them is Lorraine O’Grady at the Brooklyn Museum; Dorothy Lannone at MIT List; Dorothy Napangardi at the Seattle Art Museum; Virginia Jaramillo at the Menil Collection in Houston; and a Judy Chicago retrospective at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.
The launch follows the reopening of MoMa, which closed its doors for four months to reshuffle its collection to represent more women and people of colour. “In the last couple years, 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,” said diQuinzio.
See the full list of FAC exhibitions and programmes here.
