Feminism in Art: 1918 to 2018

Frieze Academy presents 'When Feminism met Art and when Art met Feminism: 1918 to 2018'.

In the year of the centenary of the vote for women, it is timely to explore how the emancipation of women has been expressed in art. What has one hundred years of art meant for the art women have produced, as well as for the art representing women’s lives. How closely has it mirrored the politics of the last century?

Shifting the paradigm of art history has involved much more than adding women and their history ­to existing categorisation. It has led to wholly new ways of conceptualizing what we study. It has raised the question of what is feminism within the confines of art.

Griselda Pollock and Jennifer Higgie will discuss and aim to bridge the rupture in the mid-twentieth century between political and cultural radicalism of the suffrage and suffragette movements 1900-1918 and the intense feminist engagement with art after 1960 in order to reconsider some of the misapprehensions about feminist thought, political and aesthetic radicalism in what was termed ‘the century of women’.

The talk will be held at Ely House, which has a long and chequered history. Built in 1776 by the leading architect Sir Robert Taylor, it has played host to everyone from clergymen to writers, poets, and suffragettes. The building was a meeting point for the avant-garde, artists and intellectuals until the American Red Cross moved in during the Second World War.

Speakers

Jennifer Higgie is the Editorial Director of frieze and the editor of Frieze Masters Magazine.

Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (CENTRECATH) at the University of Leeds. Committed to creating and extending an international, postcolonial, queer feminist analysis of the visual arts, visual culture and cultural theory, she is currently researching issues of trauma and the aesthetic, Aby Warburg's concept of the pathos formula, and the concept of concentrationary memory in relation to the Arendtian critique of totalitarianism. She is also writing on the cultural memory of feminism, on the image-making and creative agency of Marilyn Monroe, on Van Gogh and Memory of Place, and the theoretical writings of artist Bracha Ettinger. Her most recent publications include After-affects I After-images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation (Manchester, 2013); Art in the Time-Space of Memory and Migration (Freud Museum and Wild Pansy Press, 2013). Her most recent monograph, Charlotte Salomon: The Nameless in the Theatre of Memory (Yale, 2018) is being launched on 6 March in London.

Image: Mary Beth Edelson, Some Living American Women Artists / Last Supper, 1972. Courtesy: Balice Hertling, LLC, New York / The SAMMLUNG VERBUND Collection, Vienna © Mary Beth Edelson.