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FRIHUMSAM-Fri prosj.st. hum og sam

The Legacy of Feminism in Art Museums

Alternative title: Den feministiske arv i kunstmuseene

Awarded: NOK 12.1 mill.

What are the frameworks for building art collections today, and how are they rooted in storytelling and ideology? How can we make space for women?s art and culture? These are questions we ask in FLAME. In international surveys, Nordic countries score high on equality, and gender equality in particular is often seen as a Nordic value or almost a brand. Although issues of gender equality and diversity are regularly debated in the art field and in art museums, statistics show that women?s art is less frequently exhibited and purchased by art museums, and fewer catalogues and texts on works by women are written. This poses a general democratic problem as art museums are important cultural agents. Museums? inability to provide space for women as actors and cultural producers in both the present and the past is a democratic problem and a deficiency in museums as managers of cultural heritage. We argue that the lack of attention paid to and research on women?s art in art museums and collections is connected to a general lack of recognition of the feminist project in art history. FLAME therefore investigates the 1970s feminist activities in art. Our first conference Stofflighetens politik (or, Textile Politics) was held in June 2021 in collaboration with the University of Bergen and KODE Art Museums and Composers homes. The purpose was to illuminate and gather information about the importance of textiles for the female artists and how they reinvented the textile tradition in art and used it politically. We have also started visiting the archives to explore how feminism works in aesthetics, politics and institutional debates in ways that are specific for Norway, but also relate to a Nordic and transnational field. And how are these debates enmeshed in the management of collections in art museums? We will find out more soon, so follow our activities on the website www.ntnu.edu/flame and on the Instagram profile flame.research.

A new rapport from the Norwegian Arts Council document that women artists are still underrepresented in the collections of Norwegian art museums regardless of the fact that the problem with women’s representation has been discussed in the public sphere for decades now. This poses a general democratic problem as art museums are important cultural agents. Art museums still bow to a traditional canon favouring white, male artists when it comes to collecting art. FLAME claims that this is due to the fact that the feminist art movement of the 1970s has been ignored by the art institution. Feminist art did, in fact, have an impact on contemporary art, however this influence has never been acknowledged by the art institution and feminist art have never been thoroughly historicised in and integrated into an art historical context. If the women’s art movement is mentioned, it is always as something that happened beside other more important phenomena. To turn the blind eye on feminism as a historical and contemporary movement seems paradoxical in a Norwegian and Nordic context, where gender equality and sexual diversity are seen as inherent to the culture and as universal values. Art museums are complex institutions performing meaning at the intersection of their own histories, and the histories of art and culture. They are designed to both collect, preserve and produce, and the needs of contemporary society requires a combined survey of the art institution's modus operandi (how does collecting take place, who collects and what is collected) on the one hand and its history and anchoring (ideology) on the other. FLAME will pursue these issues through empirical research of the feminist avantgarde in the 1970s, its tools, exhibition types and social spaces in conjunction with a theorizing of the relationship to museums.

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FRIHUMSAM-Fri prosj.st. hum og sam