Agshow 2012

Agshow 1956 for Feminage. Backstory and forwardstory

The Feminage exhibition is the first in a series of three annual exhibitions accompanied by three roundtables to guide a proposed new National Feminist Art Exhibition in March 2015. Much of feminist thinking was seemingly comfortably absorbed into the post-modern movement, yet in most democracies women artists only occupy twenty per cent of the walls of museums and galleries. (See n.paradoxa statistics page.) This lack of statistical redress extends to the institutional neglect of feminist thinking and aesthetics.

Two decades ago, art historian the late Joan Kerr (1938-2004) initiated a three-part women’s art project using Australian Research Council funding. There were three main outcomes. The first, the thematic and collaborative compendium Heritage: The national women’s art book, 500 works by 500 Australian women artists from colonial times to 1955, was launched on the 20th Anniversary of International Women’s Year at the National Gallery of Australia. The National Women’s Art Exhibition organised by Kerr and Jo Holder with more than 150 exhibitions, of both historical and contemporary art by women envisaged as a ‘great imaginary exhibition’, opened on the same day in 1995. Finally, Kerr and Holder edited Past Present: The national women’s art anthology memorialising and critiquing the program with commissioned texts, extracts from catalogue essays and reviews. The National Feminist Art Exhibition in March 2015 will cover some of the decades of feminist art practice that followed.

View at The Cross Art Projects – https://www.crossart.com.au/exhibition-archive/99-2012-exhibitions-projects/169-feminage-the-logic-of-feminist-collage

Agshow 2, paper collage, 2012, 29 x 20cm

Agshow 4, paper collage, 2012, 29 x 20cm