Instead of spending time and money on organizing yet another temporary “all women” exhibition, museums should direct resources to achieving true equality in their collecting and display practices.
Guerrilla Girls, USA, established 1985, The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist.
Courtesy of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
There was a time when the “all women” exhibition was radical and necessary. By foregrounding the artistic production of women, it made an important contribution to art history, introducing both specialists and the general public to artists previously excluded from the canon. For instance, the groundbreaking 1976 exhibition Women Artists: 1550-1950 , which debuted at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and traveled to three other institutions in the United States, showcased eighty-three artists from twelve countries, radically expanded scholarly understanding of American and European art. According to the curators Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin, the exhibition’s goal was “to make more widely known the achievements of some fine artists whose neglect can in part be attributed…
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