Paris women’s art exhibition

This video from the USA is called The Guerrilla Girls at the Feminist Future Symposium, MoMA.

From British daily The Guardian:

Stealing the show

The largest all-female art exhibition in the world has opened at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. So is the art world finally taking work created by women seriously? Syma Tariq reports

* Friday 10 July 2009

In 1989, a group of women plastered posters across New York. “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met?”, the slogan asked. The Guerrilla Girls, as the activists were known, were outraged that while only 5% of the artists in the Museum of Modern Art were women, 85% of the nudes were female. Twenty years on, these posters are not just being exhibited inside a national museum – they are part of the largest all-female showcase in contemporary art to date, one that might finally show the art world what it has been missing.

1. elles@pompidou
2. Pompidou Centre,
3. Paris

1. Until 24 May 2010

It is the first time the Pompidou Centre in Paris has displayed its new permanent collection of female painters, photographers, designers, architects, sculptors, performance artists and film-makers. After decades of excluding women from its major shows, elles@pompidou is an enormous visual manifesto for the institution, proving its commitment to putting female artists at the core of modern and contemporary art. Among the 200 artists taking part are heavyweights such as role-playing photographer Cindy Sherman, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, who last year filled Tate Modern’s vast turbine hall with 200 bunk beds; and Roni Horn, whose series of photographs of a pale-faced woman (You Are the Weather) were the stars of her solo show there in London earlier this year.

This exhibition would have been impossible to mount even five years ago, according to curator Camille Morineau – the museum simply did not have enough work by women. This, she admits, was partly due to a lack of interest by former curators. But thanks to an attitude change at the Pompidou, 40% of its art by women was bought within the last four years and none of it has been borrowed from other galleries. “We’ve been buying more female artists,” she says. “There hasn’t been an open discussion about it, but my associate curators and I have a similar and particular vision of the world – more so than people in the art world from an older generation.”

Only a short walk away, another Parisian landmark offers a reminder of how unusual Morineau’s attitude is. The Louvre holds 35,000 artworks, and is the most visited museum in the world, but currently has no female artists in its collection. As a museum that deals with older art this is perhaps unsurprising, but the museum has held short exhibitions that included female painters such as early 20th-century artist Marie D’Orleans.

Who was really early 19-th century.

In the UK, the National Gallery has just four paintings by two female artists among its 2,300 works on show. The trustees of the … Tate Modern, which deals with contemporary and modern art, admit that women make up only 12% of its entire collection. By contrast, the sheer scale of the Pompidou’s collection of art by women is impressive – it has 500 pieces. There is also a dedicated website, lecture programmes and catalogue. However, Morineau says that getting an all-female show off the ground wasn’t easy: “There is a fear over isolating a group – women – but to me that creates a barrier.”

In the UK, major recent exhibitions of art by women have either featured work by individuals or group exhibitions specifically addressing gender. For instance Bad Girls, the last all-female exhibition at a big gallery, was held in 1994 at the ICA, and in it artists responded to the idea of women as passive objects. By contrast, the Pompidou collection’s pamphlet insists the art “is neither female nor feminist in its point of view”.

Women Artists Still Face Discrimination: here.