Coalition Showcases Feminist Art

The day after Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, Apsara DiQuinzio went to the Women’s March in Los Angeles. Inspired by the grassroots nature of the protest and the throngs of people that turned out, DiQuinzio wanted to find a way to channel the feeling and energy she found there and make it a national conversation.

“It was the monstrosity of our current situation,” she said. “The idea came from recognizing that misogyny was alive and real in our culture and we had not made the progress I thought we had.”

DiQuinzio, the curator of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), wanted to do something. And what she knows is art.

“I wanted to create a structure where these conversations could take place that would align strategically with the next election,” DiQuinzio said. “Because it kind of felt like everything caught us off guard, and after the election I was snapped back to reality. I started to think about creating not a hierarchical structure, but a network of museums. I reached out to a group of colleagues to ask them, ‘Is this viable?’ and they were very encouraging.”

The curators began a conversation, and after DiQuinzio got a $50,000 grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, a dozen of them met in Berkeley to talk about ideas. They developed the Feminist Art Coalition (FAC), an unprecedented collective undertaking meant to support feminist themes with artist retrospectives, group exhibitions, performance art, and film festivals. The coalition grew to include curators at more than 100 art institutions nationwide planning exhibitions promoting social change and civic engagement. It was planned for September to November 2020 (most museum exhibitions take two years or so to put together) leading up to the presidential election, but the pandemic scrambled the timeline, so although some institutions were able to move forward with shows in the fall, a lot of programming will happen in the coming year.

Aldeide Delgado, founder and director of the Women Photographers International Archive in Miami, is on the steering committee. Her organization will hold a two-day congress with women photographers, art historians, and curators at the Pérez Art Museum Miami next November. She said as soon as she heard about the project, she knew she wanted to be part of it.

“I strongly believe in the power of sisterhood,” Delgado said. “Having more than 100 institutions across the United States participating in a program that recognizes women’s contributions to art history and feminist discourse gives a clear counterpoint to museums, which are traditionally white and male.”

Art can change people’s minds and make them think of things in a new way, Delgado believes.

“Photography is such a powerful medium,” she said. “If we can imagine possible worlds, then we can strive towards a more just society. It proposes an alternative to the world we have and it allows you to see what you want it to be.”

DiQuinzio agrees that visual components can provoke new ideas in a way a talk or a news story can’t — she gives as an example work by New York City Sanitation Department’s artist-in-residence, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who has held the position since 1977.

“Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside,” a set of black-and-white photographs from 1973, shows Ukeles washing the steps of Connecticut’s Wadsworth Atheneum: pouring water, wielding her mop, and scrubbing the pavement with a rag — a white artist doing the maintenance work usually done by people of color.

“That simple action opens up a space for us to think about sanitization and who’s doing the work and the cleaning,” DiQuinzio said. “She wrote a manifesto for maintenance [which lays out the difference between development (mostly male) and maintenance (which women mostly do)], and it helps to think about health and work and care.”

Showing feminist art at large and small organizations all over the country makes a powerful statement, says another member of FAC’s steering committee, Henriette Huldisch, chief curator at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center. The museum’s exhibition Don’t let this be easy, on view through July, focuses on work of women artists from the collection from the 1970s through today.

“We are civic institutions showing female and female-identified artists and amplifying their voices,” Huldisch said about FAC. “At one of our early meetings, somebody brought up that if we get x number of institutions, it could tip the scales and we’d have more women on view than men. That’s not the purpose of this, but it’s very compelling.”

Huldisch thinks the FAC has even greater urgency now than when they first planned it.

“Civic uprising and racial reckoning are in heightened relief,” she said. “This is a feminist progressive social movement and a movement for social justice and change.”

Vic Brooks, the senior curator of time-based visual art at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in Troy, New York, finds the grassroots nature of the program and the process exciting.

“We are a real working group in the tradition of feminist practices about giving everyone involved agency,” she said. “There are museums and nonprofits showing public programs and films and everything in between.”

EMPAC will screen Dicen que cabalga sobre un tigre (They say she rides a tiger) by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, which shows a gender-nonbinary world order in the near future.

Brooks says she’s seen art expand the way people look at the world.

“A young chemist come up after a screening,” she said. “He said, ‘I have never seen anything like this, and now I can’t see the same. My way of thinking has changed.’ Art has incredible power, I think.”

BAMPFA’s contribution to the FAC is New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century, an extensive survey of feminist art due to open at the end of February.

For DiQuinzio, acknowledging that feminism is not a singular concept is important, so she prefers to put it in the plural.

“There are so many different versions of feminism today,” she said. “To say feminism pigeonholes it.”