GWA Newsletter: March

A new audio guide series – Museums Without Men; St Brigid of Ireland; Art in Florence; everything you need to see, listen to, read and do this month!

Happy Women’s History Month! To coincide with the first day of March, I’m very excited to announce a new project: Museums Without Men.

MWM is an ever-growing audio series highlighting works by women and gender non-conforming artists in museum collections worldwide. The guides will be released throughout March, and initial partnering institutions include The Met, Hirshhorn, Tate Britain, Hepworth Wakefield, and – launching today – the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Read all about it in the Guardian (here and here), artnet, and on BBC R4’s Today:

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Last night I spoke with artists Clementine Keith-Roach and Ella Walker at Hauser & Wirth Somerset about a beautiful show they are both featured in, Present Tense. Don’t miss!

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In the second instalment of Art in Cities, I took readers on a GWA tour of Florence: a dream destination that features everything from the best paintings by Artemisia Gentileschi and Lavinia Fontana to the most decadent shell grottos, and more! Read the guide here (and check out last month’s guide to Mexico City):

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In The Guardian:

At the beginning of February I wrote about Saint Brigid, the 5th century feminist saint, and the first woman honoured with a public holiday in Ireland:

“The pagan Brigid was part of the Tuatha Dé Danann – a race of deities who are said to have inhabited Ireland before the Milesians, from whom today’s Irish people are descended. Raised among druids, Brigid was the daughter of an enslaved woman and the Dagda, chief of the gods. The myth goes that she created Ireland by throwing her cloak over the land, which unrolled like a silver flame. Once the mist cleared, the Tuatha Dé Danann were able to see their country clearly: a land of emerald green grass and luminously coloured flowers – a scene evocative of her feast day that marks the dawn of spring.” Read the rest here.

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Last week, I reflected on the recent Arts Council England guidelines, which previously warned that “political statements” made by individuals linked to an organisation can cause “reputational risk and may breach funding agreements”. Here’s my take on why you can’t divorce art from politics:

“At first glance, an artwork might not appear outwardly political. Yet it is not enough to see it for aesthetic purposes only. Art requires us to pay attention, to question – and appreciate – what we are looking at, but also to see what lies beyond it. Take textiles, an art form historically deemed as “decorative” by the establishment, because of its association with women’s work. But what this categorisation actually reveals is a deep political subtext – the struggle for women’s rights of the last 500 years.”

The article continues:

“In times of crisis, expression is sometimes all we have to hold on to. For most, it is the only form of resistance, and a way to highlight injustices and inequality. Artists are not a dangerous species, they do not destroy lives and deny people their rights. Artists hold up a mirror to the world, and, in the words of Emily Dickinson, tell the truth but tell it slant.” Click to read the rest.

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OK! Here are your top cultural picks. Katy. Xoxo

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10 Great Things to Listen To

1. Madeleine Gray via Sentimental Garbage

2. Tracy Chevalier and Edmund de Waal via Only Artists on BBC Sounds

3. Burning For Something with Celine Song & Sofia Coppola via The A24 Podcast

4. Katherine Rundell on Private Passions on BBC Sounds

5. Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture: Drag, Colour and Join Face via the Courtauld Research Forum

6. The Roots if the Harlem Renaissance – and Its Power Today via The Art Angle

7. Julie Mehretu via Talk Art

8. How to Have Sex: Molly Manning Walker just wants to talk via MUBI Podcast

9. Zineb Sedira via A brush with…

10. The World’s First Author via The LRB Podcast

Bonus: The Open Ears Project is my favourite podcast of all time, and it’s back for a second season!

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10 Great Shows to See in the UK

1. The Time is Always Now at the National Portrait Gallery (until 19 May)

2. Soulscapes at Dulwich Picture Gallery (until 2 June)

3. Uman at Hauser & Wirth, (until 30 March)

4. Zineb Sedira: Dreams Have No Titles at Whitechapel Gallery (until 12 May)

5. Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art at Barbican (until 26 May)

6. When Forms Come Alive at the Hayward Gallery (until 6 May)

7. Sargent and Fashion at Tate Britain (until 7 July)

8. Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley: THE REBIRTHING ROOM at Studio Voltaire (until 28 April)

9. Entangled Pasts, 1768-Now: Art, Colonialism Change at the Royal Academy (until 28 April)

10. The Goddess, the Deity and the Cyborg at the Women’s Art Collection at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge (until 8 September)

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15 Great Things to Read

1. Isabel Waidner: Corey Fah Does Social Mobility

2. Rebecca K Reilly: Greta and Valdin

3. Ogazielum Mba: This is How You Smile, for the LRB

4. James McBride: The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store

5. Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Until August

6. Barbara Kingsolver: Demon Copperhead

7. Emily La Barge: Following Yoko Ono’s Anarchic Instructions, for the New York Times

8. Madeleine Gray: Green Dot

9. N.S. Nuseibeh: Reflections on A Warrior Woman

10. Marina Warner: Multiplying Marys, for the LRB

11. Rachel Cockerell: Melting Pot: Family, Memory and the Search for a Promised Land

12. Françoise Sagan: Bonjour Tristesse

13. Rebecca Perry: On Trampolining

14. Phillip Hoare: Albert and the Whale

15. Tracy K. Smith: Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul

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4 Artist You Should Know

Jennie C. Jones (b.1968)

Jones is an interdisciplinary artist, often working at the intersection of visual art and sound, where she builds connections between three dimensional objects and seemingly intangible sound. Her work contends within the frameworks of modernism, particularly in her interest in musical forms, such as jazz.

Karen McLean (b.1959)

McLean’s work draws on her experiences growing up in Trinidad in the 1960s, a time of political decolonisation. Through sound, image and installation, the artist explores architectural and material culture to unravel and interrogate colonial power and legacy. (See her amazing work Primitive Matters: Huts, 2010 in the Royal Academy’s Entangled Pasts.)

Mary Beth Edelson (1933–2021)

Pioneer of the feminist art movement, Mary Beth Edelson was a multimedia artist born in Chicago. Like many women artists of her generation, to be an artist was also to be an activist campaigning for the work of women artists to be seen. Edelson is renowned for her merging of influences, from modernist images of women and children, by the likes of Cezanne and Monet to the goddesses of Greek mythology.

Alicia Reyes McNamara (graduated 2016)

Living in London, Reyes McNamara deals with varied kinds of displacement in her work. Often inspired by Mexican and Irish mythology, their images and figures feel like modes of cultural morphology. I love the sensual fluidity in both their application of oil and the composition of forms!

That’s it from me! Happy GWA’ing. Thank you for reading this Substack. If you think someone else might enjoy this too, please spread the word and share this article. If you have any feedback, please comment below.