Still Invisible?

Abstract

In the inaugural "Conversation Piece" in British Art Studies, Issue 1, Richard Johns makes the observation that at the National Gallery, London, "British art" is represented by a selection of work by just ten artists-mostly English, all white, male, and born within eighty years of each other. Is it any wonder that British art can appear like an exclusive club with prohibitive requirements for entry? This exclusivity is particularly striking where British women artists are concerned, for the leading female artists in the collection-Rachel Ruysch, Rosalba Carriera, Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, and Rosa Bonheur-are all from Continental Europe. That these women were all painters is also a reminder of the extent to which gallery acquisitions have traditionally been dominated by painting, on occasion to the detriment of artists working in other media.We think that a broader and more dynamic mapping of women's art work, that pays particular heed to the geographical and disciplinary boundaries of their practice, would assist this quest. For scholars, this task requires us to remain vigilant-to avoid seizing upon surviving evidence of any one individual as "typical" of female practice in favour of a more strongly comparative and interdisciplinary approach. This may require us to ask difficult questions of material that may lie uncomfortably outside our own disciplinary boundaries, and to synthesize it in new ways. Therein, however, may lie possibilities for new kinds of visibility and, indeed, opportunities for institutional consciousness-raising.After our initial three waves, released at two-week intervals, and themed around visibility, reputation and legacy; contexts and networks beyond the studio; and display and re-evaluation, respectively, our fourth wave of contributions will be based around the effective, profile-raising, and collaborative work of a number of recent projects to raise the visibility of female practitioners in the field of art and architecture. This includes a précis of the aims of the 2017 AA XX 100 project to celebrate the centenary of women at the Architectural Association by Yasmin Shariff; an introduction to the exhibition Modern Scottish Women: Painters and Sculptors 1885-1965 by the curator, Alice Strang; and pieces recording and analysing the results of Art + Feminism wiki edit-a-thons held in 2016 at YCBA and the ICA. The Glasgow School of Art and the Paul Mellon Centre are convening a "Still Invisible" edit-a-thon in Glasgow on 25 May 2016 at the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), where many of the contributors to this conversation will gather to learn the skills involved in editing wikis, and to create new pages and update existing ones with information about overlooked women artists. In a 2011 survey, 90 percent of wiki editors identified as male (9 percent as female, and 1 percent as transsexual or transgender), which may go some way to explaining the current low coverage of women and the arts on Wikipedia. Through gathering for this event, which will incorporate training with Wikimedian, Sa...