Independent Curator, Sara Roberts, reports from our recent Curators’ Day event programmed alongside Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery’s current National Partners Exhibition, Women Power Protest.
Visiting Women Power Protest at Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery (BMAG) for the ACC Curators’ Day was a way of connecting with old friends, making new contacts, and discovering unexplored aspects of the Arts Council Collection. Lucy Gunning’s video Climbing Around My Room (1993) is the naughty school-friend it’s so great to catch up with – the idea of dressing up in party gear and clambering around your room at picture-rail level, in order to gain new perspectives, is awkward, subversive, still funny after all these years.
Of course I have never actually met Melanie Manchot’s mother, but it was glorious to see her again, in her oversize, honest, intimate photographic portrait Mrs Manchot, Arms Overhead (1996). I had wanted to see, but had never before, Mary Kelly’s hugely influential and pioneering account of early motherhood, Post-Partum Document (1973-79), painstakingly etched into slate, I guess in all those sleepless hours.
I nominate Eliza Gluckman to be my new friend. She is engaging, persuasive, a bit angry. She delivered to the group of curators a rapid, taut account of a coherent body of feminist curatorial action: Liberties, (2016) curated with Lucy Day, an exhibition of contemporary art by 24 women artists reflecting on the 40 years since the Sex Discrimination Act; Taking Up Space, (2018) curated with Dr Laura-Maria Popoviciu, profiling women artists from the Government Art Collection who challenge public space; A Woman’s Place, (2018) allowing women a new voice in the National Trust property Knole, home to, but not inherited by, for misogynistic primogeniture reasons, Vita Sackville-West.
All this, backgrounded by really startling statistics about gender balance in public art. We are aware of the Guerilla Girls’ actions in US art collections, but the figures in the UK are equally sobering. Eliza helpfully supplied some: the Fawcett Society’s 'Great East London Art Audit' (2014) audited public artworks on display in London: 70% were by male artists, 30% by women. More shockingly, of 43 pieces of public art in East London, 14% were made by women artists, 86% by men. There are 386 public works of art on display in Westminster and the City of London, of which 8% were made by women artists and 92% by men.