In 2020, to celebrate 100 years of women’s right to vote in the United States, the Baltimore Museum of Art took a “radical” decision. While its collection only included 4% of works made by women, this museum had decided, for one year, to buy only works made by them. Extremist measure? In 2018, a study conducted by Artnet News showed that between 2008 and 2018, works by women constituted only 11% of acquisitions and 14% of works in exhibitions at the 26 most important art museums in the United States. Things are not much better in Canada.
However, in the 1980s and 1990s, thanks in part to the interventions of the Guerrilla Girls, it was believed that such injustices would become things of the past. Nay! In this context, it is therefore not surprising that Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre decided to mount an exhibition at the Musée d’art de Joliette that included only women artists. But the curator was able to bring these creators together around a theme that allows both to discuss this essential question while placing it in a broader context that is topical, that of the off-screen.
For St-Jean Aubre, “it is therefore not only a question of giving visibility to these creators, but of showing approaches which speak of issues which affect us all, which deal with primordial questions of identity which also include queer”. So it’s almost sad that we have to present them as “works made by women”, rather than simply and only as “works of art”…
But here is a good way to include both white women creators, but also women artists belonging to other communities, discussing subjects that go beyond the conventional framework. Works that allow you to “come out of the closet or smash the glass ceiling, that is to say, to refuse designations, models and definitions to assert yourself and take your place”. And these works do it with intelligence.
The artist Michaëlle Sergile hits hard with To Hold a Smile (Keep the smile) and We Wear the Mask (We wear the mask), multimedia works that tell us how laughter was and perhaps still is today a “survival strategy” for many individuals in the black community. In an exceptionally disturbing mise en abyme, Sergile stages the superbly interpreted adaptation of a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar, entitled We Wear the Mask (1896), by Maya Angelou who took the opportunity to add passages from her own poem, For Old Black Men. This great work speaks of the laughter of black domestic workers and also proves to be a tribute to civil rights activist Rosa Parks.
But the work of Sergile is not limited to an educational intervention or of the order of historical remembrance. In his video, the artist offers us a tense performance, keeps a forced smile for many minutes, a painful smile expressing all the suffering, the cry of a community.
Another striking work from this exhibition is undoubtedly that of Nadège Grebmeier Forget, who also shows how performance in art is a primary source of contestation of norms. As explained by M.me St-Jean Aubre, in this video installation, it was a question of “translating the energy of his practice, the experimentation in the excess that his work embodies”. The result is a collage of staggering density and intensity, another of the major moments of this exhibition which demonstrates how engaged art can create formal expressions that emotionally capture the viewer.
And we would also have to talk about the important works of Lorna Bauer, Alicia Henry, Tau Lewis, Eve Tagny… The drunkenness of the depths by Marie-Claire Blais, a work which opens or closes this exhibition — depending on the route the visitor will take — and which shows surfaces of hessian which seem to come out of the frame of the stretcher which, conventionally, stretches the canvas from a chart. The colors invited here evoke both dawn and dusk. Are we at the beginning of a groundswell or will we quickly fall again into a slow eclipse of these values of social transformations? And are we still and only at the stage of raising awareness?
We will take advantage of this to tell ourselves that our museums must move on to another phase and finally devote important exhibitions to women artists. Just for fun, let’s establish a short list of major solo exhibitions at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in recent years: Riopelle, Mugler, Picasso, Calder, Chagall, Benjamin-Constant, Mapplethorpe, Rodin, Warhol, Fabergé, Doig… Have things really changed in 40 years?