IMMA has made a more conscious effort to rectify the lack of women in their space. Last year, their solo exhibitions featured Mary Swanzy, Helen Cammock, Doris Salcedo, Janet Mularney, and Kim Gorden. Their upcoming solo exhibitions in 2020 include five female and two male artists. Moreover, IMMA is creating a discussion around art, gender, and diversity: they hosted feminist writer Sara Ahmed for a lecture “on the role queer methodologies play in disrupting the normative use of our public institutions.” The museum using their resources to confront gender while simultaneously facilitating exhibitions for women is both an immense growth from their state in 2009 and a model which other institutions should bear in mind. The Guerrilla Girls piece implicated the Hugh Lane Gallery in the underrepresentation of women, as well. At the time the work was created, their collection was 90% men. Representatives of the museum at this time were eager to assist with this article, but unfortunately no gendered record of acquisitions exists. However, in regards to the gender ratio, they “assume it hasn’t changed much.” This does align with a statement by the NGI, which asserted that gender discrepancies exist in “all historic collections.” There are in this statement a number of questions, few of which I am able to answer today. Is this imbalance a consequence of there simply being fewer historic female artists? Was their work lost to time or destroyed because it was not valued? Did women make art in nontraditional spaces, thus causing it to be disregarded? These are all questions of history and of how historic narratives are presented through visual mediums such as art. Modern galleries and museums would do well to consider the implications of their collections in what they say about the capabilities of women past and present.
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Jane Stark Heliamphora heterodoxa, sun pitcher, 2015 Watercolour Private Collection. © Jane Stark
Women have always made art worthy of acclaim. When the Guerrilla Girls drew attention to the problem with gender disparity in Irish Art institutions, they called upon those spaces to fix things. In some cases, that can mean honoring women posthumously. Valuing contemporary artists, though, is of vital importance: the best way to change the status of female artists is to allow their careers to flourish in the present. You can support female artists at NGI by attending the Drawn from Nature: Irish Botanical Art from 7 March to 21 June 2020. Also this year, IMMA will present solo exhibitions from Paula Rego, Chantal Joffe, Bharti Kher, Eva Rothschild and Anjalika Sagar, one of the Otolith Group. This does not include the female artists in their upcoming group exhibitions, Desire and Ghosts from the Recent Past. The museum will also be predominantly showing women through their IMMA Archive: 1990s exhibition.
