Name Exhibition Review

New Faces and Old Spaces: Know My Name Exhibition Review

Isabella Vacaflores

Nearly thirty years ago, The Guerrilla Girls quipped that the advantages of being a woman artist included “working without the pressure of success”.This criticism struck at the hypocrisy of museums and galleries who were willing to display females as subjects whilst simultaneously refusing to recognise them as artists in their own right. Significant advances in gender equality have been made since then, but this has barely translated to the art world. Curators at the National Gallery of Australia discovered this themselves upon observing that the number of pieces by living women in their collection had shrunk over the past four decades, despite the increasing prominence of female artists worldwide.

Acting as a mea culpa is the newly opened Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now. The exhibition features over 400 works by 170 female-identifying individuals, with household names like Grace Cossington-Smith, Fiona Hall, and Tracey Moffatt displayed alongside lesser-known but equally skilled female artists. By showing new faces in old spaces, the exhibition presents an assault on the canon that artistic establishments operate under. Ultimately, it is a triumphant and thoughtful representation of women, their work, and their experiences, through the prism of art. A hanging of nearly 50 portraits at the entrance of Know My Name causes a double take. From Brenda Croft’s stunning monochrome photos of a First Nations elder in Matilda (Ngambri/ Ngunnawal) (2019) to Joy Hester’s amorphous acrylic Woman With Rose (1956) and Kate Beynon’s acutely millennial self-portrait (2012), women dominate a historically patriarchal space. The sheer number of females on show implicitly sets the exhibition up to offer a pluralised understanding of the artists displayed, recognising that no two individuals are the same.

The curatorial choice of thematically grouping artworks instead of organising them in conventionally teleological displays supports this. In Remembering the soft textures of Kathy Temin’s Pavilion Garden (2012) offers a different perspective to the drama of Rosemary Laing’s photographs of falling brides in Flight Research (1999) and the grungy desolation of eX de Medici’s watercolour tableau The Wreckers (2018-19). By setting aside traditional cultural and chronological boundaries, the exhibition rejects potentially exclusionary essentialist narratives of women’s experiences and highlights the intangible relationships between artists and their works.

Know My Name further frustrates artistic establishments by challenging the canonical understandings which underpin them. Throughout art history, females have been largely portrayed as passive subjects. This serves as the inspiration for Julie Rrap’s haunting Persona and Shadow (1984) series, which shows the artist photographically inserted into the works of Edvard Munch. The bodily distortions created as she attempts to fill the spaces occupied by the subjects of the original paintings illustrate the limitations women face in the artistic canon. Styling herself as a sister, a virgin, a siren, and more, the artist relates this issue to dominant narratives of femininity perpetuated through culture and society.

The exhibition allows audiences to experience a counterfactual reality where these expectations do not exist. In this world, women are simultaneously fragile and strong, soft and hard, complicit and rebellious, and so on. From Narelle Jubelin’s delicate weaponisation of petit point as a tool of decolonisation in A fallen monarch (1987) to Freda Robertshaw’s powerful body language juxtaposed with her naked vulnerability in her self-portrait Standing Nude (1914), canonical representations of females as mere objects of the male gaze are ultimately called into question.

Other important work is done in Know My Name to spotlight First Nations artists. A headline piece of the exhibition is Kungkarangkalpa (2020) by the Tjanpi Desert Weavers. Using traditional fibre-weaving methods in novel ways, a community of Aboriginal Australian women worked together to create this installation which features life-size sculptures of seven sisters. The artwork tells two stories: one from the Dreaming, and another of the creation of the work itself, highlighting the processes of collaboration and knowledge sharing that are so crucial to First Nations culture.

Nevertheless, the exhibition contains glaring omissions. Beyond First Nations women, there are only a couple of racially diverse artists on the walls. This is particularly disappointing given Australia’s large migrant populations and generally multicultural values. Any discussion about women artists must recognise that their experiences are informed by not just gender but race, sexuality, religion, class, and a myriad of other socio-cultural factors. Without adequately representing these intersectional features of identity, the efficacy of the exhibition to expand the canon in any meaningful way is called into question.

Even if a more substantively diverse group of female artists was represented, affirmative action does not guarantee permanent institutional reform. Art historian Griselda Pollock notes that “cosmetic inclusions of women cannot bring about real change because the issue is not a matter of ‘getting a bit better’”. Although Know My Name has been executed alongside a Gender Parity Plan to avoid such charges of tokenisation, these commitments can be quite superficial in practice. Businesses and organisations often satisfy quotas by filling lowranking positions with minority groups, thereby mitigating many of the benefits such policies bring. What is to say that artistic establishments – haunted as they are by deeply entrenched canonical understandings – would act any different? One simply needs to walk a hundred metres across from the (free) exhibition to the sold-out Botticelli to Van Gogh show and count the number of female artists on display there to realise the complexity of the gender problem in artistic establishments.

Although the exhibition is not without its faults, it represents a welcome and important first step towards a more equitable future. Will Know My Name single-handedly change artistic establishments and canons for good? Almost definitely not. But will it leave audiences with a greater appreciation of the contribution of Australian women to our nation’s art? Almost definitely, yes. With the former being made possible only by the latter, one is inclined to hope that the exhibition may – in the fullness of time – achieve everything it set out to do and more.

The Know My Name exhibition is held in two parts in the National Gallery of Australia. Part One is on 14 November 2020 to 9 May 2021. Part Two of the exhibition is on 12 June 2021 to 26 January 2022.