Exhibition celebrates female artistic trailblazers

A new exhibition celebrates women who were determined to paint in an era when art was dominated by men.

Another View: Landscapes by Women Artists at the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight, Wirral, highlights their place in the history of British landscape art.

It tells the story of women artists’ growing ambition and how they got more of a foothold in the art world.

About 40 works from the early 1800s through to the 1980s feature.

The exhibition interrogates the term “lady amateur”, which was often used in contrast to the “professional” artist title usually reserved for males.

Melissa Gustin, curator of British Art, said the exhibition champions work by female artists determined to fulfil their creativity but who were often mocked by the establishment.

She said: “They’ve come from being laughed at at every tea table, as Thomas Gainsborough said, to being some of the most recognised women and artists in the world.”

She said: “This exhibition shows how women landscape painters used their art to express their individual gazes, representing multiple viewpoints along the way.

“They explored and interrogated the landscape around them, developing important networks and experimenting with new mediums and techniques in the process.”

Elizabeth Campbell, whose watercolours recording her tour through the Alps were painted between 1818 and 1827, is among the relatively unknown artists featured in the exhibition.

Ms Gustin said the artist, from Yorkshire, was radical for her time.

“She married a Scottish soldier, and after he died in the Napoleonic Wars… she took her young daughter, Thomasina, off to the Continent and spent the next 20 or 30 years essentially having adventures,” she said.

Ms Gustin said she did everything from “mountain climbing to speaking new languages and meeting new people and painting everything along her way”.

“They include a document of her trip over Mont Blanc,” she said.

“They were the first women to do this and they did it in corsets and hoop skirts, painting the whole way.”

Work from decorated artist Dame Ethel Walker (1861-1951) is also included in the display.

She exhibited at the Venice Biennale several times, was elected to the Royal Academy, and was given a damehood for her services to the arts in 1943.

She wanted to be known as an artist, not a female artist, Ms Gustin said.

“She felt the discussion around women artists from male artists was counter-productive, and that what really mattered was the quality of someone’s painting or sculpture,” she said.

She said she felt “that they should not be focused on the person’s gender but on how well they actually painted and if they had originality and talent”.

Work from Sheila Fell (1931-1979) is also on show.

The Cumbria artist preferred the local views to anywhere else even though she travelled in Europe, Ms Gustin said.

“She loved the place she came from in Cumbria and painted that rather than anything else.

“She visited Greece, she visited France and she found them uninspiring compared to Aspatria and the land that she’d grown up in,” she added.

The exhibition runs until 18 August.

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THE HEADLINES

PROTEST/ART. Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866) and other artworks were tagged with the red-painted words, “MeToo,” and an embroidered art piece by Annette Messager was snatched in plain sight at the Centre Pompidou-Metz yesterday. The provocative Courbet painting of a vulva, on loan from the Musée d’Orsay, was not damaged, due to a protective glass covering. An artist named Deborah de Robertis, confirmed to reporters she organized what she describes as a group performance, titled “On ne sépare pas la femme de l’artiste,” [You don’t separate the woman from the artist]. A video shows two women painted the words “MeToo” on the Courbet artwork and another by the feminist Valie Export. A total of five pieces were targeted at the exhibit about the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, while participants distracted museum security and chanted “MeToo.” Two women have been detained by police, while Robertis is reportedly suspected of stealing Annette Messager’s red embroidered piece called “Je pense donc je suce” [I think, therefore I suck]. Robertis told the AFP the theft was a “gesture of re-appropriation,” because she recognized the object from the collection of an unnamed co-curator of the exhibit, whom Robertis said she knew personally from past sexual misconduct, according to Le Figaro. In other words, c’est compliqué!

STALEMATE. A judge has ordered a stalemate — for now — in the dispute over the land art installation Greenwood Pond: Double Site, by Mary Miss, located at the Des Moines Art Center (DMAC). “Neither side is entitled to what it wants,” wrote US District Court for the Southern District of Iowa, Stephen Locher, according to The Art Newspaper. Locher nevertheless issued a preliminary injunction blocking the DMAC from demolishing the artwork without the artist’s permission, as they had planned. But the judge also said the center could not be forced to repair the sculpture if the cost was too high. DMAC estimates restoration will require over $2.6 million, a sum which the artist contests. “The end result is therefore an unsatisfying status quo: the artwork will remain standing (for now) despite being in a condition that no one likes but that the court cannot order anyone to change,” said the judge. Miss nevertheless welcomed the ruling in response to her claim that the Edmundson Art Foundation, which owns DMAC, violated her original contract, and she hopes the temporary restraining order “opens the door to the consultations about the future of the site that were denied me.”

THE DIGEST

Police blocked pro-Palestinian protestors from getting close to the Met Gala yesterday in New York. Demonstrators were heading toward the Metropolitan Museum of Art when the NYPD intercepted their march at 5^th Avenue and 80^th Street, while barricades blocked alternative routes towards the exclusive fashion event. [Bloomberg]

Demonstrators targeted another black-tie event on Saturday, the Hammer Museum’s annual gala in Los Angeles, and called for the resignation of UCLA Chancellor Gene Block, who is also a member of the museum’s board of directors. Some 50 UCLA faculty members reportedly protested outside the museum and called for amnesty for students and others arrested during campus Gaza demonstrations last week. [Hyperallergic]

Jack Lang, a former Socialist Party French Culture Minister and current head of the Arab World Institute in Paris, told El Pais, “the Arab world has abandoned Palestine. Even some of the countries that had shown signs of enthusiastic support for years.” The Arab World Institute recently held an exhibition featuring Palestinian artists, some of whom Lang said have died in the ongoing war. [El Pais]

A park on the Hudson River in New York known as “Little Island,” is being reconfigured into a four-month annual performance arts festival by its owner, Barry Diller, with a budget of over $100 million for programming over the next two decades. He is joined by Scott Rudin, the producer whom workers accused of bullying in 2021. [The New York Times]

Researchers in France have unearthed an unusually shaped, Neolithic monument in Marliens, south of Dijon, estimated to be thousands of years old. The 15-acre site “seems unprecedented” in its form, containing several, circular enclosures, said a statement by the French national Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP). [Smithsonian Magazine]

THE KICKER

BLOCKBUSTER SCANDAL. The New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead chronicles “the British Museum’s blockbuster scandal,” over thousands of missing and stolen artifacts allegedly lifted and partly sold on eBay by a museum curator. Overlooked, and improperly catalogued, Mead explains the historic, high value ancient Romans attributed to artifacts like the now missing, engraved semiprecious stones and objects cast from glass. They were unique works of art, and reveal important details about their subjects. Mead also asks the underlying question: “Why should the sarcophagi of Egyptian kings or the fragments of ancient Greek architecture be housed in London, and claimed in some sense as British? … At a certain point in a museum’s history, it becomes more than just a repository of the cultural and artistic past, telling a story about the history of a nation, or a people, or the world. It also becomes a museum of itself – of its formation, its collecting history, its priorities, and its failings.”

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Garden Valley Collegiate and Northlands Parkway Collegiate art students will display their work for the month of May at Winkler Arts and Culture. Scott Bell is one of the visual arts teachers at GVC, and he is thrilled that his students’ hard work will be featured. 

“Grade 9 through grade 12 will be featured, and all styles and mediums of art. So, paintings, sculptures, drawings, digital work and photography. And that’s the tip of the iceberg.” 

We can expect over 180 pieces from GVC and NPC students to be featured. Bell says he is particularly fond of a surrealist collection of drawings from his grade 11 class, stating, “I think this is maybe the most talented class I’ve ever taught. There are so many gifted and imaginative kids.” 

Bell invites all to come out to see the artwork for a few reasons.  

“Chances are you’re going to see the work of a of a kid that you know, or it’s a child of someone you know. The connections within the community are huge. And [Winkler Arts and Culture] is a very friendly, inviting place. It doesn’t take long to walk through. You can take as little or as much time as you want. There are friendly volunteers and staff, it’s a wonderful facility, and there’s a lot of great work to see. I’d encourage everyone to check it out.” 

Executive Director at Winkler Arts and Culture agrees that this is something special to see at the gallery. 

“Last year I was able to see it and it was amazing. It’s amazing what our youth can produce within those art classes. It exciting to have an opportunity for students to have a venue to display all their hard work.” 

Bell thanks the school division and community for their tremendous support. 

“Our art program is very well supported by the administration and school division. We are well funded, so the kids have wonderful art materials to work with and a wonderful facility to do art in. It’s nice that the kids have that support to do their best work and then their best work is on display right now at the Winkler Arts and Culture gallery.” 

Listen to the full interview with Scott Bell and Connie Bailey by clicking below. 

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