Leaving the Gallery, Entering the Fray: Feminist Curating in Public Space
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines curatorial struggle of two emerging feminist artists/curators to communicate, through three exhibits, with an audience mostly comprised of students. Students expressed bemusement, hostility, misogyny and homophobia in response to exhibits located in at a women's university in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The authors draw on feminist theories concerning transformational politics to examine relationships between feminist art, its curation, and its audiences.This is a story -- if not a cautionary tale--about art production and reception within academy; one that has implications for feminist students of art and curatorial practice extending their work beyond formal boundaries of art galleries and into public spaces. We review here prolonged curatorial struggle of two emerging feminist artists/curators to communicate, through three exhibits, with an audience mostly comprised of students, who documented their responses to art in comment books associated with each exhibit. Students expressed bemusement, hostility, and, to an astonishing degree, misogyny and homophobia in response to exhibits located in, of all places, at a self-described women's university (85 percent of students, and 60 percent of faculty are women) in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The experience was singularly demoralizing for artists and curators as well as feminist (and pro-feminist) faculty, students, and staff. We have undertaken discourse analysis of comment books elsewhere. Here, we draw on feminist theories concerning transformational politics as well as interviews with two curators and Mount Saint Vincent University (MSVU) Art Gallery director to examine relationships between feminist art, its curation, and its audiences.The three art exhibits at issue here were all part of MSVU Art Gallery's Window Box Project series. Each exhibit was located outside Art Gallery, in a corridor of institution's library, within vitrines there comprised of two pairs of built-in display windows. This series was meant, explains gallery director Ingrid Jenkner, to provide opportunities for artists who work in ephemeral or context-oriented modes and to give beginning curators a chance to produce small, manageable projects for a broad viewership, staff and users of university library (Collyer, n.d., p. 1). Moreover, Window Box Project series was congruent with Art Gallery's mandate to emphasize the representation of women as cultural subjects and producers (msvu art gallery, 2000).Grotesque abuse characterized a significant proportion of comments associated with each of three exhibits, spanning a period of two years, from January 31, 1997 to February 22, 1999. Viewer response to these exhibits was recorded in comment books, made available for written commentary with each exhibit. We found that a large minority of comments (between 27 percent and 40 percent) comprise a hostile, often obscene, debate concerning women artists, women's equality, and role of university as a university primarily dedicated to education of women. We have termed this category of comments debates: that is, both misogynous comments (generally, but not necessarily, rude, scatological, prurient, or obscene) that refer to women, sexuality, and gender relations, and derogatory comments about women and feminism. Many comments in this category either disparage women, art made by and about women, or constitute such responses to more thoughtful comments. Also included are responses to above-mentioned hostile and offensive comments.The first exhibit, Waiting, created by Kim Dawn and curated by Glynis Humphrey (January 31 to April 6, 1997), featured four components: one half of west vitrine was with multiple colour-photocopies of a photograph (Humphrey, 1997, p. 1) of a nude woman. The other half was filled with stacked rows of nylon stockings stuffed with brewed tea bags pressed against glass. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".