MoMA´s Modern Women´s Project, Feminism, and Curatorial Practice
Mittwoch, 17. April 2013 - 18:00 Uhr
Universität für angewandte Kunst
MoMA´s Modern Women’s Project, Feminism, and Curatorial Practice
Vortrag: Alexandra Schwartz
In spring 2010, MoMA New York published Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art, a 500-page, 50-author book. Its publication was celebrated with more than a dozen permanent exhibitions over 2010 to 2011, as well as an international symposium. The book was the culmination of a five-year study of the Museum’s holdings of work by women artists, led by a committee of representatives from each of the Museum’s curatorial departments. The Modern Women’s Project, as the larger initiative was known, represented the first time MoMA, or any major American museum, had conducted a comprehensive study of its collection through the lens of gender.
As the coordinator of the Modern Women’s Project from 2005-10, Alexandra Schwartz was deeply involved with all aspects of this initiative. She gained an extraordinary perspective not only on the complex interrelationship between feminism and curatorial practice, but also on how the Modern Women’s Project affected the culture of one of the world’s major museums.
This lecture will focus on that period of transition, during which the Modern Women’s Project went from an under-the-radar research initiative to a major Museum event; as well as the changes, both within and outside MoMA, that it wrought. The Modern Women’s Project led to a number of “firsts” at MoMA, from “The Feminist Future” symposium selling out in record time, to the first time the Photography galleries were installed with only women artists.
Alexandra Schwartz is the first Curator of Contemporary Art at the Montclair Art Museum. There she established the New Directions exhibition series of emerging and mid-career artists, launching in Fall 2011 with Marina Zurkow: Friends, Enemies and Others, and continuing with Saya Woolfalk: The Empathics (2012) and Jean Shin: Host (2013). Other exhibitions for Montclair include New Media/New Forms (Spring 2012), Come As You Are: Art in the 1990s (Fall 2014), and New Century Modern: Contemporary Artists Examine Design (2016). From 2004 to 2010 she was on the curatorial staff of The Museum of Modern Art, serving as the coordinator of the Modern Women’s Project, a curatorial initiative to increase scholarship on women artists. In this role she was the co-editor of the book Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art (2010) and curator of the exhibitions Mind and Matter: Alternative Abstractions, 1940 to Now at MoMA in 2010 and Modern Women: Single Channel at MoMA PS1 in 2011. She is the author of Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles (MIT Press, 2010) and the editor of a collection of Ruscha’s writings, Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages (MIT Press, 2002). A contributor to various journals, anthologies, and exhibition catalogs, she has taught at Columbia University, the University of Michigan, and Montclair State University, and in the Education Departments at MoMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She received a B.A. from Harvard University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.