The Baltimore Museum of Art Makes a Statement by Dedicating All Its 2020 Programming to Women Artists

In honor of the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, the
Baltimore Museum of Art has announced
that it is planning a year’s worth of exhibitions dedicated to
female-identifying artists throughout 2020. In addition to the
previously announced Joan Mitchell retrospective, there
will be a show of video art by Candice Breitz, an exhibition
of beaded Native American works by 19th-century Lakota women that
appropriate patriotic imagery, and a major commission by Katharina
Grosse.

“The goal for this effort is to rebalance the scales and to
acknowledge the ways in which women’s contributions still do not
receive the scholarly examination, dialogue, and public acclaim
that they deserve,” said Baltimore Museum director Christopher
Bedford in statement. The “initiative serves to recognize the
voices, narratives, and creative innovations of a range of
extraordinarily talented women artists.”

Beginning in the fall of 2019, the museum will host 13 solo
exhibitions and seven thematic shows, all featuring women. The
initiative, called 2020 Vision, is the
museum’s latest effort to rewrite the art-historical canon. In the
past it has sold works by blue-chip
white male artists that are well represented in the
collection to fund the acquisition of contemporary art by women and
artists of color. With the proceeds from the sale of works by the
likes of Andy Warhol and Franz Kline, the museum has purchased
pieces by Jack
Whitten, Wangechi Mutu, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and Amy
Sherald, who painted Michelle Obama’s official
portrait.

Over the next year, the museum has planned solo shows for Ellen
Lesperance, Sharon Lockhart, Ana Mendieta, Howardena Pindell,
Tschabalala Self, and Lisa Yuskavage. In November, Mickalene Thomas
will transform a two-story lobby into a fully furnished,
wallpapered living room featuring her prints for the
museum’s inaugural Robert E. Meyerhoff and Rheda Becker
Biennial Commission.

The museum will also highlight the city’s contributions to art
history, with solo shows for Baltimore artists past and present,
including Grace Hartigan, Valerie Maynard, and Jo Smail. In
addition, local artists will have a prominent place in thematic
exhibitions. The embroidery, ceramics, and jewelry on view in “Free
Form: 20th-Century Studio Craft and Adorned: African Women & the
Art of Identity” will include work by Gloria Balder Katzenberg
and Betty Cooke. Meanwhile, hometown artists Simone Brangier Boas
and Amalie Rothschild will join Elizabeth Catlett, Maria Martinez,
Georgia O’Keeffe, and others in “By Their Creative Force: American
Women Modernists.”

The permanent collection will be reinstalled throughout the year
to feature more work by female artists, with presentations
tentatively titled “African Art and the Matrilineage” and “Women
Behaving Badly.” The former will take a unique look at the
prominent role of maternal power in 19th- and early 20th-century
African art, while the latter considers representations in European
and American art of women who rebelled against the traditional
roles of wife and mother, from biblical heroines and witches to
activists and actresses.

The museum also made headlines last month when it announced
plans to open a dedicated Henri Matisse art center. Thanks in
large part to a major donation from Baltimore sisters Claribel
and Etta Cone, who personally knew the artist, the Baltimore Museum
boasts the largest public collection of works by Matisse in the
world. Vision 2020 will celebrate the acquisition of
the Cone
Collection with a display honoring the legacy of
former museum director Adelyn Breeskin, who facilitated the
bequest.

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