Museu Abelló

The Network of Art Museums of Catalonia (XMAC) has begun work to give greater visibility and presence to women in art museums.

Among the annual projects proposed by the Network (made up of 20 Catalan museums, including the Abelló Museum), one of the most important will be to give greater visibility to the active role of women in artistic creation, breaking the heteropatriarchal perspective that for centuries has relegated the figure of women in art.

The first two questions have been asked: how many female artists are preserved in the collections of Catalan art museums? and, how many works by women artists are there in the permanent exhibitions? Although women have had very limited access to artistic practice, Catalan art museums have women in their holdings, with a more significant presence in contemporary art. However, they are still the big absentees from the permanents. The list of women artists is long, mostly and mostly from the twentieth century, but most are not visible in the permanent speeches of the different centers and just over 5% are on display in museum rooms.

The presence of women artists in the holdings of Catalan museums is a silenced reality that the XMAC wants to break, adding to actions such as those already promoted by the Network of History Museums of Catalonia and developing their own.

The ultimate goal is to bring out women, from inspiring muses to promoters or patrons, and especially artists, promoting changes in discourses to incorporate them into the stories of different museum centers. Initially, a complete list of the number of works and names of women artists present in the collections of the 20 museums of the Network has been drawn up with the aim of publishing and disseminating it. A small seed that this year materializes in a series of activities prepared by the different museums of the Network around International Women’s Day.