Feminist Forms, International Exhibitions, and the Postcolonial Woman Artist

This paper examines the institutionalization of feminist art in the West, and specifically, the inclusion of feminist art and artists from nonwestern centers in exhibitions such as Global Feminisms (2007, Brooklyn Museum of Art) and WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles). Both exhibitions invoked the figure of the postcolonial woman artist even as their curators subsumed multiple histories of feminism within a single overarching narrative centered in the West. Nonetheless, through the tensions they produced, these exhibitions pointed to the difficulties of simultaneously establishing a unified project of feminism in which artists and artworks participate and allowing for multiple narratives and historical contingencies through which they come into being. This paper considers the problem of locating contemporary Indian artists in ‘purely’ national contexts even as it analyzes the imperfect translations from the national to the global that Global Feminisms and WACK! entailed. It also discusses an exhibition I conceived and developed in 2007-08, with curator Vidya Shivadas, “Fluid Structures:Gender and Abstraction in India, 1973-2008”, at Vadehra Art Gallery in New Delhi. The exhibition, which identified and theorized links between two generations of women artists in India, was in part a response to feminist art history and criticism in the United States.