Location: Kumu Auditorium

This year’s Kumu conference on the topic ofWomen Artists in Baltic and Nordic Museums accompanies the Kumu Art Museum’s exhibition Creating the Self. Emancipating Woman in Estonian and Finnish Art (06.12.2019–26.04.2020, curated by Tiina Abel and Anu Allas) and focuses on women artists in the collections, permanent displays and temporary exhibitions of Baltic and Nordic museums.

Since the 1970s, the art world has been paying increasing attention to the role and visibility of women artists in art history and the contemporary art scene. For various reasons shaped by historical contexts and the dynamics of the art world, the works of women artists have often been overshadowed by those of male artists. Recently, we have seen a rise in the number of projects, exhibitions, conferences, academic publications and catalogues dealing with the oeuvres of women artists; however, the changes in various institutions of the art world have taken place in different ways and at different rates.

The aim of the Kumu conference is to focus on the art museums in the Baltic and Nordic countries and to comparatively analyse the share of works by women artists in their collections, to examine the strategies of supplementing collections and the changing structures of permanent displays, and to discuss exhibitions and research projects organised by these museums.

We welcome presentations that focus primarily (but not exclusively) on the following issues:

• how big is the share of works by women artists in museum collections and what consideration are women given in supplementing collections?
• how do museums discover and treat “lost” women artists?
• have the structures of the museums’ permanent displays changed in connection with added women artists, and in what ways?
• which research and exhibition projects have had impacts on the internal hierarchies of museums’ collections and displays?
• is it necessary to organise all-women-exhibitions and how should this be done?
• how do museums shape the position of women artists in art history and in the field of contemporary art?

Conference board: Anu Allas (Kumu Art Museum), Tiina Abel (Estonian Academy of Arts), Ulla Angkjær Jørgensen (Network for Gender and Diversity in Nordic Art Museums), Bart Pushaw (University of Copenhagen) and Kadi Polli (Kumu Art Museum).

Please send your paper proposals (up to 300 words) by 9 December 2019 to anu.allas@ekm.ee.

The conference will be organised in cooperation with the Network for Gender and Diversity in Nordic Art Museums.