The early 1900s brought significant advances for many women:  full legal personhood, new careers, the vote, and opportunities for public and artistic leadership. To others, however, it brought exclusion and repression, as racialized rhetoric intensified and colonialism entered a new phase. Economic transformation endangered traditional forms of cultural expression, but also stimulated new kinds of artistic production.
 
Most recently, studies of multiple modernities and global modernisms have asked us to rethink the boundaries and priorities of a field of study too-long defined by Euro-American exemplars. What new insights emerge when we bring the focalizing lens of Canadian women’s experiences to these discussions? How did the visual and material cultures of Canadian women position them inside and out of the modern? And how does the art that women made turn modernism itself inside-out?
 
Join art historians, curators, and contemporary artists as they respond to these issues across all forms of material and visual culture during the fourth conference of the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative, which is dedicated to examining the idea of the modern as a cultural force in Canada.

See full program here. (PDF 2.4 MB)

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This conference is a partnership between the Art Gallery of Ontario, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Concordia University, and Ryerson University’s Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre.  It has been timed to coincide with Uninvited on view at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection.

Read about this in the AGOinsider

Turning Modernisms Inside Out

Enjoy art talks from the fourth edition of the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative Conference, happening September 30 to October 2. Read now