Keynote Speakers - CONVIVIAL CULTURES | XI Lisbon Summer School for the Study of Culture - Filipa Lowndes Vicente

GROUP EXHIBITIONS OF WOMEN ARTISTS: AN HISTORICAL SURVEY BETWEEN SOLIDARITY AND RESISTANCE (19TH-21TH CENTURY)

Abstract

When Portugal witnesses by the 1^st of June 2021 the opening of the first survey exhibition of Portuguese women artists in a prestigious Lisbon art and cultural institution, Gulbenkian Museum (Tudo o que eu quero — Artistas portuguesas de 1900 a 2020) it seems pertinent to reflect on how this typology has evolved through time and space. With more than a hundred years of history of women artists choosing or being chosen to be exhibited in a space where gender is the limit, several questions can be addressed. What to do when conviviality beyond gender borders is not possible? To choose conflict with the dominant art world, that which had no gender and was therefore dominated by men? Or to choose self-segregation as a strategy to occupy public and visible spaces of display? From the mid 19^th century women artists have been discussing and disagreeing on the possible strategies to subvert and counter the discrimination they felt with the art world. How can we think of gender and art, in 2021, when art as politics and conscience could make us believe this is no longer a question?  

Biography

Filipa Lowndes Vicente is a historian and researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon (ICS-ULisboa). In 2000, she completed her PhD at the University of London (Goldsmiths College). Her PhD thesis was the basis for the book Travels and Exhibitions: D. Pedro V in Nineteenth Century Europe (Lisbon: Gótica, 2003), which won the 2004 Victor de Sá Prize in Contemporary History. In 2015, she was a visiting professor at King’s College London and in 2016 at Brown University, in the USA.

Vicente’s postdoctoral research resulted in a book published in India and Italy, Other Orientalisms. India between Florence and Bombay, 1860-1900 (New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2012). Another book on colonial India was Between two Empires. British Travellers in Goa (1800-1940) (Lisbon: Tinta-da-China, 2015). In 2020, she published, together, with Ana Rita Amaral, the correspondence sent by Portuguese orientalists, writers, and scholars to the Italian scholar Angelo De Gubernatis: Literature and Orientalism. Letters from Portuguese Writers to Angelo De Gubernatis (1877-1906) (Lisbon: Tinta da China)

Vicente’s work on women artists and feminist art history resulted in a few articles and in the book Art without History. Women and Artistic Culture (XVI-XX) (Lisbon: Athena, 2012). She has also edited the catalogue of the exhibition she curated in 2016 on the most important nineteenth-century Portuguese woman painter, Aurélia de Sousa, Woman artist, 1866-1922 (Lisbon: Tinta da China, 2016). Vicente coordinated a two-year funded research project, Knowledge and Vision. Photography in the Portuguese Colonial Archive and Museum (1850-1950), which resulted in an edited volume with contributions from thirty authors, The Empire of Vision. Photography in the Portuguese Colonial Context (1860-1960), published in Lisbon in 2014. After that Vicente participated in the making of the film Visões do Império, as one of the scriptwriters and protagonists. Directed by Joana Pontes, the film was premiered at the Doclisboa in May 2021.