Big Ideas: Griselda Pollock

  • Griselda Pollock

    Griselda Pollock. (Photo: Anonymous)

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This event was on Thursday 9th February, 7pm

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Big Ideas: Griselda Pollock

9 February | 7pm

Over five decades, feminist art historian Griselda Pollock has advocated fiercely for creative equity and gender and race inclusiveness in museums and art history.  Despite an increase in visibility for women artists in recent exhibitions, troubling questions remain. Visibility at what price? 

In this keynote lecture responding to the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint, Pollock looks back at the innovative exhibitions in Whitechapel Gallery’s history of showing women artists, including Lee Krasner (1965), Eva Hesse (1979), Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (1984) and Inside the Visible (1996) to ask: what is feminist curation?

In a context where neither patriarchy nor racism have been defeated, and art has been increasingly financialized and market-led, how do we keep open still complex, important and interesting questions about art and difference. Asking why the artworld suddenly ‘loves women artists’, she will reflect on what how the Whitechapel’s latest exhibition might reveal instead the singularity, diversity, complexity and creativity of so many ‘artist-women’ from different times and places who from the get-go co-created gestural abstraction.

Pollock has also contributed an essay titled ”Between a Rock and a Hard Place’ to the accompanying catalogue of Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-70.

Supported by the Stanley Picker Trust.

Whitechapel Gallery · Big Ideas – Griselda Pollock
About Griselda Pollock

Griselda Pollock is Professor emerita of Social & Critical Histories of Art at the University of Leeds and 2020 Laureate of the Holberg Prize. Publications include Old Mistresses; Women, Art & Ideology with Rozsika Parker (1981/ 2020),Vision and Difference (1988), Avant-Garde Gambits: Gender and the Colour of Art History (1993),Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts (1995), Mary Cassatt : Painter of Modern Women (1995/2022), Differencing the Canon (1999), Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum (2007), Art in the Space of Memory and Migration: Bracha L Ettinger in the Freud Museum (2013),After-Image/After-Affect: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum (2013), Charlotte Salomon in the Theatre of Memory (Yale University Press), Killing Men & Dying Women: Imagining Difference in 1950s New York Painting (MUP 2022).