Know My Name

Know My Name: Australian Women Artists is drawn from a two-part exhibition held at the National Gallery between 2020 and 2022, which was among the most comprehensive presentations of art by women held in Australia to date.

These exhibitions brought together work by women artists. But there were other, deeper aims—to highlight moments in which women led progressive practice; to identify points at which their experiences facilitated new forms of art and cultural commentary; to suggest ‘lineages’ or stylistic and intellectual relationships between artists through time; and to inflect history with women’s living memory. In these ways, Know My Name Parts 1 and 2 aimed to add new perspectives to the male-dominated narratives historically represented in museum collections.

The present iteration of Know My Name, which will tour to galleries across Australia over the next several years, maintains some of the structure of the original presentations. It takes a thematic as opposed to a chronological approach. It embraces diverse art in all media. And it draws together works that focus on a range of ideas and experiences–including artists’ relationships with Country and early efforts towards environmentalism; community and collaborative practices; works that approach gender as a phenomenon that’s both fluid and performative; works that consider the domestic site as one of rich artistic potential, and which embody pattern and weaving as a mode of understanding rather than of ornament.

While predicating an exhibition along the lines of gender is in many ways a complex undertaking, it represents in this instance an opening up, not a closing down. Its aim is to enrich, and at times overturn, the existing dominant narratives. To do so is still necessary as the work of women, even now, remains lesser known and is by implication less valued. One has only to look at the collections of Australia’s cultural institutions to understand that the art of women is not represented to the same depth or degree as that of men. When the National Gallery first embarked on the Know My Name exhibitions, only 25% of its Australian art collection comprised works of art by women. For many other public institutions, that figure was even less, and remains so. We cannot tell the stories of Australian art if our galleries predominantly hold the work of only one group of people.

The Know My Name exhibitions are certainly not the first dedicated to women’s art, and they draw on the remarkable scholarship of those artists, academics, curators and others who have in some cases devoted their professional lives to the advocacy of women’s work. However, while the scope of these exhibitions has been historical, their impetus is contemporary. The MeToo movement, initiated in 2006, and which came to prominence in 2017, may have originated as a campaign against sexual violence, but its cultural impact has been equally significant. It inspired numerous projects, exhibitions and publications dedicated to women’s art in Australia and worldwide.

Any exhibition, in its impermanent drawing together of works of art, is an action that marks a moment in time. This one, too, is a gesture made against neglect, an appeal to remember, to keep remembering, and to know the names and work of some of those women who have shaped our art and cultural histories.