Museums without Men

On my recent first trip to Australia, I had my sense of art history overturned. These revelations (of sorts) have only happened twice before. Once, in October 2015, when I went to an art fair, looked around me and realised I could not see a single artwork by a woman artist. The second when I installed a 10-metre-high timeline of the 1000 years of women artists at Tate Modern in London. To help guide my preparations, I’d turned to my copy of The Story of Art by EH Gombrich, which was first published in 1950 — his timeline at the back is brilliantly constructed. But after flipping through it and not finding the information I needed, I realised that his book didn’t include a single woman artist. Only the sixteenth edition featured just one — the great printmaker and German expressionist, Käthe Kollwitz. Was Gombrich’s book essentially The Story of Art Without Women? I asked myself. So, I wrote my own: The Story of Art Without Men, which came out in 2022.

I had another revelation walking through the galleries and museums I visited in Australia. I looked around and realised this was an art history I did not know. Yet, the works on the wall or around me were spellbinding. I was shocked at my ignorance and can only blame myself. But it was more an excited shock: there is a whole new world that I can spend the rest of my life getting to know.

I live in London. I’ve only ever seen a handful of works by Australian artists in a display at Tate Modern, A Year in Art: Australia 1992. While it was beautifully curated by Tamsin Hong, it was a focused exhibition. I felt sad that I’d never heard of Ethel Carrick, Olive Cotton, Minnie Pwerle or Kaylene Whiskey and thought: I had better get to work. Like I was shocked at Gombrich, I was shocked at myself. If anything, this calls for Volume Two.

This year, I’ve launched an audio guide series, titled Museums Without Men, for institutions across the globe — from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York to Tate Britain — that can be experienced in person or online. Expanding out from the United Kingdom and United States, in October I released Australia’s first Museums Without Men audio guide for the National Gallery. The aim of these guides is to introduce gallerygoers to women artists they may not have known before, and to draw attention not only to the incredible stories and works in the national collection but also to the important work the Gallery has been doing in collecting these artists and sustaining their legacies.

As a result of the incredible Know My Name initiative — an ongoing program of exhibitions, commissions, education programs, partnerships and creative collaborations celebrating Australian women artists — according to the Countess Report, in 2022 the Gallery had the highest proportion of women artists represented in exhibitions at 84.4%, and 59.85% of purchased acquisitions were by women artists. The Gallery has also vowed to reinforce its commitment to gender equity with internationally touring exhibitions, such as the first UK retrospective of Emily Kam Kngwarray, which travels from the National Gallery and opens at Tate Modern in 2025.

Before I arrived at the Gallery to see the works in person, I had spoken to curators to whittle the shortlist down to 10 works — in my opinion, it’s an amount that allows someone to really take their time with, and look closely, before they get dizzy or need a break. We’d chosen them from thumbnails on a pdf, and looking at images in the Know My Name publication. But upon my visit, all hell broke loose. The shortlist became the long list, the longer list and then the even longer list.

How could we not include The Rajah quilt, which was made by a group of around 20 women prisoners in 1841, while on board the HMS Rajah on their passage from England to Tasmania. It tells numerous stories, of women helping women (Quaker, Elizabeth Fry was a campaigner of prison reform who encouraged ways for women to earn money from their work); the British Empire (through the different patterns and prints featured); and the labour of women prisoners. I was lucky enough to see it on view in curator Simeran Maxwell’s stunning exhibition A Century of Quilts, which ran from March to August in 2024. How could I not discuss Emily Kam Kngwarray, the First Nations artist from Utopia, who made, in her short but prolific career, thousands of dazzling paintings depicting her Country as ‘alive’ — capturing the essence of what it means to inhabit her homeland. How could we miss Olive Cotton’s mystical and charged black and white photographs that show the artist’s innovative experimentations with light and shadow? Or Fiona Hall’s brilliantly cheeky and erotic metal sculptures that both surreptitiously reveal and conceal genitalia? Or Bronwyn Oliver’s ethereal sculpture Comet made from copper wire; Anne Danger’s take on Cubism; or Ethel Carrick’s atmospheric scenes — especially after such a compelling introduction to the artist by Deborah Hart, Head Curator, Australian Art.

We settled on the realisation that these audio guides could be released yearly. The Gallery’s Museums Without Men series will look at a wide range of works in the collection, from textiles to paintings, sculptures and installations; from across Australia and spanning over a century. It’s been a thrill learning about so many Australian women artists and I can’t wait to share my thoughts with listeners. I hope it will encourage people, myself included, to look more closely at the gaps in history that need to be filled — because otherwise we’re allowing ourselves to be starved of great art by great artists.

The National Gallery’s Museums Without Men audio guide is now available.