Alison M. Gingeras, “The Woman Question: 1550-2025”, (wykład w języku angielskim)

Serdecznie zapraszamy na wykład Alison M. Gingeras:

“The Woman Question:
1550-2025”
(wykład w języku angielskim)

22 maja, g. 19.30
WBASK ASP
Ul. Wybrzeże Kościuszkowskie 37/39
Sala 1.01 (1 piętro)
Wykład dla całej społeczności akademickiej ASP w Warszawie oraz zainteresowanej kulturą współczesną publiczności z zewnątrz.

Zdjęcie: Artemisia Gentileschi, Zuzanna i starcy, 1610

Presented as a preview of an upcoming exhibition of the same title at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (MSN) this November, this lecture explores the historical construct of the woman question—a phrase rooted in the early modern querelle des femmes and articulated by figures such as Christine de Pizan—as a critical framework for analyzing the visual history of women’s agency in art. Long before the advent of modern feminism, the woman question functioned as a coded interrogation of gendered power relations and social inequality. Tracing its evolution from the fifteenth century to the present, this lecture examines how the category of “woman” has persisted as both subject and agent within visual culture.
Focusing on figurative painting and sculpture, the lecture considers how women artists have asserted creative authorship despite institutional exclusion and the gendering of artistic genres. Drawing on decades of feminist art historical scholarship, the presentation addresses themes such as self-representation; allegories of power, resistance, and sexual violence; access to artistic education; representations of erotic desire and the body; the iconography of motherhood and reproductive choice; and women’s wartime agency. These interrelated loci mark key points where women have negotiated visibility, authorship, and legitimacy.
Finally, the open-endedness of the woman question—as both historical construct and curatorial device—reflects how the category of “woman” itself remains in flux. In reexamining over five centuries of visual culture, this project proposes a transhistorical feminist continuum and a reimagined visual history of women’s enduring artistic presence.

A curator and writer, Alison M. Gingeras has been recognized for her scholarly yet anarchic approach to art history. Gingeras has served as curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Palazzo Grassi, Venice where she organized a number of notable exhibitions over the past two decades. While at the Centre Pompidou, she curated the exhibition Cher Peintre: Painting the Figure Since Late Picabia and the Daniel Buren retrospective. At Tate Modern, she co-curated the exhibition Pop Life: Art in a Material World. Working as a guest curator, Gingeras organized two important monographic exhibitions devoted to Polish artists–Once Upon a Time, Erna Rosenstein at Hauser and Wirth in New York and My Name is Maryan at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami (2022) and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2023). She’s written scores of essays and books, including most recently Pictures Girls Make: Portraitures (2024).