The Women's Artists Visibility Event (W.A.V.E.) also known as Let MOMA Know, was a demonstration held on June 14, 1984, to protest the lack of women artists represented in The Museum of Modern Art's re-opening exhibition "An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture." [1] The exhibition, which included 165 artists, had 14 women among them. [2] [3]
The event's acronym, W.A.V.E., is a nod to Flag Day, which is observed on June 14 in the United States. 400 demonstrators, wearing suffragette yellow and white, marched in front the entrance to MoMA's newly expanded 53rd street building; a well received renovation that doubled its gallery space and increased traffic to the museum. [4] [1] [5] [6] [3] Demonstrators had three demands: that MoMA exhibit works by women artists from their permanent collection, that it display women's work in loaned exhibitions, and that it create a policy to acquire women's work in the future. [4] The Women's Caucus for Art (WCA) created pins to parody MoMA's "Museum of Modern Art OPENS" staff badges, upon which they included the addition "But Not to Women Artists." Cards were distributed listing the names of 100 well known female artists who were not featured in the exhibit, including Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Faith Ringgold and Louise Bourgeois. [2]
One spokesperson for the museum, Louisa Kreisberg, noted that a film series in the exhibition featured four women of the six films shown, and that the staff at the museum was roughly 65% female. [7]
The event was organized by the New York chapter of the WCA, and supported by three additional feminist arts organizations; The Heresies Collective, Women's Interart Center, and New York Feminist Art Institute. Individual organizers for the event were artists Sabra Moore, and Betsy Damon and curator and President of WCA New York, Annie Shaver-Crandell. [1] [3]
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.
Guerrilla Girls is an anonymous group of feminist, female artists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world. The group formed in New York City in 1985 with the mission of bringing gender and racial inequality into focus within the greater arts community. The group employs culture jamming in the form of posters, books, billboards, and public appearances to expose discrimination and corruption. They also often use humor in their work to make their serious messages engaging. They are known for their "guerilla" tactics, hence their name, such as hanging up posters or staging surprise exhibitions. To remain anonymous, members don gorilla masks and use pseudonyms that refer to deceased female artists such as Frida Kahlo, Kathe Kollwitz, and Alice Neel. According to GG1, identities are concealed because issues matter more than individual identities, "Mainly, we wanted the focus to be on the issues, not on our personalities or our own work."
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The Art Workers' Coalition (AWC) was an open coalition of artists, filmmakers, writers, critics, and museum staff that formed in New York City in January 1969. Its principal aim was to pressure the city's museums – notably the Museum of Modern Art – into implementing economic and political reforms. These included a more open and less exclusive exhibition policy concerning the artists they exhibited and promoted: the absence of women artists and artists of color was a principal issue of contention, which led to the formation of Women Artists in Revolution (WAR) in 1969. The coalition successfully pressured the MoMA and other museums into implementing a free admission day that still exists in certain museums to this day. It also pressured and picketed museums into taking a moral stance on the Vietnam War which resulted in its famous My Lai poster And babies, one of the most important works of political art of the early 1970s. The poster was displayed during demonstrations in front of Pablo Picasso′s Guernica at the MoMA in 1970.
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