The NGA’s Natasha Bullock On The Importance Of Recognising The Artistic Contributions Of Women

Few essays have changed the way we think about art like Linda Nochlin’s “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” In an explosive 1972 piece for the American publication ArtNews, the feminist art historian connected the erasure of women from art history to a historical bias that equated artistic greatness (Cezanne! Matisse!) with a white, male perspective.

For Natasha Bullock, Assistant Director, Curatorial and Programs at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), this bias has shaped everything from the percentage of women’s work held in major institutions to the way we remember the legacy of female artists. This historical injustice is the driving force behind the new NGA initiative Know My Name.

“Women have always made art, but they have not found the platform or the recognition or the opportunity to share that with audiences,” she says. “We are all fighting against these historical biases, but we are becoming conscious of what was once unconscious because [the issues] are rising to the surface and being revealed. In terms of addressing those biases within collection development or program delivery, one has to be cognisant that [we give to women] the time and opportunities that we give to men… In the end, people know more about male artists because they have more exposure. As the artist Sally Smart said when I interviewed her about this, they’ve had more acreage. So, we have to build our acreage around women who identify as artists, too.”

Over the course of 2020 and 2021, Know My Name has programmed a series of exhibitions, events and creative collaborations that give voice to the unsung contributions of Australian female artists. Part of building this acreage, says Bullock, means bringing work by female artists into the everyday lives of Australians. It’s part of a larger mission to elevate the voices of female creators and turn them into household names.

For six weeks, from late February to April, 76 works of art by 45 female artists from the NGA’s collection will feature on billboards, at shopping centres and bus shelters across oOh!media’s national network, spanning 1500 locations around the country.

The campaign will feature works like Smart’s Imaginary Anatomy #7, a 1995 collage that riffs on the fragmented nature of female identity; The Rose, a 1927 woodcut by Thea Proctor, a champion of modernist art in Sydney; and Yame Awely, a 1995 painting by the late Indigenous artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Kngwarreye, who lived and worked in Utopia in the Northern Territory, produced a sublime body of work that offered a counterpoint to Western ideas of abstraction made famous by the likes of Jackson Pollock.

The initiative also features pieces by a newer generation of artists whose voices are shaping Australian art and culture, including Cherine Fahd, Sanne Mestrom and Club Ate, a collective – dealing in video, performance and club nights – formed in 2014 by Justin Shoulder and Bhenji Ra.

 

“At the National Gallery, we talk about three tiers of communication – about being in the building, online and on tour, and the collaboration with oOh!media is a really good example of how we are getting this message out,” Bullock says, adding that the public art campaign will reach 12 million Australians across regional and metropolitan areas. “Close to 80 percent of the population will encounter these artists. We want female artists to be recognised beyond the art world. Art can make you think differently, it can be transformative, it can make you uncomfortable, it can make you think outside yourself. To put these billboards out there into the public is to share our love of the visual art that humanity has created.”

Often, art history has framed work by women as private and domestic rather than public and universal – a bias that has seen women seriously underrepresented in major galleries and institutions. Currently, Bullock says, only 25 percent of the NGA’s Australian art collection comprises work by women. But things are starting to change. Know My Name revolves around a year-long exhibition program that centres female artists. It includes The Body Electric, a March 2020 exhibition that showcases work on desire, sex and pleasure, by the likes of Polly Borland, Tracey Moffatt and Nan Goldin; a presentation of Patricia Piccinini’s iconic Skywhale hot-air balloon sculptures; and a flagship exhibition, Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now.

“The Know My Name exhibition program will cover the full spectrum of art from abstract to figurative,” Bullock says. “It will be a multifaceted takeover and the opening will culminate in an Art Weekend. It will be inclusive, intergenerational and accessible. The artists, families and community will all be there.”

It’s easy to have conversations about inclusivity. But Bullock says that the NGA is putting guidelines and structures into place to put gender equity front and centre both now and into the future.

“I hope Know My Name represents true and deeply embedded change in the way we program and the way we support women within the organisation,” she says. “I hope it creates a nuanced experience of art and the gallery and that it sets an example for the rest of Australia that you can elevate the experiences of women and program with equity in mind.”

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Know My Name celebrates the significant contributions of Australian women artists. For more information about Know My Name and the National Art Event in partnership with oOh!media visit nga.gov.au

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(Lead image: Patricia Piccinini, Skywhale 2013. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Gift of anonymous donor, 2019, through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program. Photo: Martin Ollman Photography)