Reading Bodies of Information: Inventive Feminist Approaches to Women Artists in the Archive

Organized by the Woman’s Art Journal, this session will present approaches that art historians and artists are already fruitfully applying to their engagement with archives in their studies of women artists, fortifying participants and attendees across art-historical and artistic disciplines with inventive, practicable, energizing new feminist strategies for working in, on, and with archival bodies.

While feminists have introduced important ways to engage with the global archive in recent years, we posit that many innovative approaches remain to be shared. This session will draw together useful new feminist methodologies and theoretical perspectives for employing collections of sources to recuperate women artists’ lives, practices, materials, and/or works.

We preliminarily define an archive as a corpus of information comprising texts, sketchbooks, maps, photographs, documentation of performances, and/or utilitarian objects, but we are open to expanded definitions. Are there bodies of sources not yet viewed as archives that contain untapped resources for illuminating women artists? Are there dissident ways of reading, interpreting, and analyzing the already known materials that can yield new insights? How can data-analysis techniques enrich this process? In what new ways can we queer the archive? What additional roles can contemporary artists play in bringing better understanding to old documents? How can we best locate women in the archives who belonged to marginalized groups, such as Indigenous or “Outsider” artists? How can we radically yet respectfully train these new lenses on records regarding women who did not identify as feminists? What challenges and concerns attend these various approaches?