IWCE February Meeting - Women in Art

Do you know that the first artist in history was a woman? Come to the IWCE Meeting on 16th February. You will learn more about Women in Art from the presentation of Carrie Blakely.

When and Where?

On 16th February at 10:00 - 12:00 at Thermae Son, Planettenlaan 2B

About Women in Art

It wasn’t always acceptable for a young woman to pursue her artistic talents, and many overcame the obstacles placed before them to make tremendous contributions to the history of art. Much of the difficulty in identifying female artists throughout history is due to name changes upon marriage, the use of a first initial to hide their gender, large gaps in dates between works of art due to child-rearing, and the deliberate alteration of artist’s signatures on works to attribute them to more famous male artists.

Often times an unsigned work has been assigned to the woman’s teacher or male relative with the assumption that no woman could have produced work of such high quality. Art Historians in the past few decades have been re-examining works of art originally attributed to male artists and have found that many were done by women who were closely associated to them, often times their students, wives, sisters, and lovers.

The role of women artists throughout history had been minimized in almost all cultures until the late 20th Century when the women's rights movement took hold. Today there are entire museums dedicated to women artists, and museum collections have been realigned to display the work of women artists in all of their collections.

The presentation in February will examine only a small number of those women, but I hope to pull together a representation from many different countries and time periods of history.

About Carrie

Carrie Blakeley was an art teacher and school administrator. She taught high school art studio and art history classes for 18 years.