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This article examines the curatorial struggle of two emerging feminist artists/curators to communicate, through three exhibits, with an audience mostly comprised of students. Students expressed bemusement, hostility, misogyny and homophobia in response to exhibits located in the library at a women's university in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The authors draw on feminist theories concerning transformational politics to examine the relationships between feminist art, its curation, and its audiences.
This is a story -- if not a cautionary tale--about art production and reception within the academy; one that has implications for feminist students of art and curatorial practice extending their work beyond the formal boundaries of art galleries and into public spaces. We review here the prolonged curatorial struggle of two emerging feminist artists/curators to communicate, through three exhibits, with an audience mostly comprised of students, who documented their responses to the art in comment books associated with each exhibit. Students expressed bemusement, hostility, and, to an astonishing degree, misogyny and homophobia in response to exhibits located in, of all places, the library at a self-described women's university (85 percent of the students, and 60 percent of the faculty are women) in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The experience was singularly demoralizing for the artists and curators as well as feminist (and pro-feminist) faculty, students, and staff. We have undertaken discourse analysis of the comment books elsewhere. Here, we draw on feminist theories concerning transformational politics as well as interviews with the two curators and the Mount Saint Vincent University (MSVU) Art Gallery director to examine the relationships between feminist art, its curation, and its audiences.
The three art exhibits at issue here were all part of the MSVU Art Gallery's "Window Box Project" series. Each exhibit was located outside the Art Gallery, in a corridor of the institution's library, within vitrines there comprised of two pairs of built-in display windows. This series was meant, explains gallery director Ingrid Jenkner, to "provide opportunities for artists who work in ephemeral or context-oriented modes" and to "give beginning curators a chance to produce small, manageable projects for a broad viewership, the staff and users of the university library" (Collyer, n.d., p. 1). Moreover, the "Window Box Project" series was congruent with the Art Gallery's mandate to emphasize "the representation of women...