Perspectives on Curating: Women in Collections
In recent years, substantial efforts have been made to redress the gender imbalance at the heart of most institutional collections and exhibition programmes. Whether works by women had been relegated to a museum's storage or plainly omitted from acquisitions priorities, was and continues to be a topical issue that institutions of varying scale and ambition are actively confronting. In this panel discussion we will discuss how to achieve greater gender equality through acquisitions and displays, and how to use gender as a tool in the interpretation of collections.
Speakers include:
Susanna Avery-Quash, Senior Research Curator (History of Collecting), National Gallery
Harriet Loffler, Curator, The Women's Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge
Moderator:
Flavia Frigeri, CHANEL Curator for the Collection, National Portrait Gallery, London
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Susanna Avery-Quash is Senior Research Curator (History of Collecting) and Lead Curator at the National Gallery. She is in charge of pre-1900 objects in its Contextual Collection, and responsible for activities associated with its research strands, ‘Buying, Collecting and Display’, ‘Art and Religion’, and the Women and the Arts Forum. Her research focuses on the study of important private and public art collections, trends in artistic taste, and the historical art market. She is a trustee of The Society for the History of Collecting, TIAMSA, and the Francis Haskell Memorial Fund; and a Specialist Volunteer for the National Trust and is an Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London and the University of Buckingham’s Humanities Research Institute.
Harriet Loffler is the Curator of The Women’s Art Collection at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge. Prior to joining the College, Harriet was the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery from 2009-2018. In her role she led on all the contemporary exhibitions, public programming and publishing, partnership projects as well as the development of the modern and contemporary collection. She regularly contributes to conferences, panel discussions and public art commissioning panels. She has also worked at Frieze and the Frieze Art Fair in London and has an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art. From 2019 – 2021 she was on the Board of Trustees at the David Parr House.
Flavia Frigeri is an art historian, lecturer, and ‘Chanel Curator for the Collection’ at the National Portrait Gallery, London. She recently guest curated the group exhibition Beyond Form: Lines of Abstraction, 1950-1970 at Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK and is now working on a retrospective of avant-garde French-Portuguese artist Maria Helena Vieira da Silva for the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy. From 2016 to 2020 she was a Teaching Fellow in the History of Art Department UCL and a member of faculty at Sotheby’s Institute, London. Previously she was ‘Curator, International Art’ at Tate Modern, where she co-curated The World Goes Pop (2015), and was responsible for Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs (2014), Paul Klee: Making Visible (2013) and Ruins in Reverse (2013). She is the author of Pop Art (2018) and Women Artists (2019) both in Thames & Hudson’s Art Essentials series and the co-editor of a volume of collected essays, New Histories of Art in the Global Postwar Era: Multiple Modernisms (Routledge, 2021). She is a trustee for the Association for Art History.
Image (l-r): Susanna Avery-Quash, Flavia Frigeri and Harriet Loffler.
