Present day
05-03-13
The Museum takes part in 2nd Women's Viewpoint Festival
To mark International Womens Day, (8 March), the second Through the Eyes of Women festival aims once again to highlight the work of women artists, critics, curators, collectors and researchers within the art system. Presented at the latest edition of Madrids international annual contemporary art fair ARCO, this years programme involves nearly 200 Spanish art centres, museums, institutions and galleries.
From 5 March to 7 April, on the first floor hall area of the Museums old building, the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum is showing a broad selection of artworks created by women artists ranging from Rosa Bonheur, who used to dress up as a man when visiting the slaughterhouse at Roule, where she jotted down notes and sketches for her works, to the 1980s activists of US collective The Guerrilla Girls. Amongst the other celebrated painters represented here are Mary Cassatt, María Blanchard, Maruja Mallo and María Helena Vieira de Silva.
This particular presentation is also the latest in an occasional series mounted by the Museum designed to improve, through exhibitions and catalogues, our understanding of the role of women in society and how they have enhanced our lives through their art: Women Impressionists. A Different View: Marie Bracquemond, Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzalès and Berthe Morisot, which was the first show in this country devoted to the contribution made by women to the Impressionist movement (12/11/0104/02/02); Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang: 45 Years of Art & Feminism, which showed works by individual artists and members of feminist collectives from different countries who began and have continued shaping what is known as feminist art (11/06/0709/09/07); and, more recently, There Is More In You: Images of Women in the Middle Ages (13th-15th centuries) (07/02/1115/05/11), conceived as an essential contribution to mediaeval studies of women through the analysis of feminine facets and roles during the final three centuries of the Middle Ages.